Putting cops in schools is still a bad idea. It turns regular disciplinary problems — ones handled for decades by administrators, teachers, and parents — into police matters, subjecting students to the whims of armed officers who have been trained to react with violence to nearly any misbehavior.

That’s what happened in this case [PDF] handled by the Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court. A momentary altercation between a student and his mother prompted a school employee to call for the school resource officer, who then went on to brutalize the student for, apparently, not immediately respecting his authority.

Here’s how it all began:

One morning, Trellus Richmond arrived late to middle school with his mother. Like many thirteen-year-olds, he was concerned with his appearance—so much so that he was violating school rules by wearing a hoodie to hide an embarrassing haircut. When his mother told him to take it off, he resisted; his mother pulled at the hoodie, which led him to push her away. That skirmish prompted the front office attendant to radio the school resource officer, Mario Badia, who arrived moments later.

And here’s how Officer Badia mishandled a situation that really didn’t require his presence, much less his, shall we say… interaction.

When Badia arrived, he spoke briefly to the front desk assistant and Richmond’s mother. By this time, Richmond’s hoodie was gone, and he was standing alone at the front desk. For about two minutes, Badia confronted Richmond by cursing at him, mocking him, and pointing his finger at him. Richmond did not look directly at Badia while he was talking, so Badia grabbed the thirteen-year-old student’s face. Richmond reacted to the hand coming at his face by trying to block it with his arm and stepping backwards. Badia then shoved Richmond in the chest and grabbed his shirt and arm. Badia pushed Richmond to the center of the lobby and used an “armbar” technique to lift Richmond off his feet, flip him onto his back, and slam him to the ground.

Badia held Richmond down by his forearm, twisting his wrist as he was on the floor. After about three minutes, Badia released Richmond, allowing him to return to his feet. Badia then pushed him to the front desk and told Richmond to “remember him.” Badia asked Richmond’s mother if she wanted to press charges against her son for battery, but she declined.

This was all captured on video by the school’s cameras. The student was never charged for a crime but Officer Badia sure was:

Badia was investigated, terminated, and prosecuted for child abuse and battery. The arrest warrant charged Badia with grabbing, shoving, and slamming Richmond to the ground “for no apparent lawful reason.” Badia ultimately pleaded guilty to battery…

Somehow, despite Badia being charged (and pleading guilty) for throwing Richmond to the ground “for no apparent lawful reason,” the district court awarded the officer qualified immunity on Richmond’s false arrest and excessive force claims. It also granted Badia statutory immunity on the state law battery claim… you know, the charge Badia pled guilty to.

Badia still gets qualified immunity on the false arrest claim.

Uncontroverted testimony establishes that Badia arrived at the scene after two school employees informed him that there had been a physical confrontation between Richmond and his mother. But a reasonable officer in the same circumstances as Badia and having received reports of a fight could have believed that there was probable cause to arrest Richmond at the time. See Fla. Stat. § 784.03(1)(a) (battery occurs when a person “[a]ctually and intentionally touches or strikes another person against the will of the other” or “[i]ntentionally causes bodily harm to another person”). We therefore conclude that Badia had arguable probable cause to arrest Richmond for battery and is entitled to qualified immunity on the false arrest claim.

The charges brought against Badia by prosecutors should have made it clear he could not be awarded immunity on the excessive force claims. “For no apparent lawful reason,” reiterates the Appeals Court.

Badia had no law enforcement justification for grabbing Richmond’s face, slamming him to the ground, or twisting his arm. Badia testified that he slammed Richmond to the ground because, after he grabbed Richmond’s face, Richmond “became explosive, he became aggressive . . . when I went to grab him, he kept pulling away.” In other words, Badia testified that he threw Richmond to the ground because Richmond resisted Badia’s attempts to grab his face. But Badia does not identify any law enforcement justification for grabbing Richmond’s face in the first place or for the other things he did to Richmond, such as twisting his wrist while he was lying on the ground or pushing him in the back after Badia allowed Richmond to stand. And, having viewed the video and taking all disputed facts in favor of Richmond, we cannot agree that Richmond was “explosive” or “aggressive”—he was simply stepping backwards, away from Badia’s grasping hands.

Officer Badia’s next move: “But I was probably trying to arrest a student.” So what, says the court. Even if true, none of the violence Badia perpetrated on the student was in service of performing an arrest.

