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| ▲ | tptacek 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | The third of these is exactly what I'm looking for: a case where a Flock camera was off by one letter, and mismatched a car as stolen when it wasn't. The driver wasn't arrested, but being stopped for a stolen vehicle is terrifying --- it happened several times where I live as well (due to stale Illinois LEADS entries). The first two don't seem like Flock issues at all. In the first, police used Flock cameras as they would have a closed-circuit camera. They got a vague look at the person driving a suspect car, and they got another lead on the owner of the car, tracked him down on Facebook, and picked out a person from his friends list that looked like the picture on the camera. In the second, there was a fatal hit-and-run accident involving a Dodge Durango; the police did a dragnet search for Dodges Durango and literally picked the first one they could find parked on the street. They then papered the case backwards to match it to the accident, claiming it had telltale damage (it did not). Both those cases are police malfeasance, to be sure. But they're not the police believing Flock against all other evidence; they're police essentially manufacturing evidence to clear a case. | | |
| ▲ | veec_cas_tant 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There seems to be a very sizable number of people who believe cameras should not be used as evidence because the footage could implicate an innocent person or be misinterpreted. OCR can be wrong, just as a person can make a mistake or fat-finger a data entry, and so on. We should absolutely expect law enforcement to understand the gravity of their actions and use this technology appropriately. I don't agree that getting rid of cameras is the answer here, far from it. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Right, the "OCR" issue here is what I'm interested in --- Flock's vision models just straight-up making mistakes. There's a whole other issue of police not being well-trained in how to use these things, which leads to problems like "indict the first Dodge Durango we can find", but those are police policy issues more than they are ALPR issues. | | |
| ▲ | veec_cas_tant 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | Does OCR accuracy even matter much here? I would expect, and maybe this is unrealistic, that anything even close to “this plate represents a stolen vehicle” would have at least one human involved. If I send in video evidence and someone just uses iOS OCR on a screenshot without checking it, I am definitely not blaming Apple. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | In theory. Cards on the table, my prior on this is that these kinds of "OCR" errors are in fact very rare. I think that because we did a deep dive on every car curbed by a Flock camera here, as part of the process that led to us eliminating the cameras, and this just never happened. There is, at least in Illinois, a pervasive and difficult-to-solve accuracy problem with these systems, which is that Illinois LEADS is full of stale data; it wasn't designed with the expectation that it'd be matched against plates in real time, but rather with patrol cars calling in plates when they pulled them over. |
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| ▲ | _DeadFred_ 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262204
"Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error." |
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| ▲ | aussieguy1234 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I can imagine if it was a person of colour driving the "stolen" car, their experience with the police would likely be quite different to that of a white person. | |
| ▲ | slowin 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How are they not Flock issues? If Flock cameras didn't exist, they wouldn't have happened. Flocks (and all other mass surveillance cameras) allow many parties to violate your rights and generally behave sociopathically. This is why people want them all removed. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you want to make the argument that all cameras are problematic, I won't necessarily agree, but it's not the thing I'm asking about. One problem in these discussions is that it's virtually impossible to have a conversation or to explore the topic in any depth because every single comment on the thread is read purely as advocacy. I'm in some part responsible for getting the cameras pulled from my own municipality, as I've discussed many times here. | | |
| ▲ | slowin an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > If you want to make the argument that all cameras are problematic Yes I think all cameras are problematic. I don't want to be recorded in public, especially by the state and it's commercial "partners". It's pretty wild that this is even up for debate at this point, scary times. | |
| ▲ | ofjcihen 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I'm in some part responsible for getting the cameras pulled from my own municipality, as I've discussed many times here. This along with the tone of your first comment comes more across as “Not in my backyard”. | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I believe you and your follow up comments to the one earlier seemed to point that direction, but there is a bit of a tone in your first comment that could reasonably be misconstrued as undue skepticism in favor of flock. I would just be mindful of how you talk about the subject, if you’re looking for feedback. If not, just ignore me I guess ha | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't think this kind of metadiscussion is productive on these kinds of threads, sorry. Just a personal preference to avoid it as much as possible. | | |
| ▲ | slowin an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | You actually started the meta discussion and they were just replying to you: > One problem in these discussions is that it's virtually impossible to have a conversation or to explore the topic in any depth because every single comment on the thread is read purely as advocacy. People "advocate" in these threads because we don't want to live under mass surveillance. This has already been discussed in depth in books like 1984. | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | hey take it or leave it, no worries |
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| ▲ | enquirewithin 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] | | |
| ▲ | Forgeties79 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | For someone who knows “what this forum used to be like” you seem very incapable of following its long-established, basic etiquette rules. |
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