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Comment by lukan | Hacker News Reader

"Flock is absolutely responsible and they should not be releasing or selling products that are this poorly made."

I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here?

"Milwaukee police later admitted the alert should have been cleared out of the system days earlier, but an employee simply forgot to remove it. "

The system seemed to work as intended - that numberplate was flagged for investigation with homicide - and gave the alarm as intented, nothing more. The problem was wrong data given to them by humans.

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Yeah I'm confused. The title of the article is wrong. There was no "Flock Camera Glitch" according to the article.

The human in the loop did not properly delete an invalid license plate number from one of the databases the flock system checks against.

The issue issues are with:

1. Human in the loop

2. Third party database police use for homicide info

3. Police response

I don't see what the license plate reading technology has to do with any of this. It seems like the only thing working reliably.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262204

"Flock amplifies existing bugs. Sounds like Flock is the error."

> I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here?

We'd need to take a look at what they have access to and how they're ingesting that info. I'd start with caring greatly about false positives and not automating department onboarding.

Working with various counties I've seen situations where someone needs to tell you a specific table dump exists to get an accurate count because that's how they published deletions back in 1983. There are no standards and the people who created these systems are all dead.

> The problem was wrong data given to them by humans.

This is always a problem. It's never not a problem. The question is how Flock chooses to address the problem.

> I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here?

Flock should stop existing. I hope people help them with that, enthusiastically.

don't worry, Axon wants to put all 90,000 CCTV cameras into a database for dragnets, too. And i'm sure there will be startups, possibly even mentioned here, that want the same thing.

There's a lot of money in cyberstalking and real stalking. see: Facebook's valuation

Legislation is how that happens. There is no other way. And these stories are what help get that ball rolling in the direction we want.

> Legislation is how that happens. There is no other way.

There are plenty of ways if you are creative enough.

Somebody could start putting Flock executive license plates in with erroneous police data.

Which would not have been acted on if those charges were ever in the flock system to begin with.

Which means they wouldn't have flagged the car and pulled it over.

A couple of days go by and the error is out of the system.

> I am not a fan of flock, nor police surveillance state, but what could they have done better here?

Not exist. That is the only societally acceptable answer.

They can design a system that doesn't enable these behaviors. Good grief these excuses are pathetic. This is a purposely made system with specific outcomes, these are the outcomes.

Saying there is nothing we can do is pathetic behavior and just shows that maybe you (nor Flock) should be in charge of these things if these are the outcomes they find acceptable.

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