as a community we really ought to be suspicious of claims like this. There's another word for "acoustic sensor" and it's "microphone". When a corporation says "trust us, we only use the data for good", we should collectively raise our eyebrows, knowing that when data is collected for one stated purpose and stored, that the data at rest will always be used for additional purposes. Once data is collected, the number of things it may be used for is always unbounded; any claims to the contrary should not be taken at face value.
It it's so amusing to me that people who carry around a phone 24/7 spend time imagining these intricate Rube Goldberg surveillance systems to be afraid of.
When I joined Google I started thinking to myself "geez, we care so much. why does HN hate us?"
It clicked for me when someone pointed out that even if you trust group of employees X with a mountain of data, nothing prevents group of Y from eventually selling it. And after what I saw my last couple years, I'm utterly convinced some McKinsey-ite will be telling 2050's CEO that's a great idea and in fact the moral option. Maximize shareholder value => stonk go up => Americans have safe retirements.
Why am I talking about Google?
People talk past eachother on this stuff. The problem isn't that "have they ever done anything bad?", it's that the incentive structure is set up such that something that crosses the line will eventually happen. They have an incentive to keep the customer happy.
And as the article, and comments below from 1.5 hours before you posted point out, there's no room for argument on that: this already happened. A court threw out info because it was illegally obtained.
But in all seriousness, you should actually read the section for that court case. Here's all of the text for that case from the link:
""" Commonwealth v. Denison, No. BRCR2012-0029 (Mass. Super. Ct. Oct. 7, 2015) "ShotSpotter is a listening and recording system that runs 24/7, attuned to the sound of gunfire. When the system hears gunfire, or what it recognizes as gunfire, it locates it, reports it, preserves the recording, and send the recording to the customer within seconds.” The defendant, charged with first degree murder, moved to suppress a recording made by ShotSpotter of an verbal exchange among numerous individuals before and after the fatal gunshots. The court rejected that the argument that the defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights because the exchange was “audible by anyone passing and was in fact heard by a crowd of neighbors and other witnesses.” However, the court found that the exchange was an “oral communication” and that the recording was a prohibited “interception” under the Massachusetts Wiretap Act because the defendant had no knowledge that the exchange was being recorded. The court also found that the interception was “willful” because the police had “purposefully directed the placement of the sensors.” The court granted the motion to suppress: “the continuous secret audio surveillance of selective urban neighborhoods ** is the type of surreptitious eavesdropping as an investigative tool that the Legislature sought to prohibit." """ [0]
The verbal exchange was recorded because it was incident to the shooting that triggered the recording. In addition to recording the shooter(s) shoot the victim(s), it also recorded the shooter(s) and victim(s) speak before the shooting. This was in public so there wasn't an expectation of privacy, and I can't imagine this is the kind of recording that the Massachusetts's legislature "sought to prohibit".
[0] https://www.mass.gov/files/documents/2018/01/08/CRIMINAL%20E...
Looking into it more all the cases of audio being used in court, that was not audio of gunshots, was audio immediately after a gunshot. Spotshotter is open about recording that and it seems completely reasonable to me this audio should be used.
What's most boggling to me about the criticism is Albuquerque apparently has 10,000 cameras law enforcement has access to. I know we likely disagree on the usefulness of those, but if you are privacy concerned why would shotspotter even be on the same level of concern as cameras that don't need a gunshot to start filming?
https://apnews.com/article/albuquerque-crime-cameras-technol...
I think that is also bad. Two things can be bad! That's just not the topic of the post.
