Gov. Abbott's Flock camera pause deserves deeper questions

The backlash against Flock cameras and AI data centers crosses every sort of boundary — political, rural/urban and racial.

When so many people are so upset about the world rising up around them, political leaders need to take stock of what's going on.

Gov. Greg Abbott is doing that with his decision to pause state funding for additional Flock cameras. It's political season, so every decision deserves to be interpreted through that lens, but we give the governor the benefit of the doubt that this is a real response to a real concern Texans are expressing.

But any flip-flop reaction deserves its own reflection. Abbott, as well as other state and local leaders, ought to ask deeper questions about what is driving this populist backlash so they can refine their next decisions to endure.

Thousands of Flock cameras are already installed around Texas. They can and have been abused. They are also effective law enforcement tools that focus on public spaces where privacy rights are diminished.

Ring doorbell cameras have been around for years, watching streets, sidewalks and front porches. Videos from these cameras have been used as evidence of crimes. They've also been used for countless social media videos of hapless people who come to the door and who might not have wanted to be online-famous for falling or being chased by a dog.

Data centers, meanwhile, are part of a long history of technological expansion that Americans have embraced in their everyday lives. But as the AI revolution has taken root, people have had enough and want them out of their communities.

Why now? And why these particular things? We are now nearly a generation into the age of what the Harvard researcher Shoshana Zuboff dubbed "surveillance capitalism."

Data privacy is all but non-existent in our country. Social media companies, web browsers, online marketplaces, smart TVs, public Wi-Fi and every other interaction we have with the internet has been used to profile us. Our family status, our home address, our age, our race, our sex, our most intimate concerns — all of this has been harvested and used by private companies.

Unlike Flock cameras and data centers, this is invisible, and there is a veneer of consent in some hopelessly complex policy we assented to just by using a service online.

We believe Americans are fed up with all of it. Flock cameras and data centers represent a deeper intrusion of technology in part because they are a visible, physical presence in our communities. But they also take the power of technology to a new level against us.

Flock cameras don't just capture images or measure speed. They collect all sorts of profiling information from license plates to bumper stickers. There is a Big Brother power they have that cuts against the American spirit of independence from the power of the state.

Data centers, meanwhile, are the foundation of a technology that does represent genuine threats to society, from job losses to existential fears shared by people as sophisticated as Bill Gates and Dario Amodei.

So a pause is reasonable. But let's make sure it's about a bigger conversation that Congress seems incapable of having, but maybe our state leaders can.

How much should technology intrude on our lives, and where can and should we tell Big Tech no?

This editorial was published by the Dallas Morning News and distributed by Tribune Content Agency.