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Suppose your job was to work out whether the identity of people entering or exiting your country matched what was stated on their travel documents. How would y
by zxcmx 9y ago
Suppose your job was to work out whether the identity of people entering or exiting your country matched what was stated on their travel documents.
How would you do it? It's not just about terrorism. What if you had to do that at scale and cared about errors?
Actually a lot of people have that job and many of them are not silly and some of them influence technology acquisition. This is a super hard problem, technology can put a dent but human identity is a super gnarly problem.
The use of a "centaur" system (face matching with a tunable rejection threshold backed up by trained humans to work out exceptions) would probably be the most socially acceptable right?
[I am assuming that you pretty much understand whats happened with machine readable travel documents over the last while and that your reference and actual can be captured at multiple points during the entry and exit process].
DNA takes too long, humans for everything suffer from decision fatigue travel delays and high labour costs, fingerprinting is socially unacceptable.
I guess if what you're saying is that you don't really want border controls to work I can accept that, but I also don't fault the people who are legitimately doing their best at system design to meet their responsibilities. These people get panned for things that don't work, is it fair to pan them for things that do work (based on what I know of process in au/nz) too?
Doing this on departure is a new, but logical measure. I don't know of anywhere else in the world this is done but I suspect it is a data gathering trial to help the U.S. justify it as an entry requirement.
If you didn't want it to be a visible gate I suppose that a "check harder" icon could appear on the exit processing officer's screen when comparing your camera picture to your passport reference, rather than exposing gate automation to you directly. It might turn out that UX is more socially acceptable. The political stakes for wrong decisions are too high for computer face rec not to be deployed at control points.
Does it seem more socially acceptable to you if the face matching feels like a point-of-check aid to a possibly fatigued human and the results aren't logged?
- saguro 9y ago> and results aren't logged There. That's the problem with this shit. The results are logged. We are tumbling head first into a future where every flight you make, every video you watch, every destination you drive to, every person you meet: your entire life, really - is logged. Do you know how many phone apps and games are built these days? First the author asks 'what data do I want to collect from a large number of people', and only secondly 'what kind of game or app do I build to successfully distribute my data probes?' The population hasn't even yet realized that this future will bring a drastic shift in how people live their lives, much less began to understand the various implications of that shift. The fact that both governments and large corporations are taking full advantage of this ignorance to build a massive tracking web before the public wises up and is able to resist, or that they actively stonewall any serious discourse on this topic, that fact makes it quite obvious that pervasive logging is not in the interest of the public.
- zxcmx 9y agoI agree it's obviously a political problem but you're sort of deflecting the point. We're not talking about corporate surveillance we're talking border control. Emotionally these things are connected, practically, the system is just trying to validate the eligibility of people to use travel documents. What do you expect people are doing at country entry and exit points and do you want them to do something that works or not? I think it's valid to say that for ideological reasons you don't really want travel documents matched against travellers properly but you do need to understand your own position properly and how that plays out politically to be able to effectively fight that battle.
- saguro 9y agoI feel like either you're not understanding the implications of the logging aspect in particular, or you're being disingenuous. Firstly, we are talking about corporate surveillance. Maybe not today, but certainly tomorrow. The Australian government is already gaging private sector interest in their facial ID database, which was quietly sneaked through legislation as an anti terror measure only 2 years ago. Secondly, these records, and all records, inevitably reach the hands of government, corporate, and finally criminal actors - usually in that order. This is again only a question of when, not if. And with access to all that data? That goes back to my original point - we haven't even thought about the implications of having such data available. But we have had a glimpse with e.g. feds getting caught looking at data of love interests. This isn't just 'border control'. Border control is merely one of hundreds of facets in everyday life where people are being stripped of this privacy by actors who ultimately do not represent their interests. Are you seriously going to claim that this removal of privacy and systemic logging of everyone's life is a reasonable way to tackle border control so we can stop some terrorists from being one of America's least significant causes of death? More people die to lightning strikes every year in the US than to mishaps at border control resulting in terrorism or such.
- zxcmx 9y agoYeah I'm gonna go ahead and claim that automated matching between the headshot on the passport NFC chip and the natural person at the gate is totally reasonable. Bearing in mind that you don't need to hook up to any external databases to do this (all the data is on the chip) Like seriously, why would you NOT do that?