Another Reason Not To Raise Your Voice In Public

from the they-can-hear-you dept

We’ve been pretty amazed at all the innovation in surveillance technology lately. Those grainy videos from convenience stores are rapidly becoming ancient history. The most exciting advances in technologies that can identify certain types of behavior, like violence or just plain old suspiciousness. The latest is some acoustic technology that can identify aggression in somebody’s voice. So police can be alerted if it sounds like a fight is about to break out in a store or on the street. One of the big problems with this type of thing is the possibility for false positives. Actions that aren’t violent or aggressive may from time to time be identified as such. And if there are too many, it ruins the usefulness of the technology. But perhaps by rolling these technologies together, law enforcement could improve their confidence as each one could confirm what’s being picked up on the others. As for the other big problem, the continued erosion of privacy, it doesn’t look like any help is on the way.


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Comments on “Another Reason Not To Raise Your Voice In Public”

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15 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

Just ’cause it’s watching you, doesn’t necessarily mean your privacy is being invaded.
If you’re out in public, someone could be watching you, listening in on your conversations anyway. But even beyond that, technology has one interesting ability people just don’t always have: the ability to forget on demand.
Furthermore, the process has to be fully automated, or no one will respond, simply because there’s not enough time and/or money.

Nobody Special says:

agression is against the law?

The problem I see is to alert Police any time aggression or violence in the voice is detected. Hello, it is not a crime to be voice aggression. And as long as you don’t threaten someone you can have violence in your voice.

The real problem is thus: this is an attempt to regulate behavior before it happens. And while there is plenty to be said about watching those who are headed in the direction of trouble, police are not the ones to be involved at the sound of trouble.

Multi tasking says:

Why don’t they couple that with facial recognition, eye movement and hand gestures. Flipping someone off on the freeway it triggers the satelite to contact you via cell phone (since everyone has one) If you don’t comply, they shut off your phone service and your Sirius satellite radio until you attend anger management. I’ll just die without my cell phone because I love to talk, and put on my make up listen to Howard Stern and drive with my knee at the same time.

Prometheum says:

Re: Re:

So the GOVERNMENT gets to just shut off cell phone and radio service to whomever it wishes if they’re too angry? Or did Verizon and Sirius suddenly get really, really altruistic and decide that they can’t have angry customers, even if they keep the money flowing to their pockets? Even though it’ll affect the type of asshole you described, that’s still against basic privacy rights, and is just paving the path to Big Brother more and more.

I’d be really freaked out if they coupled it with facial recognition. Start storing the faces of people who seem to be pissed off and schedule them for “anger management”? That’s straight out of Orwell.

Rodney R Rollins says:

Another Reason Not To Raise Your Voice In Public

This weekend in New York a man was shot to death and two others wounded, one critically in a hail of at least fifty bullets because, according to our police commissioner the officers thought they over heard something about a gun… They were unarmed… We can all do without this device… By the way the dead man was scheduled to be married this past Saturday…

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