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Flock’s Gunshot Detection Microphones Will Start Listening for Human Voices (www.eff.org)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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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.

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[–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year 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.

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