Tag: Business – Decrypt

Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao is warning crypto owners not to place blind faith in hardware wallets, following an exploit that drained tens of millions of dollars in Bitcoin from Coldcard devices.

In a Saturday post on X, Zhao cautioned that even hardware wallets can carry bugs, and that older wallets with long histories are not immune. “Nothing is 100%,” he posted.

He suggested holders consider spreading their funds across several wallets as one way to reduce exposure, while acknowledging the approach carries its own trade-offs and that no setup is entirely foolproof. CZ closed with his familiar refrain urging users to stay informed and keep their funds safe: “Stay SAFU!”

His comments followed the discovery of a flaw in Coldcard devices made by manufacturer Coinkite. As Decrypt reported, a build error caused seeds on affected units to be drawn from a software fallback rather than the device’s hardware random-number generator, leaving the private keys far easier to guess than intended. The problem traced back to firmware shipped in March 2021, and updating the firmware does not fix a seed already created on a compromised device.

The scope of the theft has grown considerably since the first estimates. Early reporting pegged losses at roughly 594 BTC, or about $38 million, drained from around 500 wallets. According to a report from Galaxy Research, which mapped the flow of funds based on a pattern identified by engineers at Jack Dorsey’s Block, the toll is now put at 1,196 addresses drained for about 1,082.65 BTC, or roughly $70.2 million, in a 41-minute window on July 30. That is nearly double the initial figure.

Galaxy said every sweep paid an identical hardcoded fee and left no change output, a signature it described as consistent with an automated tool spending keys it already held rather than owners moving their own funds. The victims spanned native SegWit and older address types, pointing to multi-path key scanning. The stolen Bitcoin was consolidated within minutes into a handful of addresses and, per Galaxy, has not moved since.

Coinkite has shipped emergency hotfixes and urged exposed users to migrate to newly generated seeds.

In a report published Tuesday, polling company Gallup said Americans are cooling toward artificial intelligence after two years of growing more comfortable with the technology.

According to Gallup, seven in 10 Americans now say they are somewhat or extremely knowledgeable about AI, up from 64% in 2024. But as familiarity has grown, so has skepticism. More Americans now believe AI does more harm than good, expect it to reduce the number of U.S. jobs over the next decade, and are less likely to trust businesses to use the technology responsibly.

Thirty-nine percent of Americans now say AI does more harm than good, up from 31% in 2025. Just 9% say AI does more good than harm, while 52% believe it does equal amounts of harm and good.

The shift was most pronounced among adults ages 18 to 29. Nearly half now say AI does more harm than good, up from 36% last year. Gallup said younger adults also became more skeptical of AI’s overall impact, businesses’ use of the technology, and its effect on jobs.

Trust in businesses to use AI responsibly also declined.

Twenty-seven percent of Americans said they trust businesses at least “some” to use AI responsibly, down from 31% in 2025. Among adults ages 18 to 29, trust dropped from 30% to 20%, while those with no trust at all increased from 29% to 41%.

Nearly eight in 10 Americans said AI will reduce the number of U.S. jobs over the next decade, up from 73% in 2025 to 79% this year. The biggest increase came among adults ages 18 to 29, where the share expecting job losses rose from 62% to 75%. Among adults ages 45 to 59, it increased from 75% to 84%.

Gallup also found Americans increasingly view AI as performing about as well as people on tasks such as driving, providing financial advice, and providing medical advice. Even so, respondents continued to rate people higher than AI across every category measured, including hiring decisions, creative work, and helping students with schoolwork.

The report follows several other surveys that have found Americans remain uneasy about AI despite using it more often.

In March, an NBC News poll found 56% of Americans had recently used AI tools such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, yet 57% said the technology’s risks outweigh its benefits. In June, an Anthropic survey of nearly 52,000 Americans found job losses were the public’s top concern across every state and political party, while just 15% said they trust AI companies to make decisions about how the technology is developed and used.

Google has pulled a newly launched artificial intelligence feature from Google Earth barely a day after releasing it, following a swift backlash from journalists and open-source investigators who warned it could flood the internet with convincing fake satellite imagery.

The company introduced the tool on July 30, letting users zoom to any location on Google Earth’s web version, click “create image,” and generate a scene from a text prompt using its Nano Banana model. By July 31, it was gone.