Here, notwithstanding his probable cause to do so, Badia was not using force to effectuate an arrest. Indeed, Badia does not even argue that grabbing Richmond’s face was related to effectuating a lawful arrest. Instead, Badia testified that he grabbed Richmond’s face to “direct [Richmond’s] gaze toward him” while they were speaking. Accordingly, on this record, Badia identifies no legitimate law enforcement justification for his use of force.

And, the court continues, fully expanding on Badia’s argument that an arrest was afoot, plenty of other stuff was wrong with how this was handled. The supposed crime was a misdemeanor, so only a minimum of force was called for since the student was obviously not a truly dangerous criminal suspect. The student did not disobey any “lawful commands” issued by the officer. Instead, he stood still at the desk for two minutes listening to the officer curse at him and mock him before Badia went on the offensive.

The Appeals Court says a jury could likely find Badia’s use of force to be a violation of rights. So could a court, like this one. And Badia should have known his assault of a student violated his rights because there’s plenty of precedent saying exactly that.

In terms of related precedent (most of it related to handcuffed subjects), the court says this:

Here, Richmond was under control, not resisting, and obeying commands when Badia used force. Indeed, Badia confirms that during their two-minute conversation, Richmond “just stood there.” And Richmond was obviously restrained when he was on the floor, but Badia torqued his wrist, nonetheless.

But, on top of that, it was an obvious violation of rights.

For the obvious clarity standard to be met, an officer’s conduct must be of a nature that every reasonable officer would have known the conduct was unlawful.

We recognized in Patel that it is obviously unreasonable for officers to use the same high degree of force on a physically weak non-resisting suspect that they might justifiably use to restrain a physically strong suspect who is resisting. Like Patel, who was frail and elderly, Richmond was a thirteen-year-old boy and significantly smaller than Badia. Nevertheless, Badia used an armbar technique to forcefully throw Richmond to the ground. Our precedents establish that the unconstitutionality of Badia’s conduct— taking all inferences in favor of Richmond, as we must—was obviously clear.

Badia can’t have immunity on the federal claims related to his assault of the student. And that means he can’t have immunity on the state law claims related to the same act. Reversed and remanded. Presumably, a settlement will be headed to the student’s family in the near future, since it’s obviously clear a rights violation took place. Plus, there’s a recording of the incident, which leaves far fewer facts in the “disputed” state where Badia might find some other way to escape this lawsuit.

Some people complain there’s never a cop around when you need them. But this complaint, which is sustained, says the opposite: schools are ensuring cops are around when you don’t need them. When faced with incidents that don’t call for their specific set of skills, some officers, like this one, will become instigators and aggressors. And when that happens in schools, it’s children and legal minors who are expected to simply take the abuse.

Filed Under: 11th circuit, battery, mario badia, police in schools, qualified immunity, sro

You may recall that a few weeks back we discussed Ubisoft’s decision to shutdown game servers for several titles, including major AAA titles like Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 3. While server shutdowns are the norm after some period of time, as is the loss of certain online gaming features, notable in Ubisoft’s announcement was that anyone who bought the PC DLC for those games was simply going to lose all that bought DLC. Making matters worse, updated versions of the game on PC are available for purchase and include all that DLC, making it so that Ubisoft was tacitly telling gamers to just go buy the content all over again.

This, as you might imagine, did not go over well. Much noise and chatter was had online, none of it positive. As often happens, this has caused Ubisoft to relent with a partial change in plans. As the company recently announced, online gaming was still going to be shut down, but those who bought DLC for these games at least have a window where they can grab it and download it permanently to their local machines.

Significantly, previously purchased PC DLC for four impacted titles—Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Assassin’s Creed III, Far Cry 3, and Splinter Cell Blacklist— will now be available to download and keep permanently. Players will have to activate that DLC on their UPlay accounts before the newly delayed server shutdown date of October 1, however, to maintain access and the ability to redownload the content past that date.

While the online multiplayer portions of those games are still going to be shut down in October, this at least keeps Ubisoft from disappearing DLC content that there was never an online need for. Honestly, this should have been the approach from the jump. If Ubisoft had come out and said they had to shut down servers for its older games but made a point of creating a window for customers to grab their DLC permanently, it would have saved a lot of headaches.

