4 ms·

Berlin did experiment with facial recognition. They had 300 test subjects that regularly used a particular train station. They claimed to have achieved a 65.8%

Berlin did experiment with facial recognition. They had 300 test subjects that regularly used a particular train station. They claimed to have achieved a 65.8% detection rate, or up to 200 properly identified persons per day (so 1/3 were false negatives). However they also identified 0.67% wrongly, so given 90,000 people using that station a day, that means about 600 people were wrongly accused by the system each day (false positives). They declared the system, which wrongly suspected up to 600 people a day at a single train station of being wanted criminals, but missed a lot of actually wanted criminals too, a major success. Mind you, they used high resolution photographs as the training input for the system, something police does not necessarily have available of criminals and suspects they try to track down. https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2018/debakel-am-suedkreuz https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2018/debakel-am-suedkreuz (German)

e40 7y ago
Recently, I've thought of the German government more the champion of individual rights than the US, but this just shows how far down the path of zero-fucks given about the damage these systems can do to people.
- rndgermandude 7y ago
  Are we talking about the German government that was pushing mandatory communication meta data retention for all? That classifies people as "dangerous" without a trial and allows for the temporary imprisonment of those people without any court involvement whatsoever? The government that was a driving force behind the copyright directive (aka article 13)? The government that made unconstitutional laws to allow police to install trojans on people's devices? That tried to push an EU-wide censorship infrastructure with secret filter lists under the guise of "fighting child porn", while lying about child porn (e.g. they claimed child porn is not illegal in India, which is not true) and where then-family minister von der Leyen (now about to become EU commission president) screened actual child porn to journalists at a press conference to influence their reporting? The government that changed the law so that now you have to talk to the police most of the time (as a "witness") That helped the NSA to spy on communication of other EU leaders and German politicians as well? And then tried to hide it when caught, using every dirty (legal) trick imaginable? That regularly does mass surveillance on peaceful protesters? Or let the police lose to bash up a few of them? That made a law that essentially turned social media companies into law enforcement agencies with no supervision? That currently tries to create laws to force service providers to turn over communication "even if it is encrypted", aka defacto crypto backdoors? and so on ...
- tsss 7y ago
  It couldn't be further from the truth. People in power here are super corrupt and trying to erode the freedom just the same as anywhere else. Whenever you think of a foreign government as good you just have to assume you don't know enough about that country to know about all the shit they do.
  - rndgermandude 7y ago
    Yeah, we get a suspiciously high number of former politicians going into industries after their political career, usually industries that they previously were in charge of regulating (but Germany certainly isn't special in this regard). But we do it with "style": e.g. our former chancellor (head of government) Schröder is a lobbyist for Russian gas and oil these days and is best buddies with Putin, to the extent that last time Putin was sworn in as president Schröder was the second person to shake Putin's hand, right after the head of the Russian-orhtodox church, but before the Prime Minister of Russia. His vice chancellor at the time, Fischer, lobbied for a competing gas pipeline after leaving government... did I mention that Fischer belonged to the Green party? Germany also managed to delay the ratification of the UN Convention against Corruption for about 10 years, citing "privacy issues" that could arise if you made politicians to disclose their income e.g., and finally passed a law that is essentially completely useless. Yes, really, the same politicians who were pushing for data retention of communication meta data of literally everybody in Germany cited privacy concerns... But what if you want to donate large sums to a political party or candidate before an election or before a vote for some law you want? No, that would be bribery and corruption! So instead, just donate your large sums of not-bribes-I-swear AFTER you got what you want, and problem solved. Throw in a lobby/board of directors job or two for some politicians who needs an income supplement or hobby when retired, and you're done. No corruption to see here, please move along.
jopsen 7y ago
But having a human review the video for 600 people seems feasible. Rather than 90k people.. I'm still not sure what it's good for though, if the plan is to stop an interogate those 600 people this is still infeasible.
DangerousPie 7y ago
I don't understand the pessimism about this. In any real-world scenario this type of system would be followed by human review of the photographs, followed by actual investigation. Nobody is proposing arresting all 600 people straight away. Whittling 90,000 photos down to a set of 600 is a major accomplishment. Even if 599 of those are false positives, that 600th person would probably never have been caught, because it wouldn't have been feasible to review all 90,000 photos manually.
- mLuby 7y ago
  >Even if 599 of those are false positives, that 600th person would probably never have been caught. Society needs to accept that some percentage of crimes will invariably occur. Our question is "what maximum level of crime can we accept?" which then determines the time and resources required to achieve that level. I have no patience for this "zero-tolerance" rhetoric.
  - kartan 7y ago
    > "what maximum level of crime can we accept?" I agree with you. Said that way seems that you are given up. I think that it can be better to say "do you prefer to catch 0.5% more criminals or to reduce 0.4% deaths by cancer". Or something like that. People usually want 100% safety, that is not possible to achieve, and to try to get it they will give away thousands of lives that could have been saved with the time and effort invested in that impossible goal.
  - DangerousPie 7y ago
    I don't disagree with your point. It doesn't really have anything to do with the question at hand though. All I'm saying is that these tools are clearly doing a useful job and pretending like false positives are an insurmountable problem is a bit silly.
    - rndgermandude 7y ago
      Are they tho? Are they doing a better job than say police randomly checking people? Let's actually do some crude math to try to estimate how many new cops we'd need to hire in Germany just to check out those false positive hits. I mean, what's the point of such a system if you do not check out the hits and make sure, right? Let's assume it takes police 15 mins to check out a potential hit in person (finding the person, checking their identify and asking some questions), and they work in teams of 2 to be able to secure each other. The Deutsche Bahn alone says in 2018 they had 5.7 million passenger in Germany per day traveling by rail[1]. Let's assume all the train stations get equipped with with this tech and let's assume their 0.67% false positive rate holds. That's 38,190 checks you need to do on innocent people, per day, or 1591.25 checks per hour. A two person team can do 60 / 15 = 4 checks per hour. So you need to have 400 such teams at any given time. A shift is only 8h not 24h and people only work 5/7 days per week, so 400 * 2 * (24/8) * 7 / 5, so you need to hire at least 3,360 police officers (well, probably more like 5000, because we completely disregarded a lot of variables, such as vacation days, etc) just to harass DB rail passengers who were incorrectly classified as threats, nationwide. Remember, those are all false positives, not one of those people is actually a criminal the system is meant to be looking for. IIRC an average police officer costs the state about 90K per year on average in Germany. So you'll be spending 300+ million EUR per year on harassing innocent people just because your tech is kinda shitty. Now if those 3,360 police offers would do actual useful work instead and prevented or solved some crimes... Also, I don't want to be that person who happens to have a similar enough face to some criminal so the face detection triggers on me all the time. [1] https://www.deutschebahn.com/resource/blob/3992284/f9331633c8a19470629f9e3aa6d5fe8c/20190328_bpk_2019_daten_fakten_en-data.pdf https://www.deutschebahn.com/resource/blob/3992284/f9331633c...
yyhhsj0521 7y ago
China now has vending machines where you can pay with your face. (In a your-face-as-your-credit-card sense) If facial recognition is deemed sufficient to be used in payment systems, I wonder if it is just that the systems these police use are just implemented poorly?
- kaiwen1 7y ago
  The payment system at KFC kiosks and some other places just confirm you with your face. You first have to enter a phone number or other identifying information. Do the vending machines eliminate that first step?
  - yyhhsj0521 7y ago
    You set it up in Alipay (Chinese Paypal + Stripe/Square) first (only once), and then you can use it everywhere.

