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Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices
- FireBeyond 1y agoAnd then they'll start proactively reporting to law enforcement when their AI model thinks what you're saying is "suspicious", just like they do now when it thinks the movement patterns of behavior of your car is suspicious. Flock's CEO openly says the he intends that "Flock will help eliminate ALL crime", and has shown he has no concerns about how dystopian or Minority Report-esque Flock would need to be to accomplish that mission.
- dotancohen 1y agoWhen one cares not about false positives, eliminating all true positives is trivial.
- bckr 1y agoI’m not worried that much about random acts of violence from desperate or misguided strangers. The crime I want eliminated is that of the elite.
- tptacek 1y agoI think you're going to find that working class people living in low and middle income neighborhoods do not agree with you about this. They're unhappy with how police response tends to traumatize the innocent in their neighborhoods, but they're even more unhappy with how police response appears only to halfheartedly address crime, which falls heavier (both in frequency and impact) on lower-income people than it does on the wealthy. You can read meeting minutes from neighborhood and beat meetings to confirm this (there's probably lots of things you can read to confirm it, but the nerdiest way to do it is to get the raw data.) A shorter way to say all of this: you're expressing a luxury belief.
- jkestner 1y agoYou’re right. It’s a luxury to have the space away from the problem to think about it systemically. Certainly, part of the work is to learn from each other. Will surveillance cameras in low-income areas (if that’s where they’ll put them) mean that the police will be more responsive to crime in those areas? If the police are already not responsive in supposedly high-crime areas, what’s the underlying cause? Would the Black Panthers have felt the need to have armed patrols in their neighborhoods if the police could’ve put up a surveillance system?
- saila 1y agoHow it is "luxury" to want to address large scale crimes such as wage theft, price collusion, corruption, unequal access, and institutional racism/classism that are major underlying factors in street crime, including the lack of enforcement you mention here? From a nerd perspective, it's seems obvious that addressing underlying causes is beneficial to all of us. In fact, it seems likely that it's the only thing that will work in the long run. Policing might also be necessary in some cases, but it's not going to fix our long-standing social issues.
- tptacek 1y agoIt's luxury to suggest that street and property crime should take a backburner to whatever your issues are, because you are (demographically speaking; I have no idea who you are personally) (1) much less likely to experience street and property crime than someone in a low-income neighborhood and (2) much more able to metabolize the impacts of those crimes. The whole thing is silly; it isn't the job of municipal police to investigate price collusion and corruption in the first place. You might just as meaningfully say that the trash collection service should be prioritizing institutional racism.
- 12345hn6789 1y agoYou live in a upper class city. Your example is great albeit not quite applicable to the first paragraph.
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- EasyMark 1y agoYeah the real issue that most Americans (and probably other countries) is that 0.1% of the populace is wagging the rest of the 99.9% around based on how much they're willing to pay to politicians.
- antibull 1y agoDisgusting.
- j4coh 1y agoSurely this will never be used for evil
- mihaaly 1y agoThey promised. Possibly even pinky promised! (hackers too, to never steal data from them)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ajay-b 1y agoThey film us on the street. They film us at traffic signals, from law enforcement vehicles, and drones, parks and even through our doorbell cameras. I don't mean this glibly, or in its entirety, but the big screen watching your every move in 1984 seems not too far off..
- boothby 1y agoAnd now with the advent of highly capable LLMs, we don't even need humans watching and listening. The data streams can be captured, analyzed, summarized, for any behavior, mention, suspicion, or hallucination of undesirable activity. In a population inured to masked agents snatching people off the street domestically and semi*-autonomous drone strikes abroad*, our future doesn't look rosy. * for now
- martin-t 1y agoThis is the key realization which is missing from talks about AI dangers. Total surveillance used to be impossible because the government needed people to spy on other people. They needed to find somebody willing and pay them. Now it can be automated. The war won't be humans vs an AI controlling robots. It'll be humans vs the government and rich people controlling AI controlling robots.