And, notably, at least one game is going to get continued support from the local studio developer.

The developers behind city-builder Anno 2070 weren’t willing to let outdated servers impact their game, though. After the planned shutdown for the game’s server was announced in July, Ubisoft Mainz responded by “dedicat[ing] some of our development resources to work on upgrading Anno 2070’s aged online services infrastructure to a new system.”

On Wednesday, the team confirmed that the effort was successful and that a new, 64-bit version of the game coming in the next week “will allow [players] to continue to play the game past September 1 and hopefully for many more years to come.” It will include full access to multiplayer functions and previous single-player progression, but the developers do warn that “we unfortunately can’t guarantee that old mods etc. are still working in this new version of Anno 2070.”

What this demonstrates is that companies like Ubisoft should put far more thought into planned shutdowns of servers for their games in order to do them in a way that has the least negative impact on their paying customers.

That a sentence like that even needs to be written out is absurd, of course, but here we are.

Filed Under: assassin's creed 3, dlc, far cry 3, game servers Companies: ubisoft

We’ve noted more times than I can count how you no longer really own the things you buy. Whether it’s smart home hardware, or routers that become useless paperweights when the manufacturer implodes, or post-purchase firmware updates that actively make your device less useful, you simply never know if the product you bought yesterday will be the same product you think you own tomorrow.

The latest case in point: numerous folks had grown to really enjoy using a smart home device dubbed SmartDry. SmartDry attaches to the inside of your dryer’s drum and connects to your smartphone, and can inform you when clothes are actually dry (saving you money), when your vents need cleaning or there’s a gas buildup (saving your life).

Unfortunately, the company behind the device is shutting down, leaving fans of the product with a useless bauble:

The problem is that SmartDry alerted you to dry clothing by connecting to your home’s Wi-Fi; the device sent a message to parent company Connected Life’s servers and then relayed that message to your smartphone. But Connected Life Labs is closing, discontinuing SmartDry, and shutting down its servers on September 30. After that, “cloud services will cease operations and the product apps will no longer be supported.”

DIY enthusiasts could buy a ESP32 development board, load some custom code, and set up their own smart home assistant, but few folks will actually be doing that. It’s a bummer to the many folks, including the hearing impaired, that say no other device offered quite the same functionality.

SmartDry didn’t cost much (about $25), and its failure creates a market opportunity for some other smart home device manufacturers. Still, it’s just the latest in a long line of devices heavily reliant on one company’s cloud infrastructure that can quickly become both useless and environmentally wasteful should the original company run into troubles:

Cloud server dependence is a recurring problem with smart home devices. Smart home company Insteon seemed to vanish without warning in April. Insteon later blamed the pandemic and supply chain shortages. In June, a group of dedicated customers purchased Insteon and revived its services. Most of the time, shutdowns are more routine, like when a service is cut after an acquisition, or a large company loses interest in its smart home experiment.

So the real innovative opportunity lies in creating more resilient systems that can still function even if the manufacturer collapses. Enter the open source Matter platform, which is expected to launch this fall, and not only unify the fractured standards in the smart home space, but let all of your smart home devices communicate on a local network, without without the need for a controlling gateway and hub.

Filed Under: bluetooth, cloud, dryer, ownership, smart home, smart home standards, smartdry, wifi Companies: connected life

Over the past few years, international law enforcement has been cracking down on encrypted device purveyors. We’re not just talking about regular device encryption, which has been mainstream for several years now. These would be specialized manufacturers that appear to cater to those seeking more protection than the major providers offer — services that ensure almost no communications/data originating from these phones can be obtained from third-party services.

The insinuation is that specialized devices are only of interest to criminals. And there is indeed some evidence backing up that insinuation. But plenty of non-criminals have reason to protect themselves from government surveillance, a fact that often goes ignored as criminal crackdowns continue.

Even if there’s a honest market for something international law enforcement considers to be a racket (as in RICO), the market cannot seem to sustain the continuous scrutiny of law enforcement. Another purveyor of specialty phones catering to people who desire the utmost in security and privacy has decided resellers should bear the legal burden of offering its offerings. Here’s Joseph Cox reporting for Motherboard:

Encrypted phone firm Ciphr, a company in an industry that caters to serious organized criminals, has made a radical change to how its product can be used and sold, signaling an attempt by the company to distance themselves from, or perhaps cut off, their problematic customers.

