Taser Seeking To Lock Down Body Camera Market With 'Free' Camera Offer To Law Enforcement Agencies

from the locked-in/locked-out dept

Taser -- manufacturer of law enforcement's favorite electronic battle weapon and the "I'm not a doctor but I play one in courtroom proceedings" creator of arrestee-specific medical condition "excited delirium" -- is branching out and (sort of) rebranding.

It's not like Taser doesn't have the less-lethal market sewn up. Its titular device is in the latter stages of genericide -- a catch-all term for any sort of stun gun. It's been busy building a new market: law enforcement body cameras. Under the name Axon, Taser has introduced a number of body-worn cameras, some of them with more advanced feature sets that tie their activation to weapon deployment by officers.

Now, Axon is hoping to increase its dominance of the body camera market. Its latest move is to offer free cameras and footage storage to any law enforcement agency that requests it. The pay-nothing-now offer lasts for a year. Once the offer expires, agencies are free to look elsewhere for cameras.

But will they? It seems unlikely. Axon claims it will make it easy to migrate stored recordings from its Evidence.com access platform, but data migration of this type is easier said than done. Add to that the fact that this is no ordinary data. It includes footage needed as evidence in criminal trials, etc. Sticking to a system officers and supervisors are already used to would seem like the most prudent move, even if it's not the most affordable option.

Axon has gathered a lot of positive press over the past few days. The offer allows cash-strapped law enforcement agencies the opportunity to get into the accountability and transparency business with no initial investment. But this push to deploy "free*" cameras isn't really about cameras. Matt Stroud -- who has tracked Taser/Axon for years via FOIA requests -- points out at The Daily Dot that this business model is nothing new. Axon has been giving away cameras for a few years now. The real moneymaker is access, storage and licensing.

Stroud's FOIA work has uncovered multiple cases where agencies have received free cameras. Axon is only charging agencies for Evidence.com usage. Albuquerque's police department received $500,000 worth of cameras for free. But it's paying $223,000 a year just for access to Evidence.com. Storage provided by Axon also comes at a premium: $1.50/GB. More cameras means more storage, which means this part of the revenue stream will just keep growing. On top of that, there's a yearly licensing fee that increases with the number of cameras in use.

It's an interesting approach: one that gives away the finite (cameras) but charges a premium for the infinite (licensing, access, storage). But here's the actual insidiousness of the deals Axon's making:

In an email, Utility’s CEO, Ted Davis, told me that Axon’s announcement was a “‘Venus Flytrap’ marketing campaign” because it was designed to lure police departments into an Axon contract for the “free” bodycams, only to then overwhelm those departments with storage and licensing fees later on. “The campaign targets an unsophisticated buyer, [but] most larger departments will not fall for this ploy,” Davis wrote. “After all, all of the competitive bidding for body cameras incorporate a total cost of ownership over a five-year or longer lifecycle. Sophisticated buyers wisely measure the cost vs the capability of the product offering, and determine the best fit for the need.”

Yes, law enforcement agencies know they're in for a hard sell once the free trial expires. No one would expect anything less.What this free offer does is undercut the competitive bidding process. This process is supposed to keep governments from ending up locked in to uncompetitive deals. But how many cash-strapped governments will turn down "free*" cameras for their cops? Once cops are hooked on Evidence.com, opening the process to an actually competitive process means possibly putting the saved footage at risk. At best, it will be stored locally by departments while fielding bids for cameras/storage/access. At worst, the footage will be almost-useless: a bunch of unsearchable files, no longer organized, sorted, or tagged.

If Axon distributes enough of these free cameras, competitors will be driven from the market. And when the competition exits, all the ancillary costs will increase, perhaps exponentially. Governments will no longer have the option to take their business elsewhere. An open bidding process preserves options. Accepting Axon's literally unbidden offer does a whole lot of damage to that process. Agencies may not pay now, but they'll be paying plenty later.

Filed Under: body cameras, police, service fees, surveillance
Companies: axon, taser

AT&T Fined For Turning A Blind Eye As Drug Dealers Ripped Off Its Customers

from the telecom-free-for-all dept

While Comcast gets the lion's share of the public's loathing, there's an argument to be made for AT&T actually being a worse company. Think Comcast, but with slower broadband speeds, more dubious executive ethics, and an even greater disdain for its paying customers. In just the last few years AT&T has been: fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired; fined $10.4 million for ripping off a program for low-income families; and fined $105 million for helping "crammers" by intentionally making such bogus charges more difficult to see on customer bills.

In every instance AT&T was either busy ripping off customers directly, or turning a blind eye to fraud aimed directly at AT&T customers -- because in most instances AT&T got a cut of the profits.

Fast forward to this week, when the FCC announced it would be fining AT&T another $7.7 million (pdf), this time for actively helping drug dealers rip off paying AT&T customers. According to the full FCC order (pdf), AT&T turned a blind eye to two bogus Cleveland companies, Discount Directory, Inc. (DDI) and Enhanced Telecommunications Services (ETS), which had been billing AT&T phone customers $9 per month for a "directory assistance service" that didn't actually exist. These bogus companies were originally only uncovered during a DEA drug investigation:

"In May 2015, while investigating the Companies’ principals for drug-related crimes and money laundering, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration uncovered that DDI and ETS were sham operations that never provided any directory assistance service to the customers billed by AT&T. The Companies’ principals told law enforcement that they submitted fake service charges for thousands of AT&T customers (mostly small businesses) over a multiyear period."