- anal_reactor 1y agoThere will be no war. As long as people are fed, they won't revolt.
- schrectacular 1y agoExactly. Roll it out first to see who is being "productive" at work.
- dashundchen 1y agoLarry Ellison, major asshole and big ally of the current authoritarian regime: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on," Ellison said, describing what he sees as the benefits from automated oversight from AI and automated alerts for when crime takes place. Ellison, Vance, Musk, Thiel, Luckey, Zuckerberg and many of the tech oligarch assholes want us to live in their surveillance state. They're currently making good progress. What will you do to help stop them? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnipresent-ai-cameras-will-ensure-good-behavior-says-larry-ellison/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/omnip...
- koolba 1y agoThe logical next step is replace the microphones with the ones we carry around in our pockets every day: https://youtube.com/watch?v=IRELLH86Edo https://youtube.com/watch?v=IRELLH86Edo
- gregoryhinkle 1y ago1960: "I have a great idea! lets have every person in the country carry a radio tracking beacon!" "That'll never fly!" 2012: "I can has TWO iphones??"
- jacknews 1y ago[flagged]
- stri8ed 1y ago[flagged]
- Rygian 1y agoBefore discussing trade-offs between those two, what about prevention of crime?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoHow would that work? Assume that I'm willing to bribe the underclass with welfare to prevent crime (hell, assume I'm only worried about the worst types of crime)... how much bribery for how much reduction?
- tredre3 1y agoFlock won't prevent you from being stabbed by a homeless junkie. It might help catch the guy and prevent him from stabbing someone else (until he's released three months later). Knowing this, wouldn't you prefer that we spend the money on crime prevention programs that "bribes" the underclass, instead of in a system that won't prevent crime at all but will rob all of us of privacy?
- adventured 1y agoThe single best resolution to crime is to dramatically reduce poverty. The single best way to reduce poverty is to pay (bribe) the poor to stop having children, which ends the cycle of poverty (which is extraordinarily difficult to break and tends to trap generations). That should go hand-in-hand with free birth control, free day-after pills, free abortions, comprehensive sexual education, etc. A large share of the bottom 1/3 in the US will never step foot outside of poverty, most of them will never hold a job on a sustained basis. Pay them to not have children, which simultaneously benefits their lives in the here and now, while preventing the mistake of bringing children into poverty. It's one of the most humane things the US could do as a society. It would very rapidly improve poverty (and reduce crime) in the US.
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y ago1. This is illegal eavesdropping 2. I will start screaming at the Flock cameras
- jjtheblunt 1y ago1. This is illegal eavesdropping https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/plain_view_doctrine_0 https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/plain_view_doctrine_0 might apply, though IANAL
- seanw444 1y agoThat's probably exactly the rationalization for this. No expectation of privacy in a public space, and therefore no requirement for warrant to eavesdrop. I may not like it, but the government will find absolutely any way to do things we don't like in spite of the infinite attempts to restrain it from doing so decades or centuries ahead of time.
- zoklet-enjoyer 1y agoThere are eavesdropping laws specifically about audio recording. Not sure if it's federal or state by state.
- squigz 1y agoNext week: App that emits frequencies that block Flock microphones 2 weeks from now: Google and Apple remove AntiFlock apps; developers arrested (Only slightly sarcastic. We should be talking about ways of making these things useless, as well as illegal)
- camillomiller 1y agoEMP devices.
- kotaKat 1y agoGet little throwable "annoy-o-tron" devices with a button-cell and a magnet that randomly play little gunshot sounds or fake screams and throw them near the Raven sensors.
- therobots927 1y agoThe slide into hell is steep and slippery. I’m afraid we’re in a dark period of history that’s only going to get darker. I want proponents of this tech to explain something to me. Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us? Isn’t the whole point of this to preempt those kinds of things?
- bckr 1y ago> stochastic terrorism This is a bugbear for me. The point of terrorism is that it’s a random act of violence.