How do you cut off perhaps your (previously) most valued customers? Well, in this market, you force the resellers to assume all legal liability.

Now, it is shifting that responsibility away from itself to individual resellers of the devices. The message says that for resellers to continue with new sales or renewals of customers’ subscriptions, they will need to run their own MDM solution. This essentially puts the management of customers much more in the hands of the resellers and not Ciphr. 

Offloading mobile device management (MDM) to third party resellers perhaps provides Ciphr with plausible deniability. If resellers want to have something to sell, they’ll need to take direct control of device management to ensure end users don’t install apps that might compromise security as well as controlling distribution of software updates and other necessities of cell phone service.

While this move may have ultimately provided Ciphr with plausible deniability when the feds came knocking, it immediately appears it won’t be profitable for Ciphr. The offloading of device management to resellers appears to have severely harmed reseller desire for Ciphr phones, as Joseph Cox notes in his follow-up article.

Ciphr will cease operations at the end of the month, according to the message. The reason was that not enough resellers took up Ciphr on its plan to shift the responsibility for Mobile Device Management (MDM) away from the company itself to individual resellers.

Resellers appeared to enjoy their previous relationship with Ciphr, which allowed them to profit heavily from a demanding, but limited market. That relationship allowed Ciphr to absorb the legal liability while third parties cashed checks. Check cashing is still an option, but cashing checks now means a possible increase in legal liability. Obviously, Ciphr’s biggest resellers aren’t on board with assuming additional legal risk.

Since there’s no interest from downstream retailers in running their own device management systems, Ciphr could either sell directly to customers it has always tried to distance itself from or call it a day. It chose the latter option, which will likely end up being far less harmful to its profits than dealing with the outcome of raids, arrests, and criminal charges that may have been the end result of its continued existence.

And while it may be easy to cheer on the demise of another company that apparently catered to criminals, let’s not forget every failure by device manufacturers like this one make it far easier for government entities to (falsely) claim secure devices and end-to-end encryption only benefit criminals. For that reason alone, we should be concerned about companies like these that shut down rather than offer products that could possibly fend off sustained attacks by state-sponsored hackers and make normal surveillance tools irrelevant.

Filed Under: criminals, encrypted phones, encryption Companies: ciphr

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In July of 1995, Time Magazine published one of its most regrettable stories ever. The cover just read “CYBERPORN” with the subhead reading: “EXCLUSIVE A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” The author of that piece, Philip Elmer-Dewitt later admitted that it was his “worst” story “by far.”

The “new study” was from a grad student named Marty Rimm, and… was not good. The methodology was quickly ripped to shreds. Wired basically put together an entire issue’s worth of stories debunking it. Mike Godwin tore the entire study apart noting that it was “so outrageously flawed and overreaching that you can’t miss the flaws even on a cursory first reading.” Professors Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak absolutely destroyed Time Magazine for the reporting around the study. And Brock Meeks did an analysis of how Rimm and his colleagues were able to fool so many people. Meeks also discovered that Rimm “was recycling his survey data for use in a marketing how-to book called The Pornographer’s Handbook: How to Exploit Women, Dupe Men, & Make Lots of Money.” Eventually, Rimm was called “The Barnum of Cyberporn.”

And yet… he got his Time Magazine cover.

And, that cover resulted in a huge moral panic over porn online. And that huge moral panic over porn online helped give Senator James Exon the ammunition he needed to convince others in Congress to support his Communications Decency Act as a way to clean up all that smut from the internet. (You may recognize the name of the Communications Decency Act from “Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act” or just “Section 230,” but that was actually a different bill—the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act—that was written as an alternative to Exon’s CDA, but because Congress is gonna Congress, the two bills were simply attached to one another and passed together.)

Senator Exon, apparently inspired by the Time Magazine story, began downloading and printing out all of the porn he found on the internet and put it in a binder—referred to as Exon’s little blue book—to show other Senators and convince them to pass his CDA bill to stop the porn that he believed was polluting the minds of children. He succeeded.

The following year, the Supreme Court threw out the entirety of Exon’s CDA (leaving just Section 230, which was the IFFEA) in the Reno v. ACLU decision. As Justice Stevens wrote in the majority decision:

In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve.

