cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/50110241

Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product that may create headaches for the cities that adopt it: detection of “human distress” via audio. As part of their suite of technologies, Flock has been pushing Raven, their version of acoustic gunshot detection. These devices capture sounds in public places and use machine learning to try to identify gunshots and then alert police—but EFF has long warned that they are also high powered microphones parked above densely-populated city streets. Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts, before this new feature causes civil liberties harms to residents and headaches for cities.

    • TootSweet
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      7 months ago
      • Get an old MP3 player. And speakers.
      • Grab the audio from horror, action, gangster, etc movies.
      • Make audio files with long periods (hours) of silence punctuated with about 2 minutes of screams and gunshots here and there.
      • Go to the location of a Flock microphone with the MP3 player loaded with audio files, speakers, and a trowel.
      • Bury the whole thing shallow and hit play.
      • BanMe
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        7 months ago

        My city just ended their contract with our shot spotter company because it hasn’t made anyone safer but has resulted in a ton of mistaken dispatches. People know they can fire a gun and simply walk away, it’ll be 10, 20 minutes before police roll by. Who cares?

    • Skyrmir
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      7 months ago

      Great, we’re gonna go from idiots blasting heavy bass, to idiots blasting anime porn sound tracks around the neighborhood.

  • OptionalOP
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    7 months ago

    Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product that may create headaches for the cities that adopt it: detection of “human distress” via audio. As part of their suite of technologies, Flock has been pushing Raven, their version of acoustic gunshot detection. These devices capture sounds in public places and use machine learning to try to identify gunshots and then alert police—but EFF has long warned that they are also high powered microphones parked above densely-populated city streets. Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts, before this new feature causes civil liberties harms to residents and headaches for cities.

  • solrize@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts

    If it’s legal to install that stuff at all, it’s unlikely to stay left up to the cities. You have to expect that if someone (e.g. federal govt) wants it deployed, it will go in everywhere whether the cities want it or not.

    Cancelling contracts at the local level is useless in the long run. The stuff has to be banned by legislation.

      • solrize@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        That’s NOW. As the stuff becomes cheaper and the voice recognition becomes more powerful, it will keep expanding like a corrosive gas.

    • Zedstrian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      has to be banned by legislation

      The list of things that the legislature needs to do is a mile high, but things will only get worse and not better as long as fascists are running the show.

  • sramder
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    7 months ago

    Personal white noise generators?

  • ganymede@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    oh look, the thing they told us would never happen when this shit was installed

    the creep is real.

    thought for the day: is thin wedge always a fallacy when it’s always fucking coming true?

  • Johnmannesca
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    7 months ago

    I always knew one day rap music would probably put me on a list