this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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A brief recap: a few weeks ago I’d taken the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing out to run some errands with my wife in Plymouth, Minnesota. I was backing out of a parking space in front of my local Kohl’s when four cop cars came screaming up and “initiated a box and pin on the vehicle,” as the police report says. Hands on their guns, the officers ordered us out of the vehicle, patted us down, and eventually told us the Range Rover’s license plate—New Jersey 34 10 DTM—was stolen, they suspected the vehicle itself was stolen too, and they’d used Flock cameras to track me down over the last two days.

The scenario involving my wife and I is just one of many like it. Thomas noted that the system is 99% accurate today, but it’s performing 20 billion reads a month. That 1% error rate, of which I was a part of in June, makes for two hundred million misreads a month.

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[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Yep, even 0.01% error rate looks great, until you run the numbers and it's 100 fuck ups per day… percentages stop being intuitive at mass scale like this

[–] EliteCloneMike@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 hours ago

Same for Google search and their AI scanning every file that gets uploaded. Their AI, even with a 1% error rate means like millions of incorrect query responses daily or probably less than daily. Same goes for false positives from scanning people family photos or data. Hundreds or thousands of false positives each week in that case. I don’t quite get why people still use Google services, but that’s another topic. I dislike Google as much as Flock or any corporate run tech that spies on citizens for government agencies. It should be that they are hesitant to turn over information rather than proactively turning over information. Break up Google and shutter Flock.