In a statement posted to X, Google said people “uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world,” and that while geospatial professionals had found useful applications, others were sharing generated images that appeared to violate its policies. It said it was rolling back the feature while building stronger guardrails.

The alarm centered on how easily the tool fabricated events that never happened. Tech outlet 404 Media demonstrated it could produce a blast crater in Los Angeles and add protesters outside Google’s own Mountain View campus. NPR generated images of Iran’s Kharg Island ablaze and a flooded U.S. Capitol, both of which would be major news if real. Open-source researcher Henk van Ess told NPR he tried prompts including refugees at the Mexican border and a nuclear plant in Iran, and that none were refused.

Satellite imagery has long served as a trusted anchor for verifying breaking news and atrocities, precisely because it has been difficult to fake. Bellingcat researcher Jake Godin cautioned that one-click generation would streamline the creation of fakes and accelerate their spread, adding that misinformation outruns any correction and that governments could now dismiss authentic images as fabricated.

Google had initially downplayed the concerns, noting that every image carries its SynthID watermark, which flags it as AI-generated in tools like Gemini, and that it blocks creation on harmful topics. Critics called that insufficient, arguing few people stop to verify images before sharing them.

Google said it would reinstate image generation in Google Earth only after implementing tighter protections, though it gave no timeline.

Iran is accepting Bitcoin from commercial shipping in exchange for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, according to the U.S. Treasury, whose Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned two firms behind the scheme on Wednesday. Vessels crossing the chokepoint, which carries a fifth of the world’s oil, are required to buy maritime “insurance” approved by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The cover protects against risks Iran itself creates, Treasury said, chiefly the seizure of vessels. Persian Gulf Marine Insurance Company, set up by Iran’s insurance regulator, brokers the policies. They are approved by the IRGC-backed Persian Gulf Strait Authority, which Washington designated in May.

The Bitcoin rail

The second firm, HormuzSafe Marine Services Authority, was developed by Iran’s Ministry of Economy and markets itself as a provider of traffic control, security and emergency response as well as insurance. It accepts Bitcoin and other digital assets, which OFAC said is part of an effort to bypass Western sanctions. Babak Morteza Zanjani, an Iranian financier sanctioned earlier this year, promoted it to his social media followers.

When the Financial Times reported in April that Iran would demand crypto tolls from shipping, starting at $1 a barrel, blockchain analysts were initially unconvinced.

At the time, TRM Labs policy head Ari Redbord told Decrypt he was skeptical, saying there was no data showing crypto being used at scale for Hormuz transit. Others noted that the man quoted in the report, an industry union spokesman, did not speak for the regime. Treasury’s designation settles part of that, naming a firm built by a government ministry that takes Bitcoin.

The shadow fleet

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Iranian regime is “desperate for cash,” with its economy “in freefall” and inflation in triple digits, and that Washington would not let Iran “hold global commerce hostage.”

The same action designated eight tankers and their operators over cargoes of Iranian crude and petroleum products, most of the companies registered in Hong Kong. More than 100 vessels tied to Iran’s shadow fleet have been sanctioned since January. Treasury said the insurance schemes were set up to replace revenue lost to Operation Epic Fury.

On Myriad, a prediction market owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, users place a 38% chance on the Iranian blockade ending by August 31.

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.

GM!

Today’s top news:

• Crypto majors are red while stocks grind higher; BTC -2% at $63.7k
• BTC ETFs see $233M in net inflows, 2nd biggest day since early May
• Coinbase posts surprise loss in Q2 earnings; Strategy books $8.2B loss
• NY AG files petition to shut down Kalshi, seeks $36B in damages
• Coldcard exploit leads to $38M in Bitcoin losses

📉 Coinbase Posts a Surprise Loss as Trading Dries Up

Coinbase reported $1.22 billion in second-quarter revenue on Thursday, down 14% from the prior quarter and 19% from a year ago, along with a net loss of $359 million. COIN stock fell roughly 5% after hours.

The miss was broad: revenue came in below the $1.29 billion Wall Street expected, and the loss of $1.36 per share was far worse than the roughly break-even result analysts had modeled. Total crypto spot trading volume fell more than 20% from the prior quarter as prices slid and volatility hit multi-year lows, dragging transaction revenue down 21% to $599 million.

