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This is awful! Even ignoring the obvious moral problems with this, I don't think such a system could be as accurate as hoped. All the publically available face
by gcr 10y ago
This is awful!
Even ignoring the obvious moral problems with this, I don't think such a system could be as accurate as hoped. All the publically available face training datasets contain mostly US demographics (read: white people), and it's unclear how the system performance will be when applied to a data distribution that's dissimilar from the training distribution (read: nonwhite faces). I'm not aware of a lot of research about this.
Even if such a system could be built with 99% accuracy, there are hundreds of thousands of people that pass through international flights every day. For every false positive, your security people have to go through all of the steps. How many innocent folks will confuse the scanner and be taken into custody for false positives?
This is just a tool for oppression. Nothing more.
(See Part 1 of Scheirer and Boult's tutorial slides at IJCB 2011, "Biometrics: Practical Issues in Privacy and Security," for a great high-level overview of these kinds of issues: http://web.archive.org/web/20130412032945/http://www.securics.com/~walter/IJCB2011/IJCB11-tutorial-part1.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20130412032945/http://www.securic... In particular, the slides starting on page 19 have more about this kind of analysis)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Spooky23 10y agoPretty sure this kind of capability exists on the highways as well, particularly between heavy trafficking corridors like Philly to Montreal. IIRC, there was a NY Times article a few years ago (which I cannot find) that mentioned that it started with LPR cameras, but was capable of capturing faces as well.
- gshulegaard 10y agoPersonally, I think talking about false positive and accuracy is a straw man problem. The much more difficult question (or not difficult question depending on who you ask) is whether a system like this should exist even if it has perfect accuracy. At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras? Mandatory facial screening? That is the real question and unfortunately it's not one that can be grounded empirically (at least as far as I have seen). One thing is for sure: we have been headed down a dangerous road for awhile. Washington seemingly wants to go down it seeing as Presidents from both sides of the aisle have only rolled us further down this road. Edit: I used Washington here because I am a US citizen, but I think it worth pointing out that other developed nations have been going this way as well (e.g. the UK).
- gcr 10y ago100% agree. Dragging the issue into the "accuracy" direction away from the "moral" direction is a Thermian argument.
- hubert123 10y ago> At what point does the tracking of individuals cross privacy lines and become oppressive? Scraping internet browsing habits? Automated traffic cameras? Mandatory facial screening? that's a "strawman" as well. Every law is oppression, the real question is what degree of oppression is justified for the good of society
- passthefist 10y agoI think accuracy is worth discussing, because even a 99% accurate system can produce poor results if the signal it's searching for is rare. Wikipedia has some good examples about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Examples One of the examples is about terrorism, with 100 out of 1 million people being terrorists and a 99% accurate system. Being 99 percent accurate, 99 out of the 100 terrorists will trigger the alarm, but so will about 9,999 law abiding citizens. Given an individual that triggered the alarm, there's a less than 1% chance they're actually a terrorist.