5 ms·

Cops Have a Database of 117M Faces

88 points by cpymchn 10y ago

_Marak_ 10y ago
Edit: Missed the obvious source in the article. Point redacted.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  No. FTA: law enforcement in more than half of all states can search against the trove of photos stored for IDs like drivers’ licenses. Getting that data from Facebook is way more complicated, fraught with legal problems and lower quality than all of the systems that already exist in the legal system between all of the sources that utilize photo id: drivers license, passport etc
  - _Marak_ 10y ago
    I stand corrected. I definitely skimmed the article too fast. State ID photos makes a lot more sense.
moftz 10y ago
There were 210M licensed drivers in the US with an expected annual growth rate of 1.6% [1]. Extrapolating this data gives 231M licensed drivers in 2016. From the article: "...law enforcement in more than half of all states can search against the trove of photos stored for IDs like drivers’ licenses." Half that number and you get a number that's pretty close to the number of faces in the database. I've got no issue with using law enforcement having access to these pictures for identity verification (i.e. checking to make sure the face on a license matches the face of the person in the database). Although automatic systems setup to identify people in crowds is a bit too Minority Report for me. I understand that I don't have any expectation to privacy when walking around in public but its a bit unnerving to have someone logging my every location and never needing a warrant, as publicly taken pictures wouldn't require one whereas cellphone tracking would. [1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/chapter4.cfm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/c...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- white-flame 10y ago
  It's my growing opinion that the aggregation of personal data (and "metadata") needs to be regulated. Individual sample points are fine, but analyzing the entire crowd all the time is too intrusive and should constitute a warrant-requiring search of private effects. Maybe we need something like HIPPA for personal data. If you start fiddling with stuff that invades privacy of individuals, things should get touchy and messy legally. I have an expectation of privacy in public while in crowds and during my personal travels.
  - zerocrates 10y ago
    This is the idea behind the nascent "mosaic" theory of the Fourth Amendment: that by aggregating together many individual observations that each in themselves aren't a "search," you arrive at a result that gives you so much information about a person and their activities that the aggregate program would be a search that required a warrant. Put another way, each individual "tile" of a search program might not be so controversial, like police being able to take your photo in public, but a mosaic formed by aggregating photos of you automatically taken every block and matching them to your drivers' license photo becomes far more problematic, privacy-wise: the whole is more invasive than the sum of its parts. The theory has made a minor appearance in at least one Supreme Court case: U.S. v. Jones, where police placed a GPS tracker on a car and didn't comply with the restrictions of the warrant they'd obtained to do so. The holding went against the government, but the mosaic theory only featured in a concurrence. The decision was based not around the invasion of privacy inherent in round-the-clock automated location monitoring but instead on the rather mundane and case-specific fact that the police committed a "trespass" to the car by sticking the device magnetically to its underside. It's a tough case because it's really the plummeting cost that's changing things: round-the-clock warrantless public surveillance is legal and basically uncontroversial if done the traditional way, by sticking police officers in a car and following you around. But the growing ability to get the same information at massive scale, at minimal marginal cost, and even retroactively is... not so uncontroversial. The Court, and courts generally, are still firmly in the camp of analyzing searches individually and not in aggregate, but there are glimmers of change on the horizon.
sliverstorm 10y ago
License plate technology lets the police identify you from far away and in secret without ever talking to you. (with some chance of error) The government being able to figure out who you are, is not a story. (Systematic & automatic use of ID information to continually track you, is)
rawfooddan 10y ago
It's probably an advantage of having an ugly asymmetric face - depending on the angle they may not recognize you.
- zizzles 10y ago
  Good news for people like me.
cryoshon 10y ago
okay, so when do we see police departments getting sued for unauthorized searches of members of the public? when do we see police departments sanctioned for tracking people not suspected of any crime? when do we find out that the police arrested or killed the wrong person based off of a faulty algorithm? when do we start wearing dazzle camo on our face to disrupt them?
- krapp 10y ago
  Well, the thing is, your face isn't private information. I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights. Facebook likely automatically builds a profile for every face it can recognize in a photograph, as well as approximate dates and times based on landmarks, shadow geometry and timestamps, building an ad-hoc and constantly updated dossier of travel times, places and associations, and feeds it into some kind of predictive machine learning algorithm designed to model, predict and influence the behavior of people who aren't even on Facebook yet. And they're secret best buds with the NSA. But the police actually knowing someone is who they they think they are might actually be a net positive in terms of public safety. It seems like a step up from "nondescript black male, 18-35, possibly wearing clothes."
  - uxp 10y ago
    > I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights. It would be one thing if there was some RainMan FBI agent who was the database and could recollect the name, address, declared weight, height, eye color and hair color of half of the population of the United States after meeting them through natural social introductions. But this is a collection of databases that hundreds or thousands of cops can search through simultaneously without having to know anything about the unidentified person. Recently, it was declared unconstitutional to attach a GPS tracking device to a vehicle without a warrant, yet it's still perfectly acceptable to have a real live person tail another individual in another car without a warrant. The reasons being is that a small police force of say 20 people could in effect virtually tail and track thousands (if their budget allowed them to purchase that many devices) of individuals at once, where physically tracking those individuals is a natural limitation of the capacity of the force. It enforces a burden on the police. Exactly the same rules apply here. If a cop knows a subset of individuals in his or her neighborhood, and then comes across a picture of unidentified person taken during the commission of a crime, and is able to identify that person from memory and develop further proof that the individual in the photo was in fact the one that committed the crime, then they have a good case. If the only way for the cops to identify that person is to look up the identification of the suspect via a highly sophisticated computer algorithm that can check against hundreds of faces per second, then the "capacity" of the force to identify suspects far outweighs the effort the public had to counteract that. Checks and balances, and all that stuff, don't just apply to the 3 branches, they apply between the citizenry and the powers over them too.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
cheiVia0 10y ago
and Facebook have a database that is many times larger.
- gscott 10y ago
  And it recognizes who is in the photo. Often when viewing a photo it will give me a name of one of the people in the photo and ask me if I want to tag it or not. It has never given me a name of someone not in the photo yet.
  - cellis 10y ago
    And it's up to date, and is augmented by much, much more data.
    - nercht12 10y ago
      And people give it info for FREE, thoughtlessly.
      - bfuller 10y ago
        And they give info not just of themselves, but others! When I finally gave in and got a fb I was surprised they already had my facial info. My mother had been uploading pictures and tagging me in them for years.
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  I am wondering if you are seeing this as an excuse or as an even larger problem.