Subscription and services revenue also missed, despite being the less trading-dependent segment of the business. Coinbase blamed late-closing USDC commercial agreements and lower staking revenue from falling prices, but the shortfall undercut the idea that the diversified businesses are decoupled from the trading cycle.

On the bright side, stablecoin revenue reached $292 million, with average USDC held on Coinbase products hitting a record $20 billion, more than 30% of all USDC in circulation. Prediction-market revenue more than doubled quarter over quarter, up 106%, and crossed a $100 million annualized run rate. Coinbase’s share of global crypto trading volume hit a record 10.3%, its third straight quarter of market-share gains, and the company said 88% of net revenue now comes from sources other than Bitcoin spot trading, up from 45% in 2020. It also held $8.6 billion in cash, extended a 14-quarter streak of positive adjusted EBITDA, and lowered its full-year expense outlook.

Now that the results are in, it’s interesting to look at Robinhood and Coinbase side by side. Both reported crypto trading revenue shrinking and prediction markets surging, but Robinhood posted record profit while Coinbase posted an outright loss. Coinbase is clearly far more exposed to the trading cycle it’s trying to grow beyond, and it doesn’t yet boast 13 9-figure product lines. As for Q3, guidance is looking fairly soft. But that may not be accounting for Cobie taking over trading and the apps. Let’s see how fast he can get to work on turning the story around…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are slightly red; BTC -2% at $63.7k; ETH -2% at $1,880; SOL -1% at $73.40; HYPE +3% at $54.90
• Top alt movers include UNI (+5%), PUMP (+5%) and ADA (+3%)
• Oil +1% at $85; Gold +1% at $4,115
• Stock futures are green as tech stocks and memory go higher; DOW +0.5%, Nasdaq +1.2%
• Strategy booked an $8.2 billion Q2 loss as Bitcoin fell below its $75,476 cost basis, far worse than the $2.15 billion Wall Street expected, though it added 11% to its stack and said its cash reserve covers two-plus years of dividends
• Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest sold BitMine while adding to Coinbase and Circle, trimming about $4.4 million across BitMine, Robinhood, Block, and Bullish after their shares fell, while recently buying roughly $43.5 million of Coinbase and Circle
• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the Senate to pass the CLARITY Act, accusing Democrats of stalling for political reasons and closing his appeal by quoting Satoshi Nakamoto: “If you don’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.”
• The Bitcoin quantum threat inched closer as IBM claimed a “trusted quantum advantage,” a milestone that renews urgency around hardening Bitcoin’s cryptography
• Elon Musk’s xAI sued Minnesota to block the US’s first AI nudification law, challenging it on free-speech grounds
• Ondo Finance is weighing an acquisition worth up to $500 million, as the real-world-asset tokenization firm looks to expand through M&A

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were mixed; DOGE -1%, SHIB even, PEPE -1%, PENGU +4%, TRUMP -2%, BONK -5%
• Robinhood chain was led by FRONG (+600x) and IF (+74%)
• Solana leaders included Moondogecoin (+300x) and KET (+60%); ANSEM +4% at $178M

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• The New York Attorney General filed a petition to shut down Kalshi in New York State over what it’s calling an illegal gambling operation and seeks at least $36B in damages
• Pons went live on Uniswap’s Launches aggregator, touting more than 210,000 tokens launched in two weeks and over $283 million in volume through Uniswap pools, with a v2 coming on Uniswap v4 to bridge memecoins and RWAs on Robinhood Chain (PONS -12% to $28M)
• A Coldcard key flaw drained $38 million in Bitcoin, with 594 BTC swept from about 500 wallets in 25 minutes after a build error left seeds far more guessable than intended; maker Coinkite believes an attacker used AI to find the bug in its open-source firmware, a review its own AI had missed weeks earlier

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were red; Punks even at 32.3 ETH, BAYC -1% at 8.3 ETH, Pudgy -4% at 3.8 ETH; Hypurr’s even at 189 HYPE
• No notable movers

New York State is seeking at least $36 billion from Kalshi, asking a state court to shut its prediction market down and strip it of three times whatever it has earned. Attorney General Letitia James filed the petition on Friday alongside a motion for a temporary restraining order, treating the platform as an unlicensed gambling business across eight counts. Filings put the damages figure at a minimum, pending a full accounting.

