this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
811 points (98.9% liked)

Technology

86780 readers
3926 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
811
Flock misread license plates in 71% of the alerts it sent to police in one California town (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 1 day ago by spaghettiwestern@sh.itjust.works to c/technology@lemmy.world
66 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In 2023 and 2024, Flock sent 1,427 alerts to the Roseville [CA] Police Department.

Roseville police found that Flock misread license plates in 71% of those alerts.

Max Isaacs, director of technology law and policy with the Policing Project at New York University's School of Law, described Roseville's misread data as "stunning."

"A 71% misread rate is really beyond the pale," he told Business Insider, referring to Roseville's reported error rate for stolen and felony vehicle alerts. He added that "in the absence of concrete rules that directly address the problem of misreads, this technology is not safe to be deployed in communities."

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 4 points 15 hours ago

This has nothing to do with weather conditions or lighting. It has to do with basic statistics: if you are looking for a very small subset of identifiers in a very large pool, and you have a system that has a (pretty good btw) 96% chance to read an identifier correctly, you will get more and more false positives the more identifiers you scan.

That means expanding the Flock network also expands the amount of false positives.

This cannot be avoided, except if you are able to make the 96% rate better; but be reminded if this system would get upgraded from 96% to 99.6%, total precision would only increase about 1% (from 29.1% to 30.1%). reducing the number of false positives in this example by only 15 licence plates.

To actually reduce the amount of false positives, you would have to make the system less sensitive - which isn't possible in this context.