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

thedrive.com

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

#81

Post by goatlover »

dfxm12 wrote: post #14
vel0city wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just reads to me like "won't someone please stop me from grinding up all these babies? If only someone would pass a law preventing me from doing these horrible things I keep doing..." Like, you know you can just stop doing bad things, right? You shouldn't need a government telling you that maybe you shouldn't do bad things. Its as if he's saying he has no free will or executive action being the CEO of Flock, he…

It's hard when people are paying for the cameras. This is capitalism. Money is always the #1 priority & we have little relative to those pushing for the surveillance state.

For Flock and similar cameras, it's often city councils without asking the public to vote on it first. I suppose the parking lot cameras are commercial, so customers would need to complain loudly enough or boycott businesses. However majority of customers might prefer having a sophisticated camera system making sure nobody breaks into their car while shopping. Those things seem to run after business hours, so presumably they're there to prevent anyone from using the parking lot who doesn't work or shop there.

More of the if you're living out of your car, we don't want to give you a place to park for the night because not having a home is a terrible sin in society. So is just hanging out I guess. The stores themselves should have adequate security already.

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

#82

Post by voxic11 »

general1465 wrote: post #40
scrapcode wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But 34DTM* == 34DTM10 which is exactly what Flock did.

> The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.

No, it wasn't looking for partial matches, it was looking for an exact match of "34 DTM" and it missed the "10" in the middle of the victims plate because it was in non-standard small lettering (as required by law for those types of plates in their state). To be clear, the 10 was in the middle of the victims plate number, which was "34 10 DTM", not the end of it.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...

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

#83

Post by plorg »

overgard wrote: post #32
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…

The way I see it their fundamental business model is not something we should tolerate. This is basically just stalking with a lot of money put behind it and barely any legal accountability. This is just not a thing we should tolerate in a free society.

In fact they seem to structure their business to specifically avoid accountability both for themselves and their customers.

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

#84

Post by dominick-cc »

behringer wrote: post #47
dominick-cc wrote: post #35

I can't deal with the ads on this page on mobile

use firefox and ublock origin. Use dns with ad blocking. You shouldn't see ads on mobile.

I'm in a hospital right now. I think that's part of the problem, used to my home wifi with dns block lists. I'll try to see if I can find ublock origin on mobile.

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

#85

Post by goatlover »

kittikitti wrote: post #52

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 is…

I fee watched all the time now. Part of me wonders what sort of legal behavior gets one noticed.

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

#86

Post by 98codes »

m463 wrote: post #70
pc86 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Flock themselves mis-translated the plate, plain and simple, and should not be being used in production for alerting authorities on very serious matters. I am anti-Flock to the point that my friends and family roll their eyes when the topic comes up, but saying that because the image recognition software did not achieve 100% accuracy it can't be used under any circumstances is just silly. I agree Flock shouldn't be…

It wasn't accuracy, it was recognizing the type of plate. It was a weird plate. 34 DTM manufacturer here's the article with pictures: https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...

Weird to us, but it's not as if it's not well known to (in this case) the state of NJ, nor is there an infinite set of license plate designs, particularly for the actual letter/number size, shape, and coloring.

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

#87

Post by vel0city »

voxic11 wrote: post #79
vel0city wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw…

This isn't in the featured article, thanks for sharing. I see its in one of the linked articles giving more backstory.

This is still an instance of a partial match. If it was looking for an exact match of 34 DTM, it wouldn't have found the target 34 03 DTM. So more like it was searching for /*34*DTM*/ instead of /*34DTM*/

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

#88

Post by scoofy »

I think a discussion we're not having is how policing should exist moving forward given this technology exists for criminals as well.

We literally have people driving around with electromagnets on their license plates to cheat any number of perfectly reasonable traffic instruments. We have folks breaking into and going for joyrides in cars that lack engine immobilizers by exploiting them, then ditching them often after crashing.

I'm certainly fine with the folks who say we shouldn't have surveillance, but then how do we have law enforcement without hiring a literal army of police officers? We are effectively at the point where technology allows very small groups to massively exploit the general public.

In the vast majority of cases, we do not have the public funds to do law enforcement purely in person anymore. I suspect the alternative is not "greater liberty" but organized crime/vigilante justice.

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

#89

Post by dylan604 »

lovich wrote: post #78
sib wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yea and that’s effectively “did not do it” when it comes to anything involving consequences. It was obvious what the rhetorical point `nekusar was making. I’ll give you the pedantic point of being technically correct when looking at it from a gods eye view.

But for the purposes of doing something in protest like destroying flock cameras, the person doesn't want to be known as not doing it. They want people to know they did it, and why they did it. They want the cred. So saying they didn't do it is not helping the cause. Accepting they did it while returning not guilty is the desired outcome. Having juries return not guilty verdicts when someone very clearly did something is a good step in having stupid laws overturned. Even if they don't get removed, it shows police and prosecutors that that juries are not going to convict for this type of case. You'd have to be a Jeanine Pirro type to be willing to bring cases that are known losers. Rational prosecutors will not.

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

#90

Post by dundarious »

If Flock has so many issues with this database, and all their solutions are patchwork, and those solutions remain local to the jurisdiction that is locally using Flock, then this is a bad product.

If you build a product on a bad database, you cannot load the blame for the resulting bad product on the bad database. If it was not fit for purpose, then the product designers are the problem as much as anything else.

This applies doubly for a product that relies so heavily on automation enabling speedy responses with heavy consequences.

I understand that this may smack of perfect being the enemy of good, but this domain is akin to medical devices in terms of impact.

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