> Says who?
Rigorous audits in technically savvy jurisdictions:
* San Francisco has a technical population that has passed numerous ordinances focused on protecting privacy of San Franciscans in balance with protecting safety. As such, the San Francisco city government has a Committee on Information Technology, which has a Privacy and Surveillance Advisory Board that evaluates and audits privacy-impacting technology used by the city. Here are their evaluations that cleared ShotSpotter for use in San Francisco. [0] [1]
Logic:
* Why would city government officials pay the very high cost for ShotSpotter (it's $73k per square mile here in my city, Chicago) if they couldn't audit the system or impost contractual, legally enforceable privacy protections?
* ShotSpotter has been a company for a long time, but the only evidence this article presents of ShotSpotter collecting verbal communications is from two courts cases where the verbal communication was incident to a shooting. At some point, absence of evidence becomes pretty plausible evidence of absence.
Economics:
* They have to pay for staff to review every loud noise to meet negotiated SLAs for alert response times (typically under 120s), so they have an incentive to not send audio samples off of sensor-devices unless there's a gunshot-like noise.
* They have no way to monitize loose bits of audio of unidentified people just walking around near sensors, but it would cost money to store this data and would cost a lot of money to organize it for search-ability.
Physics:
* These sensors are mounted high up on poles and buildings, and they are not directional. If sensors have high enough sensitivity to pick up street level voices, then there's a ton of other ambient noise that they'd pick up and the signal would be trash most of the time. It is just the distinct loudness of gunshots that trigger the audio to be written out + transmitted, and the loudness of people while they are in the excited emotional state [needed to shoot someone, or created by being shot or being near a shooting] that enable these recordings to capture audible vocals.
> The people behind these invasive systems who push back hard on the slightest attempt at basic accountability?
I get that that feels true to you, but it's not true. ShotSpotter is a company selling a product to city governments, who have constrained budgets and adequate legal departments and can cut ShotSpotter if they aren't happy with ShotSpotter (my city is dropping ShotSpotter service in September [2]). There are a ton of forces enforcing accountability.
[0] https://sfcoit.org/sites/default/files/2020-11/SFPD_ShotSpot...
[1] https://sfcoit.org/sites/default/files/2020-11/SFPD_ShotSpot...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2024/02/15/1231394334/shotspotter-gunfir...