- wizzwizz4 1y agoStochastic terrorism usually refers to incitement, afaict. Edit: it's got a Wikipedia article, which says it's a particular kind of incitement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
- mystraline 1y agoTerrorism isn't even an actual action. Its a threat of a random action to the public. For example, saying "there is a planned school shooting at a school in $metro_city", even though there is absolutely nobody doing that - that causes terror. Doesn't have to be backed by any actions at all. Like, with the shooting of UHC CEO, there was no grandiose statements or otherwise causing terror ahead of time. It was 3 bullets and leave.
- nemomarx 1y agoThey did fail to prove terrorism in court in that case - I think generally there needs to be some attempt to use the terror to achieve a political aim or change public opinion? Just making people afraid is a different thing.
- panarchy 1y agoThe stochastic part is who is doing it (random people being incited) vs an organized cell who has members engaging in random acts of violence
- scottydelta 1y ago> You're thinking Chinese surveillance > US-based surveillance helps victims and prevents more victims — Garry Tan, Sept 03, 2025, YC CEO while defending Flock on X. https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955 https://xcancel.com/garrytan/status/1963310592615485955 I admire Garry but not sure why there can’t be a line that we all agree not to cross. No weapon has ever been made that was not used to harm humanity.
- tptacek 1y agoI spent several years doing a bunch of work in my local muni that drastically restricted, and eventually booted (I'm not happy about this; long story) Flock. I feel like my Flock bona fides are pretty strong. I understand people not being comfortable with Flock. I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line. People disagree about this technology. I live in what I believe to be one of the 5 most progressive municipalities in the United States† and I can tell you from recent experience that our community is sharply divided on it. † (we're a small inner-ring suburb of Chicago; I'm "cheating" in that Chicago as a whole is not one of the most progressive cities in the country, but our 50k person muni is up there with Berkeley and represented by the oldest DSA member in Congress)
- squigz 1y agoConstantly surveilling your citizens without cause doesn't strike you as an obvious red line?
- tptacek 1y agoNo. Roughly half our community wanted to keep the cameras. And we're as blue/progressive as it gets. Whatever else it is, it isn't "a red line". That is not the same thing as me saying I think the cameras were a good tradeoff.
- tehjoker 1y agoThe wealthy people keep the poor down, then having this subpopulation that acts in messed up ways causes crime, which causes the wealthy to accept things like surveillance to "protect themselves" and continually cedes to more authoritarian policies. The middle class is the social base of fascism. The way out is to turn on the rich and produce a more economically equal society.
- mhb 1y agoThat should be Flock (YC 2017)
- cr125rider 1y agoThere are a lot of ideas that are bad for society but great for business. YC is business first, always.
- sojournerc 1y agoYeah, and yet YC has backed literal scams on some exuberance of hope (uBiome)
- dang 1y agoWe stopped putting that in submission titles years ago. An exception is for Launch HNs.
- mhb 1y agoYes. My intention was how it should be in mind space rather than literally.
- camillomiller 1y agoIt is now fair game to destroy their illegal surveillance devices. Please do.
- JumpCrisscross 1y agoIs there an audio stream that tends to ruin speech recognition?
- baby_souffle 1y agoPlay multiple lyrical songs at the same time? Bonus for multi-language.
- jdkgojwnfkgjf 1y ago[flagged]
- AfterHIA 1y agoI'm going to go around these things all day screaming, "help, rape!" It's like that old prank where you order pizzas to someone's house that didn't order them. That's how we used to fight against the man. Now we scream, "rape" randomly in public. What a time to be alive.
- yongjik 1y agoIt's a problem entirely made up from America's insistence on guns. IMHO that's like when you have a website that serves a few requests per second, and then someone has the bright idea of using Kafka and Kubernetes because reasons, and now you have a horrible mess that requires multiple developers to support and, instead of questioning the original technical decision, everybody instead piles up technical "solutions." At least nobody actually says "The founding engineers knew everything, our job is protect their original technical decisions, because otherwise our great company will fall." Regulate guns and all these problems go away. As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
- tptacek 1y agoWe're not going to regulate guns this way, so this point, valid or not, isn't meaningful to US policy.
