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FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness

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Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness

#81

Post by ceejayoz »

simoncion wrote: post #78
ceejayoz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Additionally, some of the 112 that did have a victim didn't even happen on campus. See this linked incident. Did you look at your link? > Student shot in leg during dispute in parking lot as school was dismissing That's a school shooting. The parking lot is absolutely part of the campus.

> That's a school shooting. Ah. I now understand why school shooting numbers that people are quoting are so very high as of late. Shit like Columbine is a school shooting. Shit like that is a shooting that happened to happen at school. If the assailant had used a knife, would you be calling it a "school stabbing"? If you would, then I disagree with that characterization, too. For lots of folks, the term "school shoot…

Not every school shooting is a mass shooting, no.

Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness

#82

Post by too_pricey »

Multiple 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?

Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness

#84

Post by stronglikedan »

scrose wrote: post #83

Interesting 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.

The "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.

Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness

#85

Post by mrandish »

jandrese wrote: post #80
mrandish wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they're basically making minimally plausible props for customers more focused on security theater performances than any actual security. It's scummy and dumb but legally the only real problem I see is lying and collecting money under false pretenses making it fraud. Alternatively, they could have chosen to market these products confidentially as essentially security placebos. There's a market for things l…

I don't think it's quite as innocent as security theater. I think these are more for generating probable cause when they need to shake down someone who isn't doing anything illegal.

Ah, well if the design allows manual triggering as opposed to some random percentage, then that would obviously be bad.

Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness

#86

Post by ceejayoz »

mrandish wrote: post #85
jandrese wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's quite as innocent as security theater. I think these are more for generating probable cause when they need to shake down someone who isn't doing anything illegal.

Ah, well if the design allows manual triggering as opposed to some random percentage, then that would obviously be bad.

It’s mostly based on the ideomotor effect. It’s all manual triggering, just mostly unconscious.

Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness

#87

Post by ggreer »

too_pricey wrote: post #82

Multiple 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 m…

An 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.

Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness

#88

Post by Aeolun »

idontwantthis wrote: post #20

Clark 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.

There’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.

Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness

#89

Post by mrandish »

too_pricey wrote: post #82

Multiple 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 m…

> 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.

I assume expediting peak crowd throughput at low labor cost is the primary, if not entire, value of the device. I hate that it's being marketed dishonestly but I also assume most concert venue buyers know (or suspect) it probably doesn't work all that well in practice. However, in a concert context accurate detection isn't their main priority. They need to get more bodies per minute into the venue at lower cost while appearing to conduct security checks sufficiently 'real' enough to act as a deterrent to get those who care about getting 'caught' to leave their knife or concealed carry handgun (or whatever) in the car.

The only hard and fast requirement is meeting the contractual security requirements of the venue and promoter's insurance carriers - because no insurance = no concert. It's a bonus if the 'security' also looks plausible enough to reassure the small fraction of perpetually fearful people statistically challenged enough to actually worry about terrorists or an active shooter killing them while at a Taylor Swift concert (as opposed to the infinitely more likely chance of dying in a car crash on the way to the concert).

In a perfect world, everyone would be rational and numerate enough that we wouldn't need to maintain the pretense of 'security theater' in contexts where actual security isn't necessary. But in the imperfect world we live in, I prefer having concert (and airport) security be as minimally disruptive and inexpensive as possible regardless of effectiveness (since it's unnecessary and mostly ineffective in those contexts anyway). I just wish companies would sell these products as 'security placebos' instead of lying about it because fraud is wrong.

Re: FTC orders 'gun detection' tech maker Evolv to stop overstating effectiveness

#90

Post by mattw2121 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #43
mattw2121 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USA Today's reporting is wrong. There are not 971 cases of school shootings. There are about that many "school incidents". Some of those incidents, like the one listed below, are where police responded to a report of someone with a gun and never found the person or gun. https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/3096236 Additionally, some of the 112 that did have a victim didn't even happen on campus. See this linke…

> Additionally, some of the 112 that did have a victim didn't even happen on campus. See this linked incident. Did you look at your link? > Student shot in leg during dispute in parking lot as school was dismissing That's a school shooting. The parking lot is absolutely part of the campus.

Yes I have. An altercation between two people in a parking lot is different than a school shooting.

Have you looked at the other items listed where there are victims? Multiple times I see that it was an altercation in a dorm room of a college. Sorry, I would consider that an altercation in a residence, not a school shooting. Here's another one that a kid shot himself in the leg and it's counted as a school shooting.

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/3092594

These stats from GVA are inflated with respect to school shootings.

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