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FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness
- kylehotchkiss 2y ago[flagged]
- Urd- 2y agoBecause a crazed gunman will (A) go through the scanner and (B) will not open fire when their weapon is detected.
- Spooky23 2y agoYou can make the scanner a condition of entry. Disclose that it’s happening and it’s a deterrent. Better for crazy people to do crazy at the front door.
- roamerz 2y ago(C) crazed gunman neutralized by good guy with gun. In this case it was 3 minutes after the fact (Median Police Response Time to Active Shooter Attacks) rather than immediately as there were no available Good Guys with Guns due to gun policies. I would never ever choose to be involved in an active shooter situation but if I were I’d surely want to be armed rather than not.
- ceejayoz 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting#Timeline_of_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting#Timelin... 11:30am: First 911 call. 11:31am: Officer arrives at school. One minute police response time, by your metric. ~80 minutes later, the ~400 very well armed cops on scene managed to finally go in.
- SoftTalker 2y agoWell the "good guy with a gun" argument presumes the good guy is willing to use his gun and probably risk his own life doing it. This would happen more easily if he's already inside and under direct threat by the bad guy(s). A cop outside is not obligated or expected to put his own life at risk. He's expected to show up for work tomorrow.
- roamerz 2y agoYup agree 100% with the first statement. I do not agree with the second at all. Law Enforcement are both obligated and expected to put their own life at risk protecting the public. That said they are also expected to show up for work tomorrow! It’s a sad day when they don’t.
- dmoy 2y agoOk, but in the US they are not obligated to do that. It's been put forth to the Supreme Court at least once. A cop can be at the scene of you getting actively murdered and do nothing about it, and legally the cop is ok. Morally, you could definitely argue they're not okay.
- dmoy 2y ago> Supreme Court 1981 Warren v. District of Columbia 2005 Castle Rock v. Gonzales
- roamerz 2y agoYeah that was horrible and a bad day for everyone. I was referring to instances where LE does their job correctly.
- javagram 2y agoGun and weapon detection is still useful to stop shootings and stabbings that arise out of fights, where one member may suddenly present and use a previously concealed weapon. Agreed that the usefulness against a crazed gunman is less clear, although crazies do not always have a rational plan. If the weapon was concealed in a backpack or something the security may be able to tackle them before they access it. If they’re carrying it in an easily accessible, concealed holster, that’s less effective and they might be able to draw and use it after being detected.
- dmoy 2y ago> Gun and weapon detection is still useful to stop shootings and stabbings that arise out of fights, where one member may suddenly present and use a previously concealed weapon. Which might be a reasonable thing to aim for? It was mentioned up thread there's >100 school shootings/yr. The vast, vast majority (>>90%) of those are not the "crazy person randomly shoots up school" type, but rather the "two people in a fight / two groups in a fight / targeted revenge on single person". The former is tracked as an active shooting incident, by the FBI. In 2023 there were 3 such incidents: https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2023-active-shooter-report-062124.pdf/view https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2023-active-shooter-repo... (10 year average is a bit higher). Of course the downside with the latter is that simply weapons checking at the school won't stop it from happening right before / after school, or otherwise outside of school.
- vel0city 2y agoI'm still sad about having so many scanners preventing things like pocketknives in public spaces though. I generally carry a pocketknife with me everywhere I go, and there have been a number of times where I just haven't even thought about the fact it's on me when I end up going to a sporting event. They're pretty useful things; I probably use mine a few times a day. Luckily some venues are nice about checking it with security, but still a pain to have to remember to go back and pick it up when leaving. Wouldn't it be nice of people would just quit shooting and stabbing each other at things like sporting events :(
- stronglikedan 2y ago> “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” lie has been repeatedly disproven over and over again Has it? They certainly don't stop themselves (unless resulting from being surrounded by good guys with guns).
