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Comment by Vaslo | Hacker News Reader

Oh man the privacy folks are gonna hammer this comment hard.

I'm a huge privacy advocate but it makes some sense. If the police and government is corrupt and using this tech, creating a non-corrupt open-source community driven alternative to combat the corruption is probably a net win despite the privacy issues. The real win is to destroy the Police surveillance state and tech but we as a people (the US) seem incapable of real policing change. :(

I don’t think people firing guns have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Voluntarily submitting cellphone data is already used for several things like traffic congestion via Waze and related apps.

I am vary pro privacy, but as long as it’s voluntary I don’t have an issue with this.

It would depend strongly on whether the phone is analyzing the data from the mic and reporting to a server "possible gunshot heard, GPS coords X,Y, volume-level 60%, gunshot-like-score 75%" or whether the phone is sending raw recordings from the mic to a server and trusting that the server is only checking them for gunshot sound (not, say, saving your private conversations).

And of course it's difficult for the average user of an app to tell the difference, or even for a tech savvy user to tell without investing some time and effort.

Yes hopefully all the analysis would happen on device but that limits anything like a google home/alexa. Last I looked neither device allowed processing on device.

I am going to assume significant processing would need to happen on the device or your uploading audio 24/7 which would have heavy bandwidth implications. I don’t think uploading individual sub 2 second sound clips with time stamps is significant from a privacy standpoint, but it might be in the middle of a long gunfight.

I'd not put that on my primary device either, maybe leave a spare plugged in near an open window, etc

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