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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 rol

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

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.