Donald Maye: One of the more enlightening pieces of information that we learned was from a school board meeting where an Evolv employee was describing the trade off of settings as it relates to Chromebooks and guns. And what he stated was, he goes, if you go on setting C, which is a lower sensitivity setting, he goes, you won’t alert on Chromebooks. However, you might miss certain guns. Then he says it’s a difficult give and take. And he specifically noted subcompact handguns. And so for me, I heard it. I go, well, that’s, that is a difficult give and take. If you’re a school you’re having to decide whether or not I wanna do the work around where, where I’m asking people and students to hold up their Chromebook or go to a lower sensitivity setting and run the risk of someone, you know, not alerting on a gun.
Jennifer: And Donald Maye says it’s not clear what variables the algorithm weighs when that sensitivity is adjusted.
And this decision between efficiency and accuracy… one with potentially devastating consequences… is left up to the people using the device, which in this case, might fall to a mix of volunteers from the teaching staff.
Donald Maye: Being presented information and not having the ability to reliably dissect it and understand it. And I think that disconnect in information creates an imbalance of power between the buyers and end users and the people who are selling it. And that can lead to a lot of problems.
Jennifer: And what he’s describing… extends well beyond this topic… because the world is becoming ever more technical, and with it, that information imbalance just keeps on getting wider.
It’s a bit like looking under the hood of a car. In the past drivers could understand the basic mechanics of how it all worked. Not so much anymore. And back to that laptop problem… making the system less sensitive could miss some weapons… but on the other hand, alarms going off all day are likely to be ignored.
Mike Ellenbogen: Yeah. It’s a, it’s a real challenge within the security domain, right? Whether it’s physical or cyber, you know, we call it alert fatigue.
Jennifer: Mike Ellenbogen… is the cofounder of Evolv