It is true that we have repeatedly recognized the governmental interest in protecting children from harmful materials. See Ginsberg, 390 U. S., at 639; Pacifica, 438 U. S., at 749. But that interest does not justify an unnecessarily broad suppression of speech addressed to adults. As we have explained, the Government may not “reduc[e] the adult population . . . to . . . only what is fit for children.” Denver, 518 U. S., at 759 (internal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Sable, 492 U. S., at 128).40 “[R]egardless of the strength of the government’s interest” in protecting children, “[t]he level of discourse reaching a mailbox simply cannot be limited to that which would be suitable for a sandbox.” Bolger v. Youngs Drug Products Corp., 463 U. S. 60, 74–75 (1983).

Stevens, in particular, called out as burdensome the idea that speech should be suppressed if a minor might somehow come across speech intended for adults.

Given the size of the potential audience for most messages, in the absence of a viable age verification process, the sender must be charged with knowing that one or more minors will likely view it. Knowledge that, for instance, one or more members of a 100-person chat group will be a minor—and therefore that it would be a crime to send the group an indecent message—would surely burden communication among adults.

He also noted that it would be “prohibitively expensive” for websites to verify the age of visitors. It also calls out undefined terms that can “cover large amounts of non-pornographic material with serious educational or other value.”

I raise all of this history to note that California’s recently passed bill, AB 2273, the Age Appropriate Design Act has basically every one of those things that the Supreme Court called out in the Reno decision. Here, let’s rewrite just some of the Reno decision for clarity. I did not need to change much at all:

In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the [AADC] effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve.

Knowing that, for instance, some minors are likely to access a website—and therefore create liability for the website—would surely burden communication among adults.

The entire premise of AB 2273 is strikingly similar to the premise behind Exon’s CDA. Rather than a sketchy, easily debunked (but massively hyped up) research report from a grad student, we have a documentary from a British baroness/Hollywood filmmaker, which she insists proved to her that online services were dangerous for teens. The baroness now has made it her life’s mission to basically wipe out any adult part of the internet in the belief that it all needs to be safe for kids. Not based on any actual data, of course, but rather her strong feelings that the internet is bad. She’s produced a whole report about why spying on users to determine their age is a good thing. And she is a major backer of the bill in California.

She might not have a little blue book — and her laws may not have the same level of criminal liability that Exon’s did, but the general concept is the same.

You start with a moral panic about “the kids online.” Note that data will generally be missing. You just need a few out-of-context anecdotes to drum up fear and concern. Then, you insist that “Silicon Valley is against you” despite the fact that Silicon Valley has almost entirely stayed quiet in fighting these bills, because none of them want the inevitable NY Times headline about how they’re fighting back against this nice baroness filmmaker who just wants to protect the children.

But the overall argument is the same. There is some content online that is inappropriate for children, and we cannot rest until that is all gone, and the entire internet is safe for kids — even if that wipes out all sorts of useful content and services for adults, and creates a ton of unintended consequences. But, I’m sure we’ll get headline after headline about how we’ve saved the children.

So, if Governor Gavin Newsom decides to go forward and sign the bill into law, think of just how much taxpayer money is going to get wasted in court, for the courts to just point to Reno v. ACLU and point out that this law is way too burdensome and full of 1st Amendment problems.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, ab 2273, age appropriate design code, baroness beeban kidron, free speech, moral panic

We’re just going to keep getting kids killed in America. We’ll never stop throwing money in the direction of the problem, but not directly at the problem. Nothing gets safer. It just gets more budget line items.

The problem with school shootings is uniquely American. The proposed solutions — and the industry that has sprung up to address the problem — are simply demand creating supply. We have to stop shootings in schools. We just don’t think the problem is the easy availability of guns.

So there’s a market — one that has been filled by public and private entities. Some public entities think training and expertise is the solution and spend their time terrorizing students and teachers in hopes that they’ll respond with slightly less terror when an actual shooting is occurring. These same entities also spend public money training law enforcement to respond quickly to reported shootings, only to see less than ideal results when this training is put to use.

More public money buys tech that is supposed to keep the problem at bay. Students are routinely subjected to round-the-clock surveillance that is far more than cameras in schools. It also includes social media surveillance, unfettered access to student mental health records, and exploitation of loopholes in student privacy laws.