The counts run from the New York Constitution’s gambling ban to bookmaking, possession of gambling records, unlicensed mobile sports wagering and the federal Wire Act. The state also wants $100,000 for every offer of sports wagering, restitution and disgorgement.

“Kalshi has chosen to ignore New York’s gaming laws, which exist to protect consumers, prevent problematic gambling, deliver funding for critical public services, and ensure that every company plays by the same rules,” said New York Governor Kathy Hochul in a statement, adding that the state was taking action to stop its “illegal behaviour” and bring the firm into compliance.

Investigators placed test bets, including four contracts on Connecticut to beat Michigan in April for $1.14 including fees. The petition says Kalshi lets 18-year-olds open accounts where New York sets the floor at 21, and offers markets on games involving New York college teams, which even licensed operators are barred from touching.

A federal-state collision

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission had moved first. It sued New York in April to establish that federal law gives it sole authority over event contracts, and on Thursday asked the court in that case for a restraining order barring the state from bringing criminal or civil enforcement against Kalshi or any other CFTC-registered platform. New York filed the next day regardless.

Kalshi has mostly been losing. It sued the New York State Gaming Commission in the Southern District last October, was denied a preliminary injunction on July 7 and refused protection pending appeal on July 27. A Michigan judge restrained it in June, and King County Superior Court granted Washington a preliminary injunction on July 20. Its two real wins are the Third Circuit, which upheld an injunction against New Jersey in April, and Minnesota, where a federal judge blocked the state’s ban on July 27.

The Minnesota ruling turned on whether event contracts count as swaps under the Commodity Exchange Act. Judge Katherine Menendez found many do, and singled out sports and pop-culture markets as the doubtful cases. New York’s petition is aimed almost entirely at sports.

Washington versus the states

New York is the latest front in a campaign the Trump administration has run for months. The CFTC has sued Illinois, Arizona and Connecticut over their attempts to police event contracts, added Wisconsin, and moved against Minnesota within hours of its ban becoming law. The president has backed the agency directly, calling state officials who oppose prediction markets “SCUM.”

Kalshi’s own figures, quoted back at it in the petition, put its valuation at $22 billion and annualized trading volume at $178 billion. James sued Coinbase and Gemini in April on a similar theory.

Coinkite believes an attacker used AI to find a flaw that has cost owners of its Coldcard hardware wallets tens of millions of dollars in Bitcoin, and says its own AI review of the same code weeks earlier turned up nothing. 

The hardware wallet manufacturer published an advisory for its Mk3 and a technical breakdown on Thursday, after learning that seeds generated by its devices were far more guessable than intended.

The losses to the flaw, which was exploited early Friday, are estimated at 594 BTC, around $38 million. Funds were drained from roughly 500 wallets inside 25 minutes, with 562 BTC since consolidated into a single address.

Coinkite said it has to assume “someone used AI to review previous versions of our firmware” in order to uncover the flaw. The firm said it had run one of the best available models over its own code a few weeks earlier, and the model “did not find this bug or anything serious.” Attackers and defenders have the same tools, it wrote, but this time “it did not help us, and only helped the bad guys.”

What went wrong

Coldcard’s firmware calls a function to fetch randomness, and two implementations of it sat in the codebase with identical signatures: the hardware generator Coinkite wrote, and a software fallback inherited from MicroPython. A preprocessor guard checked only whether a setting was defined, without testing its value, so the build completed against the fallback without complaint. Seed generation had been drawing on it since a March 2021 migration.

Every current model is affected to some degree. Coinkite estimates the effective search space for an Mk3 seed at about 40 bits, against the 128 a seed is meant to have. Extra entropy from the secure elements on the Mk4, Q and Mk5 lifts theirs to roughly 72 bits, which the company says materially improves the position without reaching the target. Tapsigner, Opendime and Satscard use different code and are unaffected.

What owners must do

Coinkite has shipped an emergency hotfix, version 5.6.0 for the Mk4 and Mk5 and 1.5.0Q for the Q. Updating does not repair a seed already created on affected firmware. Owners need a new seed generated on patched hardware, and the company recommends a strong BIP-39 passphrase, at least 99 dice rolls, or both. Mk3 owners, whose model is out of support, are pointed to a separate migration path.