e40 7y ago

Recently, I've thought of the German government more the champion of individual rights than the US, but this just shows how far down the path of zero-fucks given about the damage these systems can do to people.

rndgermandude 7y ago
Are we talking about the German government that was pushing mandatory communication meta data retention for all? That classifies people as "dangerous" without a trial and allows for the temporary imprisonment of those people without any court involvement whatsoever? The government that was a driving force behind the copyright directive (aka article 13)? The government that made unconstitutional laws to allow police to install trojans on people's devices? That tried to push an EU-wide censorship infrastructure with secret filter lists under the guise of "fighting child porn", while lying about child porn (e.g. they claimed child porn is not illegal in India, which is not true) and where then-family minister von der Leyen (now about to become EU commission president) screened actual child porn to journalists at a press conference to influence their reporting? The government that changed the law so that now you have to talk to the police most of the time (as a "witness") That helped the NSA to spy on communication of other EU leaders and German politicians as well? And then tried to hide it when caught, using every dirty (legal) trick imaginable? That regularly does mass surveillance on peaceful protesters? Or let the police lose to bash up a few of them? That made a law that essentially turned social media companies into law enforcement agencies with no supervision? That currently tries to create laws to force service providers to turn over communication "even if it is encrypted", aka defacto crypto backdoors? and so on ...
tsss 7y ago
It couldn't be further from the truth. People in power here are super corrupt and trying to erode the freedom just the same as anywhere else. Whenever you think of a foreign government as good you just have to assume you don't know enough about that country to know about all the shit they do.
- rndgermandude 7y ago
  Yeah, we get a suspiciously high number of former politicians going into industries after their political career, usually industries that they previously were in charge of regulating (but Germany certainly isn't special in this regard). But we do it with "style": e.g. our former chancellor (head of government) Schröder is a lobbyist for Russian gas and oil these days and is best buddies with Putin, to the extent that last time Putin was sworn in as president Schröder was the second person to shake Putin's hand, right after the head of the Russian-orhtodox church, but before the Prime Minister of Russia. His vice chancellor at the time, Fischer, lobbied for a competing gas pipeline after leaving government... did I mention that Fischer belonged to the Green party? Germany also managed to delay the ratification of the UN Convention against Corruption for about 10 years, citing "privacy issues" that could arise if you made politicians to disclose their income e.g., and finally passed a law that is essentially completely useless. Yes, really, the same politicians who were pushing for data retention of communication meta data of literally everybody in Germany cited privacy concerns... But what if you want to donate large sums to a political party or candidate before an election or before a vote for some law you want? No, that would be bribery and corruption! So instead, just donate your large sums of not-bribes-I-swear AFTER you got what you want, and problem solved. Throw in a lobby/board of directors job or two for some politicians who needs an income supplement or hobby when retired, and you're done. No corruption to see here, please move along.