Tech isn’t solving the problem. Schools are using ShotSpotter-esque tech to detect gunshots. Others are utilizing mics to “detect aggression” — something that manifests as false positives for slammed locker doors, coughing, and — in tests performed by researchers — clips of comedian Gilbert Gottfried.

Now, a company is bringing AI into the mix, promising a high-tech solution to gun violence in schools. Evolv has been aggressively marketing its “AI-based weapons screening system” to schools. Schools, unfortunately, have been spending money on this unproven tech. The company has pretty decent copywriters. It does not, however, have much scientific evidence on hand to back its claims about weapon detection.

Joseph Cox has public records receipts for Motherboard. His report shows the tradeoff of privacy for safety isn’t working out. Students are definitely losing whatever privacy they have left when entering schools using Evolv systems. What they aren’t getting in return is any additional safety. Emails from administrators of schools where Evolv is installed depict rollouts of the tech as catastrophic failures.

On the ground, the reality of deploying Evolv scanners is very different than marketing materials suggest. Some school administrators are reporting that the scanners have caused “chaos”—failing to detect common handguns at commonly-used sensitivity settings, mistaking everyday school items for deadly weapons, and failing to deliver on the company’s promise of frictionless school security.

“Today was probably the least safe day,” one principal observed the day scanners were deployed at her school, because the machines were triggering false alarms and requiring manual searches on “almost every child as they walked through” monopolizing the attention of safety officers who would otherwise be monitoring the halls and other entrances.

The rollout in the Charlotte Mecklenburg School District was a response to twenty-three guns being found on its 180 campuses during the first four months of the 2021 school year. The district claimed Evolv was instrumental in dropping this number to only seven weapons during the rest of the year. But those actually in the schools saw something else — a failure one principal referred to as a “cluster[fuck].”

The purchase and deployment took place despite noted concerns from district administrators, who informed Evolv they were able to bring a pistol into a school with the machine set to the default sensitivity. Promises of “line-free” convenient scanning were immediately proven false. The only suggestion that security experts had was for students to arrive earlier. As the system failed again and again, Evolv was somehow still included in district email chains as educators and administrators sought advice on how to respond to staff concerns and media questions.

Evolv doesn’t appear to like the media much, especially when its AI is being questioned. In response to Motherboard’s inquiries about the multiple failures detailed in district emails, Evolv suggested the site was endangering students simply by publishing this article.

“Our note to you, as a reporter doing your job: by publicly communicating detailed information on sensitivity settings, protocols and processes puts students and educators at risk and endangers lives,” said Evolv Chief Marketing Officer Dana Loof, in a statement sent to Motherboard. 

But this reporting doesn’t make students less safe. It appears Evolv’s AI is doing most of that work itself.

Although phones and keys—menaces to traditional metal detectors—do not set off Evolv scanners, Spartansburg did report “3-ring binders do hit it a lot. Laptops will hit.” The school also reported that about 25 percent of students have to be searched manually using the “C” setting—the one that doesn’t detect a Glock pistol. Turning up the sensitivity setting would require even more students to be manually searched. 

The system is creating new problems, as detailed in one high school principal’s email:

Currently, the reality is that ‘weapons of mass instruction’ set off almost every child as they walk through. If you have multiple binders or spiral notebooks in your bag then it lights up and we must search. The solve I was given was literally to ask kids not to bring so many binders. Seriously?

False positives means tying up more personnel security with searches at entrances, leaving hallways and offices unmanned. And if there are false positives, there are bound to false negatives, especially when schools lower sensitivity settings after too many false positives.

And it’s not like these problems aren’t well-documented. Motherboard links to IPVM reports on Evolv’s weapons detection AI that utilized previously publicly available Evolv instruction manuals. However, Evolv pulled these documents from its site in response to questions from IVPM, again suggesting any reporting on Evolv’s tech endangered the public.

These are not the actions of a company that has confidence in its own product. But its desire to hide information from journalists hasn’t stopped it from presenting itself as a gun-detection solution for multiple public places, including schools. The reality of Evolv’s AI seems to be trailing far behind the rosier picture painted by its sales pitches. Continuing to deny the reality of the situation is going to get students killed.

Filed Under: gun detection ai, guns, privacy, school shootings, schools, surveillance Companies: evolv

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