A seed created on an affected Coldcard stays weak after being restored to another brand’s device, a point rival hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor made while telling its own users their funds are safe. Block, which published an independent analysis on Friday, said none of its products are affected, and its hardware lead Max Guise urged anyone exposed to move funds as soon as they safely can.

Coinbase reported $1.22 billion in second-quarter revenue on Thursday, down 14% from the previous quarter, and a net loss of $359 million.

Coinbase shares fell sharply in after-hours trading, losing roughly 5% of its stock price, after missing on earnings estimates for the quarter. The company was expected to bring in $1.29 billion in Q2.

According to Coinbase, total crypto spot trading volume declined more than 20% from the previous quarter as crypto asset prices fell and market volatility reached multi-year lows. Transaction revenue totaled $599 million—lower than the expected $628 million.

Subscription and services revenue totaled $555 million, representing 48% of net revenue. Coinbase said the figure was below its previously forecast range of $565 million to $645 million because certain USDC-related commercial agreements closed later than expected and lower crypto asset prices reduced staking revenue.

Stablecoin revenue totaled $292 million. Average USDC held across Coinbase products reached a record $20 billion during the quarter, representing more than 30% of USDC in circulation at quarter-end. Coinbase also said 88% of net revenue came from sources other than Bitcoin spot trading, compared with 45% in the second quarter of 2020.

Coinbase said its crypto trading market share reached a record 10.3% during the quarter, its third consecutive quarter of market share gains. The company said it gained share in both spot and derivatives trading.

In a bright spot for the company, prediction markets contracts and revenue grew 106% from the previous quarter and exceeded a $100 million quarterly annualized net revenue run rate, according to Coinbase. Average Borrow/Lend balances increased by more than $1 billion from a year earlier to $1.49 billion. The company also said the conditions for its commercial agreement with Circle to renew in August automatically had been met.

The earnings report follows a busy second quarter for Coinbase.

In May, the company became the first U.S. crypto exchange cleared to offer customers access to offshore crypto perpetual futures through its Deribit subsidiary. In June, Coinbase launched Coinbase for Agents, a platform that lets AI agents trade crypto, make payments and manage portfolios on users’ behalf. Later that month, the company announced plans to launch tokenized stock trading, crypto and equities options, along with new lending and rewards products.

Coinbase ended the quarter with $8.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents and $10 billion in total available resources. During the quarter, the company repurchased 814,000 Class A shares. Year to date, it has repurchased nearly 7 million shares for $1.2 billion, leaving about $2 billion remaining under its share repurchase authorization.

For the third quarter, Coinbase said transaction revenue totaled approximately $130 million through July 26. The company expects subscription and services revenue between $500 million and $580 million and adjusted expenses between $980 million and $1.08 billion.

Despite the weaker-than-expected earnings report, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong remained optimistic about the future of the company.

“Coinbase is no longer a bet just on the price of Bitcoin,” he said during the earnings presentation. “All of financial services are getting updated by crypto technology, whether that’s trading or payments or lending. And Coinbase is the best-positioned company in the world to power this. And of course, this next frontier is going to be agentic finance, where we’re an early leader.”

Some Windows 11 users are discovering a new Microsoft app they never installed. Called OneDrive Photos, it automatically indexes local images and offers AI-powered search and optional facial grouping.

The rollout, first spotted by industry publication Windows Latest, comes via Windows Update or updates to the existing OneDrive client rather than as a separate download.

According to Windows Latest, OneDrive Photos can detect and display images stored locally on a PC even if the user is not signed into a Microsoft account. After signing in, the app enables AI-powered search that can locate photos using natural-language queries and optical character recognition.

The app also includes an optional People feature that groups similar faces, which are visible only to the user, aren’t shared with third parties, and can be deleted by disabling the feature. However, Windows Latest noted that the feature requires users to opt in because facial data may be considered biometric information in some jurisdictions.

The news comes two years after Microsoft was forced to overhaul its AI-powered Recall feature following a privacy backlash that prompted the company to make the screenshotting tool opt in by default.

More recently, in May, Google began downloading its roughly 4GB Gemini Nano AI model to eligible Chrome installations through browser updates to power on-device AI features, adding to concerns about AI capabilities arriving through routine software updates.

