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I cannot fathom how they put obvious mistakes in the training material (e.g. hairline in the last example). How are they selling something when their own traini

by brohee 7y ago

I cannot fathom how they put obvious mistakes in the training material (e.g. hairline in the last example). How are they selling something when their own training material shows it's total bunk. The time and money spent on that could be spent on actual police work...

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Because it's not about accuracy. It's about generating a match, no matter how crappy. It's no different than back when they used to pick up random known criminals (usually non-white) and charge them with whatever crimes they had no leads for in order to clean up the number of open cases. Selecting the random person to pick up is now outsourced to the software. The cops can claim not to be responsible because they're just doing what the computer says. The company selling the crap can claim not to be responsible because the cops are using it wrong.
- taneq 7y ago
  > It's about generating a match, no matter how crappy. That's the worst thing about this kind of dragnet search is that the more comprehensive the surveillance and the more accurate the picture of the offender, the more likely it is that when you're picked up as the prime suspect in something you had nothing to do with, that you look identical to the culprit and you were in the area at that exact time and so on. And so if you are the unlucky bugger that gets caught up in it, the better the system works, the harder it is for you to argue that you actually WERE innocent. Juries aren't good at the Law of Large Numbers.
  - Shivetya 7y ago
    Well we can look at this from the opposite side, it eliminates more people far faster giving the authorities fewer people to check. Now this is fine provided there are sufficient rules governing that second step. That is where the process currently fails. There are no published checks and balances. Look, we don't have to like this one bit but we are kidding ourselves to think it can be stopped. Even the actions of San Francisco can be overridden at the state or federal level when push comes to shove if not a shift in electorate. so the task ahead is to regulate strictly how it is used and what can happen from beginning to end of life of the data. the first rule being, it can never establish guilt on its own.
    - sfink 7y ago
      There will be some percentage of false positives. If you're feeding the system with a biased, handpicked population, you will get false positive matches from that population and not from other populations. If you are on the shit list, your odds of being accused when you're actually innocent are far, far higher than those of someone not on the shit list. If the shit list is predominately black, then innocent blacks will be sent to jail more often than innocent whites. It's profiling.

by brohee 7y ago

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

Because it's not about accuracy. It's about generating a match, no matter how crappy. It's no different than back when they used to pick up random known criminals (usually non-white) and charge them with whatever crimes they had no leads for in order to clean up the number of open cases. Selecting the random person to pick up is now outsourced to the software. The cops can claim not to be responsible because they're just doing what the computer says. The company selling the crap can claim not to be responsible because the cops are using it wrong.

taneq 7y ago
> It's about generating a match, no matter how crappy. That's the worst thing about this kind of dragnet search is that the more comprehensive the surveillance and the more accurate the picture of the offender, the more likely it is that when you're picked up as the prime suspect in something you had nothing to do with, that you look identical to the culprit and you were in the area at that exact time and so on. And so if you are the unlucky bugger that gets caught up in it, the better the system works, the harder it is for you to argue that you actually WERE innocent. Juries aren't good at the Law of Large Numbers.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  Well we can look at this from the opposite side, it eliminates more people far faster giving the authorities fewer people to check. Now this is fine provided there are sufficient rules governing that second step. That is where the process currently fails. There are no published checks and balances. Look, we don't have to like this one bit but we are kidding ourselves to think it can be stopped. Even the actions of San Francisco can be overridden at the state or federal level when push comes to shove if not a shift in electorate. so the task ahead is to regulate strictly how it is used and what can happen from beginning to end of life of the data. the first rule being, it can never establish guilt on its own.
  - sfink 7y ago
    There will be some percentage of false positives. If you're feeding the system with a biased, handpicked population, you will get false positive matches from that population and not from other populations. If you are on the shit list, your odds of being accused when you're actually innocent are far, far higher than those of someone not on the shit list. If the shit list is predominately black, then innocent blacks will be sent to jail more often than innocent whites. It's profiling.