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A College Told Flock to Remove Its Cameras. The Company Refused.

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The Chicago Sun-Times reports: When Elgin Community College hired Flock Safety to install six surveillance cameras in April 2025, President Peggy Heinrich thought they would "enhance the safety and security of students...." They were supposed to help locate stolen cars and missing people. But Heinrich started to wonder if the cameras were actually making students less safe after seeing news reports that data captured by Flock cameras in Illinois had been shared with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Then in September 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained an Elgin Community College student in a campus parking lot. More than half of students at the far west suburban Chicago campus identify as Latino. Heinrich said enrollment dipped. Students were afraid to come to class. College officials decided the cameras had to go... College officials asked Flock to remove the surveillance cameras "out of an abundance of caution for our students," Heinrich said. But getting the cameras taken down was not as simple as it sounds, especially because Flock retains ownership of the company's equipment.... Surveillance experts say the company is financially incentivized to have as many cameras gathering data as possible even in places that no longer want them, because potential clients are looking for the surveillance network with the greatest reach.... Elgin Community College staff notified Flock in October 2025 that they wanted to cancel their contract and have the cameras taken down. Within a day, Heinrich said, Flock rejected the request and refused to uninstall the equipment on the basis that the company had not breached their agreement. College officials reached out again in December 2025 and said they would pay for the remaining five months of the contract — they just wanted the cameras taken down. "We never received a response back from Flock," Heinrich said. That's when things got weird. Heinrich said Elgin Community College staff began to cover the cameras using black trash bags and zip ties so that they would not be able to capture footage. But workers in an unmarked vehicle, which Heinrich assumed belonged to Flock, repeatedly removed the coverings... This strange dance continued, Heinrich said, until Elgin Community College's contract with Flock expired in April this year and the company uninstalled the cameras for good.

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Week in Review: Most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Oct. 4, 2026

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Get caught up on the latest technology and startup news from the past week. Here are the most popular stories on GeekWire for the week of Oct. 4, 2026.

Sign up to receive these updates every Sunday in your inbox by subscribing to our GeekWire Weekly email newsletter.

Most popular stories on GeekWire

From H-1B to CEO: How Satya Nadella traveled the path the U.S. just cut off for Microsoft workers

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella followed the path from a temporary work visa to permanent residency to U.S. citizenship. On Thursday, President Trump honored him with a national medal, hours after the administration blocked Microsoft from sponsoring its foreign workers for permanent residency. Here’s how the programs work, and what the numbers show about Microsoft’s practices. Read More … Read More