88 points by cpymchn 10y ago

_Marak_ 10y ago

Edit: Missed the obvious source in the article. Point redacted.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago
No. FTA: law enforcement in more than half of all states can search against the trove of photos stored for IDs like drivers’ licenses. Getting that data from Facebook is way more complicated, fraught with legal problems and lower quality than all of the systems that already exist in the legal system between all of the sources that utilize photo id: drivers license, passport etc
- _Marak_ 10y ago
  I stand corrected. I definitely skimmed the article too fast. State ID photos makes a lot more sense.

moftz 10y ago

There were 210M licensed drivers in the US with an expected annual growth rate of 1.6% [1]. Extrapolating this data gives 231M licensed drivers in 2016. From the article: "...law enforcement in more than half of all states can search against the trove of photos stored for IDs like drivers’ licenses." Half that number and you get a number that's pretty close to the number of faces in the database. I've got no issue with using law enforcement having access to these pictures for identity verification (i.e. checking to make sure the face on a license matches the face of the person in the database). Although automatic systems setup to identify people in crowds is a bit too Minority Report for me. I understand that I don't have any expectation to privacy when walking around in public but its a bit unnerving to have someone logging my every location and never needing a warrant, as publicly taken pictures wouldn't require one whereas cellphone tracking would. [1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/chapter4.cfm https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/c...