The complaint proceeds to suggest that AT&T was aware of these charges (as with previous cramming settlements), but turned a blind eye because it took a cut of each fraudulent charge:

"Although it bore ultimate responsibility for the charges placed on its customers’ bills, AT&T never required proof from the Companies that they obtained customer authorizations to be billed for their service and the record shows that the Companies never obtained any such customer authorizations. In addition, AT&T ignored a number of red flags that the charges were unauthorized, including thousands of charges submitted by the Companies for nonexistent, disconnected, or otherwise “unbillable” accounts."

As per the settlement, AT&T will issue $6,800,000 in refunds to all current and former consumers charged for the sham directory assistance service, and a $950,000 fine to the U.S. Treasury. AT&T's also been forced to cease billing for nearly all third-party products and services for wireline customers (now that few use wireline anyway), adopt policies requiring express informed consumer consent before such charges can be reapplied, and revise its billing systems so that such charges are easier to find.

While these fines are puny and belated, keep in mind that until the last few years regulators did little to nothing whatsoever to hold larger telecom companies accountable for their role in perpetuating that kind of fraud -- making this a step up from the apathy of decades' past. Still, AT&T consistently gets to pay settlements that are likely only a small fraction of the money collected over the years, its lawyers and accountants already busy cooking up the fraudulent efforts we'll surely get to read about in 2022.

Filed Under: cramming, drug dealers, fcc, fines, service fees
Companies: at&t

Ticketmaster Says People Don't Like Service Fees Because We Don't Understand Them

from the I-don't-think-that's-it... dept

If you follow the music business, you probably already know about or follow Ticketmaster boss Irving Azoff's Twitter feed, which he kicked off earlier this month by calling two different reporters "jerks," and generally jousting with some of his critics. He went quiet for a bit, but caused a bit of a stir over the weekend by announcing (sort of) that Ticketmaster had "full disclosure pricing." Considering just how much hatred there is towards Ticketmaster's "service charges," this certainly picked up some attention.

The only problem? While the tickets Azoff pointed to highlighted prices that included fees (amusingly, the fees on the cheapest ticket markup the official ticket price by a whopping 50%) some quickly discovered that this wasn't, at all, what they expected. That's because despite the implication that these prices now showed you full fees, some noticed another $6.50 fee tacked on at the end. After people pointed that out, Azoff again responded by claiming that Ticketmaster simply can't show you all the fees until it knows how many tickets are being bought and what the shipping method is.

A few hours later, Ticketmaster launched a blog, where the first post tries to delve into this by suggesting that the problem isn't the fees, it's that you don't understand the fees. Yeah, really. This is incredibly tone deaf on Ticketmaster's part. People understand fees just fine. As Eliot Van Buskirk at Wired points out "each dollar that comes out of their wallets is identical." No one cares that Ticketmaster has to pay various third parties, such as "promoters, venues, teams, artists" out of those fees.

Years ago, we discussed a nearly identical situation with phone bills, showing how people were incredibly annoyed with massive unexplained fees, and the telcos insisted they were necessary to "recoup costs." But, as we pointed out, in most businesses you recoup the costs in the list price and don't break out fees. Otherwise, we'd have lots of companies doing this sort of crap: Want a pizza pie? It's just $3, but there's a $3.50 "crust fee," a $9.38 "oven fee," a $4.50 "service fee," and a $2.18 "cleanup fee." Plus tax.

That, of course, is ridiculous and would piss people off -- just as telco fees do and just as Ticketmaster's fees do. If Ticketmaster wanted to make people happy it would stop telling people they need to be better educated about fees -- a subject they don't care about -- and just offer straight up, all-in, pricing. If Ticketmaster has to pay a bit more to some third party because of this, well, why not figure out a way to bake that into the overall price. It's called forecasting, and most other businesses predict their cost of goods sold using various forecasting methods, and it seems rather silly that Ticketmaster apparently cannot.

Filed Under: concerts, convenience fees, fees, irving azoff, live, service fees
Companies: ticketmaster

Bob Dylan Gets Around Service Fees & Scalpers With A Simple Plan: Pay Cash At The Door

from the that's-one-way... dept

In our recent post about musician Joe Pug and other artists looking to get away from ridiculous service fees on tickets, commenter berick pointed out that Bob Dylan has come up with an interesting strategy to not just get around service fees, but scalpers as well: no pre-bought tickets to the show, just pay cash at the door:

When Bob Dylan says his just-announced, surprise show at the Warfield in San Francisco next Wednesday, August 25 costs $60, he means it costs $60 -- no service charges. No scalpers. No secondary market. In fact, perhaps as an effort to combat all complaints about the ticketing industry at large, there simply won't be any advance tickets to the show. Fans will pay $60 -- cash only -- on their way inside the venue, and that's that.

Of course, the downside to this is that if too many people show up (a decent possibility) you might not get in at all... Still, it's interesting to see how musicians are trying to get around activities that are seen as anti-consumer when it comes to pricing live shows.

Filed Under: bob dylan, cash, scalping, service fees, tickets