- ceejayoz 2y agoExamples in both directions abound. Guns aren't required: https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/25/us/indiana-school-shooting-teacher/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/25/us/indiana-school-shooting-te... https://www.npr.org/2022/11/15/1136617873/buffalo-clinic-gunman-ar15-guard-police https://www.npr.org/2022/11/15/1136617873/buffalo-clinic-gun... https://time.com/6249944/monterey-park-mass-shooting-brandon-tsay/ https://time.com/6249944/monterey-park-mass-shooting-brandon... https://nypost.com/2022/02/01/waffle-house-shooting-video-shows-hero-james-shaw-disarm-gunman-in-2018-attack/ https://nypost.com/2022/02/01/waffle-house-shooting-video-sh... https://abcnews.go.com/US/abc-news-exclusive-teacher-hugged-school-shooter-disarming/story?id=77774494 https://abcnews.go.com/US/abc-news-exclusive-teacher-hugged-... Guns (even nearly 400 of them, carried by explicitly trained professionals) don't necessarily help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uvalde_school_shooting
- AngryData 2y agoI can't agree with this stance at all. US shootings and crimes will not be stopped or declined by stronger invasions of privacy and increased searches. US's high crime problems boil down to poor socioeconomic factors. Poverty, desperation, lack of economic mobility and opportunity, draconian law enforcement, poor social services and safety net. Over and over and over again throughout history, harsher law enforcement and invasion of personal privacy has failed to appreciably reduce crime or violence or murder. At best you merely create divisions in society between the privileged and the desperate that hides the problems from the privileged and wealthy so they can ignore it until eventually it boils over because the privileged and wealthy members of society are shielded from actually seeing the systemic problems that everyone else is dealing with.
- razakel 2y agoCanadians have guns. Mexicans have guns. Australians have guns. They don't have school shootings on an almost daily basis. The problem is definitely not the guns. It doesn't help, but it's not the root cause.
- yesco 2y agoI am happy to inform you that the United States also does not have school shootings on an "almost daily basis". Not trying to be pedantic here, but gross exaggerations misrepresent the issue.
- ceejayoz 2y agohttps://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/12/17/mass-shootings-school-shootings-2024/77044156007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/12/17/mass-s... > GVA has reported 971 cases of school shootings across the United States in 2024, with many of them having no victims or injuries. The database has tracked 112 school shootings in which a victim was injured or killed. Somewhere between ~3/day and ~0.3/day, depending what you count. Close enough.
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- AlgorithmicTime 2y ago[dead]
- parsimo2010 2y agoIt would be nice to have better screening tools, but that doesn’t mean a company should get to lie about what their products are capable of and how they work. Ironically, millimeter wave imagers, that are legitimately capable of finding hidden weapons pretty much anywhere, isn’t deployed outside airports because of the cost and the huge backlash that anything that has the resolution to accurately distinguish a gun can also image your private parts quite well. Evolv wants you to think they can have comparable accuracy with higher throughput and lower cost, but I’ll bet every airport in the country would have them if those claims were true. So instead Evolv preys on nervous leaders who want some protection in large public gatherings but aren’t knowledgeable about security.
- Syonyk 2y ago> So instead Evolv preys on nervous leaders who want some protection in large public gatherings but aren’t knowledgeable about security. That's certainly consistent with their email list. I have no idea how I got on it, but I was on it for a while about church security, and it was constant "webinar" reminders (I assume, sales pitch without having to actually interact with people one-on-one) about how you might have people "bringing guns into" your church without knowing it, etc. It would have been interesting tech to play with. I figure that a quarter of the church on any given Sunday was carrying in some definition of "concealed" or another (ranging from "Dude, I can read the serial number on your gun through your shirt..." to "I'm certain there are people carrying that I would never expect to be carrying and will never know unless there's a reason it needs to come out").
- SoftTalker 2y agoIn at least some parts of the USA there is probably a fair overlap between people who carry any time they leave their house and people who go to church every Sunday.
- throw10920 2y agoPlease don't go off into political flamewar tangents on articles on less political topics. We can talk about whether or not a technology is effective and how much manufacturers should be allowed to overstate claims without getting into unnecessary political strife that degrades HN.
- unwise-exe 2y agoSure sure, the "one neat trick" for getting around the bill of rights by deputizing the private sector to do things that only get recognized as rights violations if it's the government doing it.
