5 ms·

As in many things, a blanket statement of 'not ready for use' isn't really the most helpful way to look at the situation. There's a range of ways such technolog

• shanghaiaway 8y ago
  Regardless of how you try to rephrase it, the fact remains the same: the technology doesn't work well enough.
  • hashkb 8y ago
    ...and law enforcement has shown it can't act responsibly with technology, especially when it comes to privacy.
    • workinthehead 8y ago
      You're right, but if "acting responsibly" was at all a prerequisite, they wouldn't even have their precious guns.
      • RodericDay 8y ago
        that's fine, take their guns away too
      • logfromblammo 8y ago
        Or their cars.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • bilbo0s 8y ago
    This is going to sound horrible, but I suspect at least part of the reason people are unwilling to state that "facial recognition tech currently doesn't work well enough", is because there is a lot of money riding on it. Selling to law enforcement was probably a very large part of the plan for that sector. So whether it works or not, they kind of have to get law enforcement to use it.
    • sillysaurus3 8y ago
      Why does that sound horrible? That's how the world works. I suppose it is horrible, but it's a very common situation.
    • bobwaycott 8y ago
      It doesn’t sound horrible, but it is horrible.
  • Ajedi32 8y ago
    Well enough for what? You don't think there's _any_ conceivable way that law enforcement could utilize facial recognition tech without negative consequences? Not even, say, aiding manual review of security camera footage as part of an investigation into a preexisting suspect?
    • madamelic 8y ago
      >You don't think there's _any_ conceivable way that law enforcement could utilize facial recognition tech without negative consequences? Absolutely. Deploy the cameras around town and train it using pictures of their officers to catch misbehavior.
      • bobwaycott 8y ago
        What do we do with all the data that includes everyone else’s faces?
        • true_religion 8y ago
          If there is no potential officer misbehavior in the data, delete it after 60 minutes of recording.
  • zippy5 8y ago
    We also rely on witnesses with dubious memories and motives but people will never be held to the same standards as machines.
  • mc32 8y ago
    Doesn’t some kind of facial recognition work well enough for Vegas casinos? Instead of police being able to scan one face at a time as they walk their beats looking for suspects, an automated system could scan everyone in view and then alert that an suspect has been identified with xx% accuracy. Every week on next door someone posts a video still of a vagrant or thief etc. either from a broken car window, hit and run, lurker, etc. Automation would help if the perps. We, as a society, might want to adjust the dials on punishment, given the efficiency, but we shouldn’t give up the chance to minimize these crimes when reasonable.
    • synctext 8y ago
      It is a bit more complex. There are few scientific studies on this topic. See this one: http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a... "We find that these datasets are overwhelmingly composed of lighter-skinned subjects (79.6% for IJB-A and 86.2% for Adience) and introduce a new facial analysis dataset which is balanced by gender and skin type. We evaluate 3 commercial gender classification systems using our dataset and show that darker-skinned females are the most misclassified group (with error rates of up to 34.7%). The maximum error rate for lighter-skinned males is 0.8%.
      • mc32 8y ago
        That’s pretty interesting. Given those stats, why can’t it be selectively deployed on light skinned perps till the system is trained better on other skin color classifications in order to achieve similar accuracies? And in the mean time catch some baddies.
        • solotronics 8y ago
          Interesting, so given your implementation only targeting light skinned "suspects" would using this be racist?
          • mc32 8y ago
  • sonnyblarney 8y ago
    "Regardless of how you try to rephrase it, the fact remains the same: the technology doesn't work well enough." I don't suggest that anyone is looking to simply lock people up because of a 'face match' - rather flag an individual as 'possibly being someone' in which case this can be very useful information. If for example they use it at border checks to 'flag' individuals, then a border agent can manually intervene, check the person's info etc.. So maybe that this not even possible to any degree of validity today, in which case 'the tech is not ready' ... but if the tech works to any measurable degree of reliability then it's possible to be put to use to reasonable effect - like anything (guns, tasers, DNA matching, fingerprints) - it has to be used properly. Fingerprints seem to be a bonafide way to identify someone and can be used as evidence, it'd seem that facial recognition can't be used as evidence, but likely for other things.
    • bradknowles 8y ago
      If we could force the cops to always use the tool in a way that is consistent with its limitations, then you might be right. Unfortunately, cops are not technologists. They're not mathematicians. They don't understand the dangers of applying a solution that is right 99% of the time to a population of 300 million people, and if each person averaged appearing on just one camera per day, that would mean three million false identifications per day. How many real criminals are they really looking for on a daily basis, and which would warrant such a dragnet measure? They can't handle a false positive rate like that. They can't be running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to verify the millions of bogus hits against the tiny fraction of potential valid ones. It's the same problem that the TSA has, only these are real police with real guns. And real people are going to get killed because they get mis-identified, as opposed to just inconvenienced and pulled aside for extra scanning. Do you really want to make the cops as bad as the TSA?
      • sonnyblarney 8y ago
        You don't have to 'force' cops if the proper parameters and processes are laid out. Moreover, though cops can bend and break rules, they're not idiots. For example, at border crossing, a 'fact match' with a name simply could flag someone for an interview, and a background check to see if it's a certain person. An arrest has to be made on some kind of reasonable grounds if a 'face match' is not considered reasonable grounds, border guards (and cops for that matter) are quite aware of that and know they can't make the arrest on that basis alone.
• rainbowmverse 8y ago
  >> "I'm fairly sure there are countries out there where citizens do not lie awake at night in fear of their government, and where such technologies might be responsibly deployed as a tool in law enforcement." This was true of many countries where it's no longer the case. Once a technology is available to a benevolent government, it remains available once that benevolence ends. It's wise to do what can be done to prevent and hinder misuse before it's too late.