The Federal Trade Commission has entered a settlement with self-styled “weapon detection” company Evolv, to resolve the FTC’s claim that the company “knowingly” and repeatedly” engaged in “unlawful” acts of misleading claims about their technology. Essentially, Evolv’s technology, which is in schools, subways, and stadiums, does far less than they’ve been claiming.
The FTC alleged in their complaint that despite the lofty claims made by Evolv, the technology is fundamentally no different from a metal detector: “The company has insisted publicly and repeatedly that Express is a ‘weapons detection’ system and not a ‘metal detector.’ This representation is solely a marketing distinction, in that the only things that Express scanners detect are metallic and its alarms can be set off by metallic objects that are not weapons.” A typical contract for Evolv costs tens of thousands of dollars per year—five times the cost of traditional metal detectors. One district in Kentucky spent $17 million to outfit its schools with the software.
The settlement requires notice, to the many schools which use this technology to keep weapons out of classrooms, that they are allowed to cancel their contracts. It also blocks the company from making any representations about their technology’s:
The company also is prohibited from making statements regarding:
If the company can’t say these things anymore…then what do they even have left to sell?
There’s a reason so many people accuse artificial intelligence of being “snake oil.” Time and again, a company takes public data in order to power “AI” surveillance, only for taxpayers to learn it does no such thing. “Just walk out” stores actually required people watching you on camera to determine what you purchased. Gunshot detection software that relies on a combination of artificial intelligence and human “acoustic experts” to purportedly identify and locate gunshots “rarely produces evidence of a gun-related crime.” There’s a lot of well-justified suspicion about what’s really going on within the black box of corporate secrecy in which artificial intelligence so often operates.
Even when artificial intelligence used by the government isn’t “snake oil,” it often does more harm than good. AI systems can introduce or exacerbate harmful biases that have massive negative impacts on people’s lives. AI systems have been implicated with falsely accusing people of welfare fraud, increasing racial bias in jail sentencing as well as policing and crime prediction, and falsely identifying people as suspects based on facial recognition.
Now, the politicians, schools, police departments, and private venues have been duped again. This time, by Evolv, a company which purports to sell “weapon detection technology” which they claimed would use AI to scan people entering a stadium, school, or museum and theoretically alert authorities if it recognizes the shape of a weapon on a person.
Even before the new FTC action, there was indication that this technology was not an effective solution to weapon-based violence. From July to October, New York City rolled out a trial of Evolv technology in 20 subway systems in an attempt to keep people from bringing weapons on to the transit system. Out of 2,749 scans there were 118 false positives. Twelve knives and no guns were recovered.
Make no mistake, false positives are dangerous. Falsely telling officers to expect an armed individual is a recipe for an unarmed person to be injured or even killed.
Cities, performance venues, schools, and transit systems are understandably eager to do something about violence–but throwing money at the problem by buying unproven technology is not the answer and actually takes away resources and funding from more proven and systematic approaches. We applaud the FTC for standing up to the lucrative security theater technology industry.
Deep-pocketed individuals and corporations have been turning to civil lawsuits to silence their opponents. These Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPPs, aren’t designed to win on the merits, but rather to harass journalists, activists, and consumers into silence by suing them over their protected speech.
Now there’s a bill in Congress that will allow speakers targeted by SLAPPs to fight back, by getting the lawsuits quickly thrown out of federal court, and allow for SLAPP victims to get their legal fees back. The Free Speech Protection Act, H.R. 10310, sponsored by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA), will protect people from getting sued just for exercising their constitutional rights.