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Comment by jkestner | Hacker News Reader

Note that Flock says it can identify a car by physical characteristics from dents to bumper stickers.

Having worked with the result of prior generations (circa 2010) of algorithms for that sort of thing in the radar spectrum (I was not privy to the actual algorithms that underpinned it all) I suspect accuracy drops off exponentially once you get away from text based stuff and flagrant body differences (missing mirror, aftermarket spoiler, etc).

Absolutely they can. Vehicle panel colors, wheel rims, roofrack, tow hitch, bumper stickers, damage all factor into their vehicle fingerprinting.

And once they've got a real license plate for the vehicle, all the historical information for that vehicle fingerprint's activities are now linked.

I routinely add/remove many of those things so I'm not sure how reliable they are.

Like I alternate between hitch/no hitch/bike rack, add/remove roof rack (it hurts mileage and is easy to swap), swap between my summer and winter rims+tires, and rotating through a set of magnetic bumper stickers would be trivial.

I'm guessing license plate takes precedence over all those things. On the other hand, Flock hasn't shown any particular competence, and is happy to flag a bunch of false positives (look at all those criminals!).

> and is happy to flag a bunch of false positives (look at all those criminals!).

Garrett has explicitly said he'd prefer a false positive to a false negative (very dystopian, no?) given his goal of "zero crime, powered by Brawndo, I mean Flock".

So you’re in the < 1% they can’t accurately and reliably fingerprint.

On the whole, no big deal.

Note that Flock has incorrectly identified several vehicles as "suspects" to police during investigations.

Flock has two obligations. Sell equipment to police. Avoid freaking the public out.

Their statements are almost certainly not reliable.

You properly could identify cars uniquely by the sound they make. If not now then soon.

My dog could do this 10 years ago. 2 miles away through the canyon she knew exactly who would be showing up in 10 minutes. And it's a popular canyon.

I can identify the family wagon we had growing up from the door slamming.

Always makes me smile when I hear it across a parking lot.

"The whistlers go WOOOOO"

If Shot Spotter is bad at merely identifying the source of a gunshot, I'm not going to trust our security tech bros to cut through all the environmental noise and provide trustworthy identification among 10,000 different Teslas.

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