According to Windows Latest, OneDrive Photos is tied to the existing OneDrive client and cannot currently be removed on its own. Users who want to uninstall the app must remove OneDrive entirely from Windows.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Decrypt.

Public opposition to Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader cameras is spreading from city council meetings to Capitol Hill as lawmakers prepare legislation targeting federal funding for agencies that deploy the technology while communities across the country reconsider its use.

The protests come amid mounting evidence that Flock’s technology has been used in ways critics say extend well beyond its stated purpose of investigating crimes and locating missing people.

A recent report by The Institute for Justice identified over two dozen cases nationwide in which officers resigned or were arrested for allegedly using automated license plate reader systems to stalk current or former romantic partners.

In February, Milwaukee prosecutors charged an officer accused of using the system to track a romantic partner and her former partner. In July, an internal affairs detective who investigated that case was arrested after authorities alleged he also used Flock to track people for personal reasons.

Privacy advocates also cite broader uses of the technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says agencies searched license plate databases during protests, including the No Kings protests in 2025. That same year, the group reported that Texas deputies queried Flock data during an abortion investigation that authorities initially described as a missing-person case.

Opposition has also moved beyond public meetings. During June and July, activists across the country spray-painted, taped over, disabled and destroyed Flock cameras in protest of automated surveillance. The Guardian identified at least 33 incidents across 23 states. Online communities have shared camera maps, tips for avoiding the devices and methods for obstructing them, while several people now face criminal charges after allegedly destroying multiple cameras.

Founded in 2017, Atlanta-based Flock Safety sells internet-connected license plate reader cameras that automatically photograph passing vehicles, read license plates, and use computer vision to identify characteristics such as a vehicle’s make, model, color, decals, roof racks, and other distinguishing features. Participating law enforcement agencies can search the database during criminal investigations, receive alerts when vehicles linked to cases pass a camera, recover stolen vehicles, and locate missing people.

Flock says its cameras do not use facial recognition and typically retain data for 30 days unless local laws require a different retention period. CEO Garrett Langley said the company takes privacy concerns seriously and believes many critics reconsider their views once they understand how the technology works.

“Once they understand what the technology actually does, not what it might do in 50 years, not what someone thinks it could do, but what it actually does day in and day out, it takes a picture of a car. Most people go, ‘This makes a lot of sense. I want my kids to be safe,’” Langley told ABC7.

In a post on X on Saturday, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie said that he plans to introduce legislation that would withhold federal funding from municipalities and law enforcement agencies that deploy automated license plate reader systems, including Flock cameras.

The proposal follows a series of disputes over Flock cameras across the United States.

In St. Petersburg, Florida, 77-year-old Carl Gunn has drawn attention by staging solo protests beneath Flock cameras, holding a sign that blocks their view.

“This is just another thing to take our information and to spy on us,” Gunn told news outlet Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “I have a constitutional right to my privacy. I’m a law-abiding citizen, and I don’t need anyone sticking their nose in my business. And if they do, I’m going to chop it off.”

In Fresno, California, residents packed a community forum to urge city officials to remove Flock cameras, arguing the technology allows broad government surveillance. Police defended the system, saying it helped investigators solve homicide and shooting cases and emphasizing that it does not use facial recognition.

“We have to find a balance between safety and liberty,” Fresno Police Chief Mindy Casto reportedly said.

However, not all law enforcement agencies are on board with using Flock cameras and are re-evaluating their use of the technology. On Thursday, the Los Angeles Police Department suspended its partnership with Flock over concerns involving privacy, data sharing, security, and contract terms. Monroe County, Indiana, also voted to end its contract a year early, despite commissioners acknowledging the cameras had helped solve serious crimes. Earlier in July, Leon County, Florida, delayed funding for additional Flock cameras after residents questioned how the data is collected, stored, and shared.

The scrutiny has prompted a response from the company. Earlier this month, Langley apologized for previously describing anti-Flock activists as a “terroristic organization,” saying the comments were a mistake and that the company has spent more time listening to critics while trying to balance public safety and privacy.

“My comments were a mistake, and I apologize,” he told Forbes. “There are groups today that have real valid criticisms of the business, and I think what’s changed for us is, as we’ve listened to them and heard them out, what we’re trying to do is find this balance. We believe in a world where we can have safety and privacy.”