- idontwantthis 2y agoClark County School District recently signed a $5 million contract with a different AI “Weapon Detection System”. There is no way any of them are real is there? Edit: CCSD uses Remark. Maybe their AI actually knows what a person walking with a gun somewhere on their body looks like in all situations and for all skin colors.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoSeems like it would cost less than $5m to independently test this unit before purchase.
- Aeolun 2y agoThere’s definitely some form of filtering you can apply to metal detector results to make a relatively good guess on whether it’s a false positive or not. Just need to train it with a variety of hidden and unhidden items. I kinda like the idea of a team of test people hiding their weapons everywhere and then taking multiple trips through the thing just to teach it.
- idontwantthis 2y agoIt’s not a metal detector it’s optical. What does a person with a pistol strapped to their inner thigh walk like? Or a knife? There is no possible way to detect that visually.
- mlyle 2y ago> There is no possible way to detect that visually. Well, let's not go that far. Security personnel definitely detect people carrying weapons by gait and the way their clothing hangs. Certainly computers could help do the same. Can it ever be reliable enough? Ehh, I doubt it.
- shakna 2y agoAnd will that disproportionately flag against the disabled? Like people who drag a leg, use walking sticks and frames, etc? Have an insulin pump under the clothing?
- xrd 2y agoI cannot find any summaries for the cost of these detection devices. What did this cost, anyone know?
- ceejayoz 2y agoProbably a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 made tens of millions of dollars at ~$5,000/unit. > The laboratory found that the card contained only a standard radio frequency ID tag of the type used in stores to prevent shoplifting. According to the laboratory's Dr. Markus Kuhn, it was "impossible" for the card to detect anything and it had "absolutely nothing to do with the detection of TNT". The card could not be programmed, had no memory, no microprocessor and no form of information could be stored on it. Despite the high cost of the devices, the cards were worth only about two to three pence (3–5¢) each. Kuhn commented: "These are the cheapest bit of electronics that you can get that look vaguely electronic and are sufficiently flat to fit inside a card." The "card reader" was found to be an empty plastic box.
- gs17 2y ago> Promotional material issued by ATSC claimed that the ADE 651 could detect such item as guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies, contraband ivory and bank notes at distances of up to 1 kilometre (0.62 mi), underground, through walls, underwater or even from aircraft at an altitude of up to 5 kilometres (3.1 mi). Could they have at least tried to make their lies believable?
- pavel_lishin 2y agoI assume it's like Nigerian Prince emails - if they were believable, they might have appealed to buyers who would have done something like purchasing one and testing it, instead of spending millions of dollars on garbage.
- jandrese 2y agoThis is it exactly. All of the serious people left before they finished the sales pitch. If they had sold one to someone competent that would be grounds for a lawsuit or fraud charges. They had to filter out the customer base to just two kinds of buyers: 1. The people who fail to realize that it's a big scam and will be fat dumb and happy forever. 2. The people who don't want something functional, they want a "probable cause" generator they can pull out when there isn't any evidence to go on.
- giantg2 2y agoI mean, the company has never really said how their systems worked. It's basically left the users/scanned with the impression that it's magic. It seems to me that it's basically some of 3D metal detection paired with cameras. It would be cool to understand how they make it work, but I guess it's a trade secret. They haven't readily put up numbers about false positive rates, and even less data about false negatives. I get the impression that this relies heavily on placebo effect - "they have scanners so I better not try to take my weapon in".
- timewizard 2y ago[dead]
- unwise-exe 2y agoI thought advertising and marketing materials were expected to exaggerate things to the point of blatant falsehood. Is that changing, or is this company being singled out for some reason, or are they really that much worse than everyone else?
- Zak 2y agoIt is, and has long been illegal to make false statements of fact in marketing materials. Puffery, on the other hand is allowed. That usually entails non-falsifiable statements like "Evolv is the best way to detect guns". "Best" doesn't really mean anything because there are a bunch of tradeoffs that go into designing a security screening system.
- conover 2y agoRight. "The world's best cookie". I think the idea is that no reasonable person would understand that statement to mean that literally, of all the cookies in the world, this one right here is the best.