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Android Weekly Issue #748

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Articles & Tutorials
Sponsored
AI multiplied the amount of code your team writes. But the process that delivers it to users hasn’t changed: same release trains, same quality gates, same manual handoffs. Join a live panel w/ mobile engineering leaders on what that volume changes about the release process. Nov 12, 10am PT/1pm ET.
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Joe Birch walks through building Pixelate, a Compose Multiplatform library that pixelates composables to mask premium content.
John O'Reilly walks through migrating the PeopleInSpace KMP sample from SKIE to Kotlin's new Swift export.
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Discover why real-time threat monitoring is crucial to your cybersecurity posture through a simulated attack demo. Join us on Oct 20th to uncover why threat monitoring is essential to the complete, end-to-end protection of your mobile app.
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Shiva Thapa walks through publishing one Kotlin Multiplatform library across Maven Central, SPM, pub.dev, npm, PyPI, and the web.
Ricardo Costeira explains cooperative coroutine cancellation and common mistakes that silently break it.
Manuel Lorenzo Parejo walks through running one Maestro flow across languages on iOS and Android, including common traps.
Konstantin Tskhovrebov shows how to profile Compose Multiplatform apps on Wasm, recovering stripped function names for deeper traces.
KMP Bits outlines a shared Analytics/CrashReporter contract in commonMain to stop Android and iOS telemetry events from drifting apart.
Gergely Orosz examines Firebase's global outage, Google's poor incident response, and why Android's SDK survived.
Sasha Denisov builds litetune to verify fine-tuned on-device models after conversion and quantization.
Adit Lal shares hard-won lessons on hooks, AI code review, and token costs from running Claude Code on a real Android app.
Place a sponsored post
Reach out to more than 80k Android developers around the world through our email newsletter and social media channels. Advertise your Android development related service or product!
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Libraries & Code
A Compose Multiplatform library that pixelates composable content into a mosaic while preserving layout and data.
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An Android library that captures and visualizes WebView JavaScript bridge messages in real time, Chucker-style.
A declarative Kotlin code generation API for building Kotlin source code programmatically, written in pure Kotlin.
A self-hosted App Store Optimization toolkit that tracks keyword rankings for Google Play and the App Store.
A Kotlin Multiplatform download manager library with parallel connections, pause/resume, queues, and speed limits.
News
JetBrains ships Kotlin Toolchain 0.13, now recommended for new KMP projects, with a new `kotlin new` setup flow, SwiftPM support, and Native compiler caching.
JetBrains discontinues Swift IDE features (editing, highlighting, navigation) in the Kotlin Multiplatform plugin, citing low usage.
Videos & Podcasts
Firebase's Roger covers September updates: spend caps, Remote Config pricing, AI Logic, auth event triggers, and App Check replay protection.
Philipp Lackner discusses Shopify's shift from React Native back to native Kotlin and Swift development.
Philipp Lackner introduces spec-driven development with OpenSpec for managing AI-assisted coding projects.
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Why every company now needs to think and operate like a lab team | Josh Woodward (Google Labs, Gemini, AI Studio)

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Josh Woodward is the head of Google Labs, the Gemini app, and AI Studio. He has spent over 17 years at Google and oversees its longest-running and largest labs team, whose products include NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook), Project Genie, and Flow. His job is to find, experiment with, and scale new AI products, and he has built one of the most distinctive product cultures in the industry for generating ideas, running experiments, and, even more importantly, knowing when to quit.

In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:

1. Why every company now needs to think and operate like a labs team

2. Where the best ideas really come from

3. The “almost possible” framework

4. How to recognize genuine product-market fit early

5. When to kill an idea

6. What skills are rising in value in the AI era

7. Why roles are not actually blurring into one universal builder role

8. How to set up your internal labs team

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Brought to you by:

WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more

DX—Engineering intelligence for the AI era

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Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-every-company-now-needs-to-think

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Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0

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Highlights: https://lennyspodcast.com/mostreplayedmoments

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Where to find Josh Woodward:

• X: https://x.com/joshwoodward

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshwoodward

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

—

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:53) Why every company now needs to think like a labs team

(05:43) Where great ideas come from

(07:43) The “almost possible” framework

(11:52) Finding product-market fit

(16:09) Falling in love with the problem, not the solution

(17:57) When to kill an idea

(19:35) Overseeing Google Labs and the Gemini app

(22:21) Next consumer AI breakthroughs

(24:32) Google’s vision for a personal assistant

(27:18) What is overhyped and underhyped in AI right now

(31:36) Skills rising in value: unlearning rate, explosive endurance, trust

(35:45) Why roles are not blurring into one universal builder role

(38:59) Explosive endurance rhythms

(41:31) How planning has changed: rolling windows and 100-day milestones

(43:37) Labs lifecycle stages

(47:37) Tips for setting up an internal lab

(54:00) The future of products in an AI world

(56:26) Google Labs culture, rituals, and closing thoughts

—

References: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/why-every-company-now-needs-to-think

—

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

—

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.



To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com



Download audio: https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/api.substack.com/feed/podcast/216810191/b5148fc43510e2906d5e532bff5b6116.mp3
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What Actually Happens When a Durable Orchestration Awaits an Activity?

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Can One Worker Safely Execute Delayed Operations for Many Tenants?

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Matching a grant's tenant to the resource's tenant prevents cross-tenant substitution. It does not contain a compromised shared worker that is authorized for every tenant; that needs separately enforced identities, credentials, permissions, or partitions.
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