jopsen 7y ago

But having a human review the video for 600 people seems feasible. Rather than 90k people.. I'm still not sure what it's good for though, if the plan is to stop an interogate those 600 people this is still infeasible.

DangerousPie 7y ago

I don't understand the pessimism about this. In any real-world scenario this type of system would be followed by human review of the photographs, followed by actual investigation. Nobody is proposing arresting all 600 people straight away. Whittling 90,000 photos down to a set of 600 is a major accomplishment. Even if 599 of those are false positives, that 600th person would probably never have been caught, because it wouldn't have been feasible to review all 90,000 photos manually.

mLuby 7y ago
>Even if 599 of those are false positives, that 600th person would probably never have been caught. Society needs to accept that some percentage of crimes will invariably occur. Our question is "what maximum level of crime can we accept?" which then determines the time and resources required to achieve that level. I have no patience for this "zero-tolerance" rhetoric.
- kartan 7y ago
  > "what maximum level of crime can we accept?" I agree with you. Said that way seems that you are given up. I think that it can be better to say "do you prefer to catch 0.5% more criminals or to reduce 0.4% deaths by cancer". Or something like that. People usually want 100% safety, that is not possible to achieve, and to try to get it they will give away thousands of lives that could have been saved with the time and effort invested in that impossible goal.
- DangerousPie 7y ago
  I don't disagree with your point. It doesn't really have anything to do with the question at hand though. All I'm saying is that these tools are clearly doing a useful job and pretending like false positives are an insurmountable problem is a bit silly.
  - rndgermandude 7y ago
    Are they tho? Are they doing a better job than say police randomly checking people? Let's actually do some crude math to try to estimate how many new cops we'd need to hire in Germany just to check out those false positive hits. I mean, what's the point of such a system if you do not check out the hits and make sure, right? Let's assume it takes police 15 mins to check out a potential hit in person (finding the person, checking their identify and asking some questions), and they work in teams of 2 to be able to secure each other. The Deutsche Bahn alone says in 2018 they had 5.7 million passenger in Germany per day traveling by rail[1]. Let's assume all the train stations get equipped with with this tech and let's assume their 0.67% false positive rate holds. That's 38,190 checks you need to do on innocent people, per day, or 1591.25 checks per hour. A two person team can do 60 / 15 = 4 checks per hour. So you need to have 400 such teams at any given time. A shift is only 8h not 24h and people only work 5/7 days per week, so 400 * 2 * (24/8) * 7 / 5, so you need to hire at least 3,360 police officers (well, probably more like 5000, because we completely disregarded a lot of variables, such as vacation days, etc) just to harass DB rail passengers who were incorrectly classified as threats, nationwide. Remember, those are all false positives, not one of those people is actually a criminal the system is meant to be looking for. IIRC an average police officer costs the state about 90K per year on average in Germany. So you'll be spending 300+ million EUR per year on harassing innocent people just because your tech is kinda shitty. Now if those 3,360 police offers would do actual useful work instead and prevented or solved some crimes... Also, I don't want to be that person who happens to have a similar enough face to some criminal so the face detection triggers on me all the time. [1] https://www.deutschebahn.com/resource/blob/3992284/f9331633c8a19470629f9e3aa6d5fe8c/20190328_bpk_2019_daten_fakten_en-data.pdf https://www.deutschebahn.com/resource/blob/3992284/f9331633c...

yyhhsj0521 7y ago

China now has vending machines where you can pay with your face. (In a your-face-as-your-credit-card sense) If facial recognition is deemed sufficient to be used in payment systems, I wonder if it is just that the systems these police use are just implemented poorly?

kaiwen1 7y ago
The payment system at KFC kiosks and some other places just confirm you with your face. You first have to enter a phone number or other identifying information. Do the vending machines eliminate that first step?
- yyhhsj0521 7y ago
  You set it up in Alipay (Chinese Paypal + Stripe/Square) first (only once), and then you can use it everywhere.