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.
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.
That’s just incorrect, the majority of these are run by local governments.
That’s NOW. As the stuff becomes cheaper and the voice recognition becomes more powerful, it will keep expanding like a corrosive gas.
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.