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...

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.

  • redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.comBannedBanned from communityEnglish
    47·
    10 months ago

    Should be fun flooding these with false positives and adversarial noise.

    • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      10 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.
    • Skyrmir@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      10 months ago

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