This happens apparently already. A few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27959755
The EFF has already made commentary on this [0], and basically my understanding is that this technology is being advertised and positioned as "expert", and that there is deep science behind it, but in fact it's mostly interpretive, and ultimately state prosecution simply make fanciful deductions based off the results and omit sometimes very important facts.
I think that it is incredibly important that as law enforcement continues to build technology that is only used for prosecution purposes, this technology is heavily public and auditable, as at least with the above, it's quite clear that law enforcement has not been handling the technology responsibly. My personal take is that the technology is only available to those interested in a prosecution, not those you may be saved by it.
[0] https://www.eff.org/pages/gunshot-detection
Offtop with regards to your site:
- As I get it, it's an NFT-esque system, yes?
- For your signup, it would be useful to maybe do the verification code after the age verification has already been done, or at least make it clear that the verification part needs to be done. I found it when I couldn't click "Continue", but the button was kind of in a blind spot for me
- Also, maybe do verification after you've confirmed age already on a separate screen so that 100% any email you collect there was collected under the indication from the user that they were older than 18 as per your requirements in the EULA
- The download button for the test asset I uploaded, or doesn't seem to do anything really.
- Edit cause click submit too soon: You might want to include a visual indicator on your copy to clipboard buttons that it triggered successfully
- I'm not quite sure why you need geographical information to make an account; as I get it, no money is transacted so you don't have an obligation for much user data
- We store the asset ID, additional metadata, and associated checksum in our datastore (for reliability, scalability, and performance reasons). We then essentially mint an NFT with a URI to a JSON object stored in IPFS with a privacy-respecting minimal copy of the above as additional protection against our datastore being called into question. Eventually it may be 100% blockchain-something based but it's such a rapidly evolving space there's no clear "perfect" solution (just yet).
- The age verification and jurisdiction stuff are related to COPPA in the United States (and similar in other jurisdictions). It's my first time dealing with it and what we have in place will evolve but EULA or otherwise I don't mind being perhaps a little more cautious on this front until I can get a better understanding of all the issues at play. In any case we could do a much better job explaining why we (probably? might?) need date of birth and country.
- Overall I'm not thrilled with the signup and onboarding process and it's towards the top of the list for something we need to spend some quality time on.
- I'll have to look into the download button issue (not sure how we missed that).
- Great point on the copy to clipboard buttons!
Thanks again for taking a look and providing feedback, I submitted to Show HN[0]two weeks ago but as you can see it never got any traction. Feedback like yours was exactly what I was hoping to get. Still trying to figure out what happened with our Show HN but that's a bigger issue.
Unfortunately it's probably going to take many more multiple TB losses (resulting in failed prosecutions) for them to take this seriously with digital evidence as well.
One of the things I find nontechnical people tend to fail to understand is the importance of organizing and cleaning up data. Often when we are running out of space, I get asked why we can't just buy another hard drive at Best Buy for $50.
Then when people do clean up their data, they don't understand file space. They'll spend hours cleaning up old Word documents, but not touch the decade-old AVI video files which could at least be stored in a better format.
Ask a government entity to buy a SAN, they complain. Ask them to buy a backup storage appliance, they ask why we need another SAN. And then in five years, they ask why you need another SAN if you bought one five years ago...
With physical evidence this has evolved to a pretty tight system where evidence is tracked, sealed, and secured from collection to trial with physical security - relatively secure tamper proof seals, fairly strict chain of custody, logging, etc.
In further conversations with them I was surprised to learn there is essentially nothing when it comes to digital evidence security, of which there is increasingly more and more of (of course). Everything from crime scene photos to phone dumps, entire hard drives, police body cam footage, etc. There is virtually nothing in place to track the chain of custody, detect potential evidence tampering, etc for this evidence.
I'm convinced that if there were a high-profile case today with a modern legal "Dream Team" the lack of these systems for digital evidence verification would be front and center from an expert (and resource rich) defense. On the other side of the aisle, what's to stop the prosecution from actual digital evidence tampering?
This was actually one of the applications that provided the genesis for my startup Tovera[1]. It's still in very early stages but I'm hoping we can make some inroads in law enforcement as I think it has real potential to address the digital evidence verification issue and make for a more transparent and secure justice system (which both sides of the process should value). It remains to be seen if they actually do.
[0] https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2014/06/08/oj-simpson-case-...
[1] https://tovera.com