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
white-flame 10y ago
It's my growing opinion that the aggregation of personal data (and "metadata") needs to be regulated. Individual sample points are fine, but analyzing the entire crowd all the time is too intrusive and should constitute a warrant-requiring search of private effects. Maybe we need something like HIPPA for personal data. If you start fiddling with stuff that invades privacy of individuals, things should get touchy and messy legally. I have an expectation of privacy in public while in crowds and during my personal travels.
- zerocrates 10y ago
  This is the idea behind the nascent "mosaic" theory of the Fourth Amendment: that by aggregating together many individual observations that each in themselves aren't a "search," you arrive at a result that gives you so much information about a person and their activities that the aggregate program would be a search that required a warrant. Put another way, each individual "tile" of a search program might not be so controversial, like police being able to take your photo in public, but a mosaic formed by aggregating photos of you automatically taken every block and matching them to your drivers' license photo becomes far more problematic, privacy-wise: the whole is more invasive than the sum of its parts. The theory has made a minor appearance in at least one Supreme Court case: U.S. v. Jones, where police placed a GPS tracker on a car and didn't comply with the restrictions of the warrant they'd obtained to do so. The holding went against the government, but the mosaic theory only featured in a concurrence. The decision was based not around the invasion of privacy inherent in round-the-clock automated location monitoring but instead on the rather mundane and case-specific fact that the police committed a "trespass" to the car by sticking the device magnetically to its underside. It's a tough case because it's really the plummeting cost that's changing things: round-the-clock warrantless public surveillance is legal and basically uncontroversial if done the traditional way, by sticking police officers in a car and following you around. But the growing ability to get the same information at massive scale, at minimal marginal cost, and even retroactively is... not so uncontroversial. The Court, and courts generally, are still firmly in the camp of analyzing searches individually and not in aggregate, but there are glimmers of change on the horizon.

sliverstorm 10y ago

License plate technology lets the police identify you from far away and in secret without ever talking to you. (with some chance of error) The government being able to figure out who you are, is not a story. (Systematic & automatic use of ID information to continually track you, is)

rawfooddan 10y ago

It's probably an advantage of having an ugly asymmetric face - depending on the angle they may not recognize you.

zizzles 10y ago
Good news for people like me.

cryoshon 10y ago

okay, so when do we see police departments getting sued for unauthorized searches of members of the public? when do we see police departments sanctioned for tracking people not suspected of any crime? when do we find out that the police arrested or killed the wrong person based off of a faulty algorithm? when do we start wearing dazzle camo on our face to disrupt them?

krapp 10y ago
Well, the thing is, your face isn't private information. I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights. Facebook likely automatically builds a profile for every face it can recognize in a photograph, as well as approximate dates and times based on landmarks, shadow geometry and timestamps, building an ad-hoc and constantly updated dossier of travel times, places and associations, and feeds it into some kind of predictive machine learning algorithm designed to model, predict and influence the behavior of people who aren't even on Facebook yet. And they're secret best buds with the NSA. But the police actually knowing someone is who they they think they are might actually be a net positive in terms of public safety. It seems like a step up from "nondescript black male, 18-35, possibly wearing clothes."
- uxp 10y ago
  > I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights. It would be one thing if there was some RainMan FBI agent who was the database and could recollect the name, address, declared weight, height, eye color and hair color of half of the population of the United States after meeting them through natural social introductions. But this is a collection of databases that hundreds or thousands of cops can search through simultaneously without having to know anything about the unidentified person. Recently, it was declared unconstitutional to attach a GPS tracking device to a vehicle without a warrant, yet it's still perfectly acceptable to have a real live person tail another individual in another car without a warrant. The reasons being is that a small police force of say 20 people could in effect virtually tail and track thousands (if their budget allowed them to purchase that many devices) of individuals at once, where physically tracking those individuals is a natural limitation of the capacity of the force. It enforces a burden on the police. Exactly the same rules apply here. If a cop knows a subset of individuals in his or her neighborhood, and then comes across a picture of unidentified person taken during the commission of a crime, and is able to identify that person from memory and develop further proof that the individual in the photo was in fact the one that committed the crime, then they have a good case. If the only way for the cops to identify that person is to look up the identification of the suspect via a highly sophisticated computer algorithm that can check against hundreds of faces per second, then the "capacity" of the force to identify suspects far outweighs the effort the public had to counteract that. Checks and balances, and all that stuff, don't just apply to the 3 branches, they apply between the citizenry and the powers over them too.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

cheiVia0 10y ago

and Facebook have a database that is many times larger.

gscott 10y ago
And it recognizes who is in the photo. Often when viewing a photo it will give me a name of one of the people in the photo and ask me if I want to tag it or not. It has never given me a name of someone not in the photo yet.
- cellis 10y ago
  And it's up to date, and is augmented by much, much more data.
  - nercht12 10y ago
    And people give it info for FREE, thoughtlessly.
    - bfuller 10y ago
      And they give info not just of themselves, but others! When I finally gave in and got a fb I was surprised they already had my facial info. My mother had been uploading pictures and tagging me in them for years.
eveningcoffee 10y ago
I am wondering if you are seeing this as an excuse or as an even larger problem.