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...

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.

    • neomachino@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      4 hours ago

      Thanks for this, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen these in a few spots around my area but I don’t see any on the map. I’ll check next time I go out.

    • irelephant [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      1·
      3 hours ago

      They don’t seem to be much of a thing in Ireland yet (unless people just aren’t reporting them). There’s 3 in Dublin, all of which are in an industrial park, and the rest (66 of them) are in Northern Ireland.

      • swampdownloader@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4·
        16 hours ago

        They have solar panels and once you know what to look for they’re quite apparent. Typically on every major route in/out of your town along the edge bordering adjacent towns.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      55·
      13 hours ago

      And DESTROY them. I’ve been mulling pulling up behind them on the interstate, parking, popping them off with a 12-gauge, rolling on with an obfuscated license plate. Pull over in a few miles, remove the magnet. Single shot through the engine block!

      But most of you libs aren’t armed, can’t lift a shotgun, “I might get in trouble!” At what point do you actually fight back? This seems an easy point of entry?

  • Sundray@lemmus.orgEnglish
    23·
    19 hours ago

    Flock’s Gunshot Detection Microphones Will Start Listening for Human Voices

    Spanish

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
    441·
    22 hours ago

    Anyone else like to watch horror movies with the windows open and the volume turned up?

    Totally unrelated of course but people should try it, apparently it can create quite an immersive spectacle.

  • RaoulDook@lemmy.worldEnglish
    261·
    21 hours ago

    Flock “Safety” read Orwell’s 1984 and decided to be the infrastructure supplier for Big Brother

  • foo@feddit.uk
    282·
    22 hours ago

    I can think of another company with microphones all over the place, mostly in living rooms and attached to front doors.

  • snooggums@piefed.worldEnglish
    23·
    22 hours ago

    Imagine all the false positives from children screaming during play.

    Also, fuck this dystopian bullshit.

  • Kairos@lemmy.today
    6·
    18 hours ago

    This will exclusively have the effect of deploying police to the location of mentally I’ll homeless people, making things worse.

  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
    141·
    23 hours ago

    Allegedly, the physical construction of the gunshot mics don’t make them particularly suitable to listening to conversations on the street. Like a lot of flock marketing and products, it is over promising but it can still be useful for detecting “unrest”. So think less “it will hear you say 'fuck trump”" and more “it will hear a crowd of people in a starbucks realizing how fucked everything is” or “it will hear someone yell out a warning that ICE is in the area”.

    What is inevitable and will actually cover the individual will be the drone detection mics. The actual act of hearing a Terrorist Drone is REALLY easy from a technical standpoint and is a very similar concept to the gun shot detectors but have MUCH more sensitive mics.

    • Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works
      1·
      21 hours ago

      Drones have a very specific sound that isn’t similar to anything else, so I’d imagine picking up a drone would be much simpler than someone in distress.

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
        4·
        19 hours ago

        Yeah. It is a shockingly easy problem to solve. The point is more what the hardware is designed to listen for.

        Drones? A quadrotor big enough to handle a… paint balloon is not that big. That is why so many dumbass russians don’t hear it until it is too late in Ukraine. So you need a fairly sensitive mic and the hardware to filter through all the background noise.

        Gunshots? You COULD rig something up to do similar so you can hear a gunshot from a mile away but there really isn’t a point since that wouldn’t be actionable data for the real customers (cowardly cops who want to run the other way). And you want to sell a LOT of these because triangulation obviously means square mile because said customers don’t understand trigonometry. So you want to focus on loud noises and be able to distinguish a gunshot from a car backfiring from fireworks. So relatively low sensitivity mics and hardware more geared towards that.

        Which, when you are re-purposing them for surveillance, are very different tools.

  • blargh513@sh.itjust.works
    10·
    22 hours ago

    I wonder what the resonant frequency of those mics could be? Wonder how loud it would have to be to ruin a mic?

  • notannpc@lemmy.world
    1·
    16 hours ago

    So what ways could these devices be disabled with the minimum amount of risk? I suspect a strong enough laser could damage the image sensor. But what about the microphones?

    Because I highly doubt we can count on the law to protect us from this.