Cofounder at Phaselab (https://phaselab.co)
Former product/exec at Cortico, Speakable, Chartbeat. Board member at @wxyc. Spent some time at WFMU, Internet Archive. Into thru-hiking.
| Website | https://dvd.qa |
| https://twitter.com/dvd | |
| Location | Chapel Hill, NC |
This email from the CEO of Carta is a crazy self-own. No I didn't hear about the upsetting allegations against your company, but I guess I'll just delete this email and move on, as instructed?
To amplify one of my colleagues, "anything less than an apology is insane".
Finally there’s the data rights.
Shotspotter is allowed to sell Durham’s gunshot data to basically anyone except journalists… and in order to protect their right to do this, the city IS NOT ALLOWED to make that data available to the public.
Seems not ideal considering it is our money that is paying for the data collection and processing.
Speaking of accountability, there isn’t much here.
What happens when Shotspotter doesn’t meet these low standards? Well Durham gets a small discount on their next year of service (if they choose to renew)!
But that’s only if Shotspotter significantly misses on 2 of the 3 SLAs, so as long as they keep their support staff on their toes and their website online the 90% detection thing doesn’t even really matter.
The first says they’ll detect 90% of actual gunshot events. The second says that 90% of detections will be reviewed by a human within a minute of their detection.
The third is standard for any SaaS product and promises three 9’s of uptime, or that their system is allowed to be unavailable (due to unplanned technical issues) for up to 9 hours a year.
Notably absent here is any kind of promise about limiting false positives.
First, some general info.
Here’s a map of the area that will be monitored by Shotspotter. The town has signed up for a year long trial, with a total cost to the town being just under $200k.