- Zak 2y agoAt least equally important to whether a reasonable person would take it literally is that there's no way to prove it isn't. If I call something the best cookie, the closest thing that has to a concrete meaning is "I like it better than any other cookie".
- skywhopper 2y agoIt’s illegal, and has been for many decades. It’s not enforced nearly as often or as strictly as it should be.
- kjs3 2y agoIn the US (YMMV) there's a distinction in advertising between exaggeration for effect, like "this expensive cream will make you beautiful", and straight up falsification like "we can detect all guns everywhere" when you demonstrably can't.
- too_pricey 2y agoMultiple concert venues in my city use these, so I interact with them all the time. They have replaced standard metal detectors, bag searches, and manual patdowns w/ hands and/or metal-detecting wands. Security checkpoints are the primary point of delay for getting into venues, and places that have rolled these out process people through about 95% faster. It's a huge difference. If it does trigger, you just get the manual patdown you would have gotten anyway, so the false positive cases aren't any lost time. The article and settlement seem to only mention the false positive rate, which is a bad thing to focus on. Every true positive is a much faster experience. Only subjecting 110 out of 3000 people to a longer search is a big improvement. Given the negative outcomes of a gun slipping through and the lack of a cost of a false positive, we probably want it to be tuned to be more false positive prone anyway. We don't need these to detect guns THAT well, we just need them to weed out people who definitely don't have them. I do have concerns about what its false negative rate is relative to the standard practice it replaces. I do not really trust whatever psuedo-AI they're bolting to their metal detectors; it's probably easier to get a gun through. That said, the false negative rate probably isn't good already. TSA isn't great on their false positive rate, does more intense screening, and isn't being staffed by hungover 20-somethings. So maybe the false negative rate didn't actually increase by much?
- ggreer 2y agoAn acceptable false negative rate really depends on the consequences of getting caught. If someone's nefarious plan depends on smuggling a gun in, they want to be confident they won't be arrested or shot at the entrance. Even failing to detect 20% of firearms means there's an 80% chance they'll be caught before they can do whatever it is they plan on doing. This is also why it's important to have armed guards alongside the scanners. Scanners aren't very useful if the only armed person is the bad guy. If the consequences of getting caught are negligible (as is the case for anyone trying to bring a box cutter through airport security), then the attacker can try as many times as they want without issue. Even if the false negative rate is low, they only have to get lucky once. Annoyingly, I can't find any info about false positive/negative rates for various scanners. There doesn't seem to be the equivalent of Consumer Reports or Underwriters Labs for scanners. My guess is that the numbers must be pretty bad if companies aren't willing to go through public 3rd party testing.
- scrose 2y agoInteresting how a guy whose entire administration is being investigated and indicted by the FBI ran almost entirely on a ‘law and order’ platform, with this pilot being one of the staples.
- stronglikedan 2y agoThe "investigated and indicted by the FBI" that lead to nothing for the "law and order" candidate? Interesting that the "lawfair" candidate would have had the complete opposite outcome, had the laws been equally enforced.
- bwilliams18 2y agoYou're confusing Eric Adams with Donald Trump.
- timewizard 2y ago[dead]
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- liliiavyshnska 2y ago[dead]
- Animats 2y ago[flagged]
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- palmfacehn 2y ago"Hear me out, we run the same playbook, but this time with AI" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651 >The ADE 651 is a fraudulent bomb detector[1] produced by the British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd (ATSC). It was claimed to detect many substances, such as drugs or explosives, from long distances. The device was sold to various countries, particularly in Iraq where the government was claimed to have spent £52 million for security operations. >The device features a swiveling antenna attached to a plastic grip and requires charging by a user's static electricity. Users would insert "programmed substance detection cards" to supposedly detect specific substances, which were claimed to absorb the vapors of those substances. However, investigations revealed that the product was incapable of detecting anything, essentially being a dowsing rod. The ADE 651 was used primarily by Iraqi security forces for security checkpoints. Due to the false sense of security, many critics pointed to numerous incidents where bombings occurred despite the presence of the ADE 651 at security checkpoints, underscoring its ineffectiveness.