- seanw444 1y agoDangerous freedom > peaceful slavery The non-American mind simply can't comprehend, and that's okay.
- rhubarbtree 1y agoBut the argument doesn’t make any sense. History isn’t full of examples where handguns prevented tyranny. It’s America that is running the experiment, not the rest of the world. And the conclusion is lots of people die as a result, and right now it looks very much like you’re headed toward tyranny anyway.
- mindcrime 1y ago> Regulate guns and all these problems go away. Firearms are regulated in the United States. Quite heavily, in fact. This goes back to the National Firearm Act of 1934, carries through the Gun Control Act of 1968, then loops in the Firearm Owners' Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 (which included the famous Volkmer-McClure amendment that all but outlawed fully automatic weapons for civilians) and runs through at least the Brady Act of 1993. And that's without getting into the smorgasbord of state, county, and municipal laws that also apply. The idea that the US is still living in the Wild West era with regards to firearms is a complete myth. > As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights. That's not an experiment I'm willing to indulge in personally. As the old saying goes "I'd rather have my guns and not need them, than need them and not have them."
- ph4rsikal 1y ago"We will all be on our best behaviour because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VA5hHllB4Xw https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VA5hHllB4Xw
- keiferski 1y agoIt’s pretty depressing to see every ostensibly American value be replaced by profit-driven utilitarianism. “It improves X problem marginally and it makes money, so why not?” seems to be the reasoning for just about everything anymore. No discussion of values, of the society we want to build, or anything else. That’s the world the tech industry is building.
- captainkrtek 1y agoIt really feels like there is no debate anymore when it comes to things actually being implemented, they are just thrust upon us and maybe discussed later after there have already been consequences
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoAnd by discussion you mean discussion about removing safety/privacy/any other laws in the way the the 'new thing' being implemented.
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- mothballed 1y agoReminds me of the school 'vape detectors' that can also be programmed to listen for "loud noises" and "keywords" but basically handwave away the fact it violates wiretapping laws because they're claiming they're basically doing pattern matching on RAM buffered audio then dumping it.
- crtasm 1y agoDo you have a link to an analysis of one of these?
- 1y ago
- tQHAZ21 1y agoDon't worry. If LEOs are dispatched reacting to a Flock event, they will be using Carbyne, a company founded by Epstein and Ehud Barak.
- jollyllama 1y agoHow's this different than shotspotter?
- jkestner 1y agoIt’s webscale
- Bud 1y ago[dead]
- EasyMark 1y ago“Human distress” today, and “human everything” tomorrow. They probably just don't currently have the processing capability or upload bandwidth for all the passersby talking, the only issue is technical and not moral. Flock is in this for money, all morals are turned off --corporations are not really people-- and will sell cops and the government anything they are willing to pay for, including listening for wrongthink. Every time I read a story like this I send EFF or the ACLU another $20
- foresto 1y ago> will sell cops and the government anything they are willing to pay for Anything they are willing to force us to pay for.
- mihaaly 1y ago"Listening on normal conversations can uncover serious crimes being executed or planned" - just an imaginary excuse from the future, along the small gradual steps taken, like this one.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago1984 was a pretty mild vision of the surveillance state. If tech continues to improve we will not too far into the future have full surveillance around the clock of everybody. No way around it and it will not even cost a lot. The big question is who will have access to the data.
- cluckindan 1y agoSeems we are not far away from full-on 1984.
- npvrite 1y ago[dead]
- 1659447091 1y agoLooking beyond the obvious surveillance issues, how long until all the location are made public and people start in with the pranks/activism/etc diverting responders away from real emergencies? "officers we're just rehearsing a play in a public space ... " or something like that