Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

thedrive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 120 posts

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#51

Post by pc86 »

scrapcode wrote: post #23
sterlind wrote: post #17

seems like: - cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database. - Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it. - cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him. thoughts: - as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil,…

> as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. 34DTM != 34DTM10

No license plate matching system required full, exact matches to return any hits. That has nothing to do with Flock.

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#52

Post by kittikitti »

I find this quote interesting, "That lack of feeling safe starts to lead to these erosions of society."

These camera's don't make me feel safer given the rising fascism associated with surveillance. If they are taking it seriously, the false positives would also include the racism in policing and the inequality in criminal courts. However, they're not serious about it, and for them, this is just a public relations issue.

If America wasn't actively mobilizing their own gestapo (ICE) then my opinions would be more muted. I think that wealth inequality and oppression of a state's own citizens leads to the erosions of society. A modern interpretation of Benjamin Franklin's quote is apt, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#53

Post by nekusar »

sib wrote: post #27
lovich wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s referencing jury nullification. Juries actually can “make them have not done it”, although that’s been used for good and ill purposes.

"Not guilty" does not mean "did not do it" - it means "the state didn't prove that they did it beyond a reasonable doubt."

Exactly.

I think as a citizen and a 2x juror, that it is our responsibility first to determine if a law should be a law for all. Secondly, if the law passes scrutiny, ONLY then should we determine guilt or innocence.

I am highly disincentivised in seeing victimless crimes as crimes. Like drug usage and all that. Or destruction of horrific security appratus like Flock.

Simply put, the laws wrong. And that means 'Not Guilty' for anyone I would have to judge, even if they admitted it in open court.

(I'm also aware that jury nullification has also been used to find black lynching perpetrators to be not guilty of the same nullification. I said that I judge a law if it should be. Murder is pretty clearly not victimless, but extenuating circumstances like self defense are a thing. Lynching is terrible, and so is freeing lynching perpe-traitors.)

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#54

Post by pc86 »

righthand wrote: post #19
sterlind wrote: post #17

seems like: - cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database. - Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it. - cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him. thoughts: - as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil,…

So we should give guns to children then because it’s just a tool to defend themselves right? Or a more common metaphor, if you give chimpanzee’s a gun… The police have no actionable method of abuse if you take Flock cameras away. They wouldn’t be acting on flagged random license plates if you took away the dragnet and surveillance system that’s randomly flagging people. This is 100% fault of Flock.

Flock can be a terrible unconstitutional company and this particular incident can have nothing to do with that and not be Flock's responsibility in any way. Acting like anyone who understands how true legacy ALPR systems work and how police officers track plates and search for stolen vehicles are by extension somehow supporting or excusing Flock is ridiculous.

Nearly the exact same thing could have happened with traditional non-surveillance ALPR systems, or with manual plate running by officers in cars.

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#55

Post by aeturnum »

sterlind wrote: post #17

seems like: - cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database. - Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it. - cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him. thoughts: - as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil,…

> as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here

Seeing this in an engineering-centric community disappoints me. It's hard to say for certain without seeing the system but I think it's extremely likely they are at fault. Things that come to mind:

- If the incomplete plate really was "34DTM" - why does the system allow that to be added? Either you should use actual wildcards to indicate you are searching for a partial or you should be blocked from adding an incomplete plate.

- This likely is not the first time his car was seen by the system. Why did they not require the person entering the partial match to clear / assess all of the cars that were known already?

- Alternatively, if it had never been seen before, why was that info not highlighted?

- If "flagging" the same for partial and full matches - that seems like a substantial design oversight.

There are so many things Flock could have done to prevent this kind of inevitable user error.

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#56

Post by cucumber3732842 »

dylan604 wrote: post #9
nekusar wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YCombinator and HN would run a "Slit your mommas throat as a service" if they though there were hockey stick growth profit. Flock, and anybody who funds them are the real domestic terrorists. Anybody who destroys these devices are patriots in my book. And if I ever serve for jury duty over a case like that, they didn't do it.

> And if I ever serve for jury duty over a case like that, they didn't do it. Now you're bending facts. You can decide they are not guilty of a crime, but you can't make them have not done it.

If you really want to nitpick, juries are what settle questions of facts.

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#57

Post by vel0city »

scrapcode wrote: post #21

I am absolutely biased, but there is a lot of attempt to shift or at least share the blame here and not a lot of accountability. Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters. We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact p…

> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple

To be fair to Flock, from what was said in this conversation they were told to be on the lookout of a partial plate of 34DTM. Meaning, there could be some additional characters that were not originally caught. So 34DTM10 and 1034DTM could potentially both be matches. It doesn't seem to me like Flock mistranslated the plate.

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#58

Post by pjc50 »

scrapcode wrote: post #21

I am absolutely biased, but there is a lot of attempt to shift or at least share the blame here and not a lot of accountability. Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters. We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes. The obvious here being that even if this was the exact p…

> We are already very aware that the police overreact and make plenty of mistakes

This is the deeper problem. See BLM, and then the backlash against that to create a much less accountable federal paramilitary/carabinieri force, ICE, resulting in the Minnesota conflict and several people getting killed.

And what lies underneath all that? Dirty Harry and a whole stack of subsequent propaganda. There's a very powerful story that the world is full of criminals and any form of police accountability (such as double checking information before acting, or taking a safety focused approach to stops which may include not doing them) is getting in the way of "fighting crime".

HN is firmly against Flock, but there are lots of people, Republicans and Democrats, who are going around demanding more surveillance to fight crime.

(The UK "ring of steel" and high presence of surveillance cameras and ANPR do not seem to have nearly this much level of problems. Here the controversy over stops is mostly good old manual racial discrimination for "driving while black")

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#59

Post by charcircuit »

righthand wrote: post #19
sterlind wrote: post #17

seems like: - cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database. - Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it. - cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him. thoughts: - as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil,…

So we should give guns to children then because it’s just a tool to defend themselves right? Or a more common metaphor, if you give chimpanzee’s a gun… The police have no actionable method of abuse if you take Flock cameras away. They wouldn’t be acting on flagged random license plates if you took away the dragnet and surveillance system that’s randomly flagging people. This is 100% fault of Flock.

[flagged]

Re: Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

#60

Post by yesb »

sterlind wrote: post #17

seems like: - cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database. - Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it. - cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him. thoughts: - as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil,…

Flock's system misread the plate, simple as that. Trying to pitch it as solely human error just shows that they don't want to take responsibility of the limitations of their software. Handling partial matches should be the bare minimum. In this article the CEO talks like considering those is a great idea that they'll look into. That's so incredibly dumb that I can't believe that they don't already do that. What likely actually happened is that the plate was incorrectly flagged as a perfect match.

Why is their tech not tested on every plate format that is currently used? That should be table stakes. Why did it not flag the match for review because the "34" and "DTM" had an unusual amount of space between them (not matching expected spacing of NJ plates)? The truth is that they are probably just using some free ML models off of hugging face and selling it as a magic black box that finds criminals to police.

Post reply on HN