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I operate under the assumption that the majority of cops are just doing the job for a paycheck, and not out of any genuine desire to do the job correctly arisin

I operate under the assumption that the majority of cops are just doing the job for a paycheck, and not out of any genuine desire to do the job correctly arising from a professional work ethic. I get it--it's just like every other job. Only a few people actually care about what they do, and the rest know what it means to just be an employee. Giving the footage, without the name, forces the cops to positively identify the suspect through investigation of crime scene evidence. The FaceID-generated name is just speculation from Apple. Operating under the assumption that the cops will do the absolute minimum amount of work to clear the case, just giving the video runs the risk that they will decide that identifying the suspect is too difficult, and give up. But bear in mind that they failed to identify the real suspect anyway, and also arrested an innocent person, just because Apple said that's the person who did it. The professional cops, who are usually not as knowledgeable about computing science as the professional software developers, may be unaware of the GIGO principle--garbage in, garbage out. They don't know how Apple assigned a name to the face, but they trust them, because Apple spends a lot of marketing dollars getting people to believe that all their stuff "just works". The facial recognition software linked the face with a name attached to all the faces that didn't. Apple can certainly give a rate of false positives and false negatives for the face-matching, but I'm not sure they have any idea how many people are showing them fake IDs. That's something cops and bouncers would know, not ordinary retail employees. If you were a cop, and someone dropped this case on your desk, what would you do? I, personally, would search for that name on every corner of the Internet before getting off of my ass. I'd be looking for any excuse I could find to not go out to arrest someone, because that's work, and solving property crimes, especially shoplifting cases, is not noteworthy or glamorous. But Apple is rich, so I'd put just a tiny extra effort in to find the real thief, in case I ever wanted to run for sheriff, and get them as a corporate campaign donor. I'd probably go to one of the department's fake Facebook accounts, upload a cropped still from one of the videos, and see if their auto-tagging software produces a match. If that didn't come up with anything, I'd have to get a search warrant for the named suspect and their home address, looking for any stolen Apple stuff. Then I'd see that the named suspect does not match the video footage. I'd give the best face-shot and a short video clip to the local TV news to see if that generated any tips or leads, and then finally write a report saying that the suspect could not be identified or located from the available evidence. But I'd be polite about it, because Apple is rich, and would certainly want to read the report. And then that would be it. Because every retailer has to live with a nonzero amount of shoplifting and other forms of shrinkage, even the rich ones.

danaris 8y ago
> The FaceID-generated name is just speculation from Apple. No, it's not. As I've said multiple times, the name came from the stolen ID the thief had. The only use of facial recognition in this case was to link his presence at the time he gave the ID, to his presence at the other stores where thefts took place. Facial recognition played no role in actually identifying the thief (either the actual one or the poor sap whose ID was stolen).
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Do you realize that the first paragraph of your post directly contradicts the second? 1. Facial recognition played a role. 2. Facial recognition played no role. One of the two must be false. It is the second. Facial recognition played a role. Specifically, it linked the face seen in video where a crime was observed to a face that misidentified itself. The speculation on Apple's part was that the name the face presented for itself was genuine, and not a deception. It did not stop to assess the probability of all customers presenting fake ID, or the conditional probability of a customer presenting genuine ID given that they are a suspected serial shoplifter. That last one is relevant. A person that can do a grab-and-run theft might also be willing to do a fraudulent purchase theft by giving a stolen, cloned, or credit-fraud card and stolen or faked ID. So while you might be able to assume that regular customers usually give genuine ID, giving fake ID and stealing from retail stores are probably not independent events. Once you have reason to believe a person is stealing, based on the facial recognition matches, you can't trust that they are who they said they were with the same confidence. And what would Apple have done if the same person had given a different stolen or faked ID, on a different occasion, and that name was also linked to the case by facial recognition?
  - danaris 8y ago
    Apple is not the police, and it's not their job to solve the crime for the police. It's their job to hand over all relevant information so the police can solve the crime. And what would Apple have done if they had identified this person instead by good old-fashioned human facial recognition, in one store—they check their security camera records, see the person who gave the ID, and spend some time matching it up with thousands of dollars worth of theft in the same store. They would likely have done just the same: handed the ID over to the police, along with the information about the thefts. My first paragraph does not contradict itself. Facial recognition software was not used to identify the thief. That was purely done through the use of the ID. Facial recognition software was then used to link the already-identified thief in a single instance to other instances of theft at other stores. Even if the facial recognition software had never been used, the guy the ID was stolen from would still have been fingered as the thief in that first instance. This is not a story about Big Bad Apple, or Big Bad Technology Gone Wrong. This is just a story about Humans Making Mistakes. Specifically, it's a story about the police not doing their due diligence.

danaris 8y ago

> The FaceID-generated name is just speculation from Apple. No, it's not. As I've said multiple times, the name came from the stolen ID the thief had. The only use of facial recognition in this case was to link his presence at the time he gave the ID, to his presence at the other stores where thefts took place. Facial recognition played no role in actually identifying the thief (either the actual one or the poor sap whose ID was stolen).

logfromblammo 8y ago
Do you realize that the first paragraph of your post directly contradicts the second? 1. Facial recognition played a role. 2. Facial recognition played no role. One of the two must be false. It is the second. Facial recognition played a role. Specifically, it linked the face seen in video where a crime was observed to a face that misidentified itself. The speculation on Apple's part was that the name the face presented for itself was genuine, and not a deception. It did not stop to assess the probability of all customers presenting fake ID, or the conditional probability of a customer presenting genuine ID given that they are a suspected serial shoplifter. That last one is relevant. A person that can do a grab-and-run theft might also be willing to do a fraudulent purchase theft by giving a stolen, cloned, or credit-fraud card and stolen or faked ID. So while you might be able to assume that regular customers usually give genuine ID, giving fake ID and stealing from retail stores are probably not independent events. Once you have reason to believe a person is stealing, based on the facial recognition matches, you can't trust that they are who they said they were with the same confidence. And what would Apple have done if the same person had given a different stolen or faked ID, on a different occasion, and that name was also linked to the case by facial recognition?
- danaris 8y ago
  Apple is not the police, and it's not their job to solve the crime for the police. It's their job to hand over all relevant information so the police can solve the crime. And what would Apple have done if they had identified this person instead by good old-fashioned human facial recognition, in one store—they check their security camera records, see the person who gave the ID, and spend some time matching it up with thousands of dollars worth of theft in the same store. They would likely have done just the same: handed the ID over to the police, along with the information about the thefts. My first paragraph does not contradict itself. Facial recognition software was not used to identify the thief. That was purely done through the use of the ID. Facial recognition software was then used to link the already-identified thief in a single instance to other instances of theft at other stores. Even if the facial recognition software had never been used, the guy the ID was stolen from would still have been fingered as the thief in that first instance. This is not a story about Big Bad Apple, or Big Bad Technology Gone Wrong. This is just a story about Humans Making Mistakes. Specifically, it's a story about the police not doing their due diligence.