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N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database
- mtgx 7y agoI wonder if it's related to this somehow: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/31/facial-recognition-school-new-york-privacy-fears https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/31/facial-re...
- cameronbrown 7y agoI know that this might be an unpopular opinion, but if privacy really is dead, why don't we just make this data public? I know there's significant risks, but I feel like it's a better step forward than having this technology developed and deployed in secret.
- mjparrott 7y agoThe ultimate "f&#$ it" move. It's true ... your thoughts, words and actions are all going to be documented and preserved to be later audited and evaluated into perpetuity. The train is too far down the tracks to do anything about it.
- WaitWaitWha 7y agowhy do you think privacy is dead? Where I travel, (digital and otherwise) privacy is quite alive and well. (This is definitely outside of highly populated first-world cities.)
- cameronbrown 7y agoMy point is that if corporate surveillance with creepy camera technology and facial recognition is going to be rolled out everywhere (for the real safety benefits) then isn't it better for us all to spread the power out as much as possible rather than it being concentrated in the hands of a few giant entities?
- pixl97 7y agoThe AWS effect will make sure its concentrated on a few giant entities anyway.
- mjparrott 7y agoWhich way are things trending where you are today? The cost to surveil is going down at a tremendous rate so it is just a matter of time before someone decides to pay to surveil you and then sell their insights or take advantage of them. I don't think it's possible for politicians to keep up with the rate of tech advancement. Did you ever watch a congressional hearing in the US on any technology realated subject? It's a comedic bit.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago>Did you ever watch a congressional hearing in the US on any technology realated subject? It's a comedic bit. This comment could be straight out of 1870 when things were industrializing rapidly. We'll figure it out eventually. Hopefully without any serious oppression and/or bloodshed in the process.
- xvector 7y agoAs long as the geriatrics in Congress remain in Congress, no change will happen. We need new people so we can actually make progress.
- WaitWaitWha 7y agoThis is nearly identical attitude of the younger generation, no matter how far we go back. :D I _do_ agree that the US Congress could use term limits.
- mjparrott 7y agoSo because it is the same attitude it is dismissed? What’s the point of this argument?
- jMyles 7y agoI'm not convinced privacy is dead. But I do agree with you. We can't stop eyes (biological and electronic) from seeing faces. We can't stop memory banks (biological and electronic) from storing the likenesses of faces. Better than trying to craft legislation that we know the state will secretly violate is to make all of this data public and make the world's human facial lexicon part of our shared understanding. This is the most ideal solution for an optimistic society.
- wpietri 7y agoI'd be ok with that if we also a) make public every time the data is accessed, including who is doing it, and b) require that anybody accessing the data have at least as much data public as they are accessing. I think the worst problems here are around asymmetries. If I secretly have all your data but you don't know that and have none of mine, there's a power imbalance. But if we have equal amounts of data and know when each is looking at the other, that seems far more reasonable to me.
- prawn 7y agoWouldn’t people just obfuscate data access through intermediaries and flooding with junk queries?
- alwaysdoit 7y agoCharge an increasing amount for the API and subsidize our taxes with it?
- wpietri 7y agoDepends on how it's done, but if penalties are sufficiently large for that, hopefully not. Especially if we give big awards to bounty hunters and whistleblowers who find malfeasance.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoYes, transparency for all, and I mean all, is the only other way to balance the scales of power. It's either privacy for everyone, or transparency for all, but this in between is the worst where some entities get leverage over others because they have access to information that others don't have about them.
- heavenlyhash 7y agoRight, so then we'll just have balanced power between everyone who can afford the AWS or other compute service bill do to the facial recognition matches against all those millions (and later, hundreds of millions, then billions) of records. That'll be... Oh. Hm. Maybe "privacy for everyone" is a better point to aim for. The alternative seems to be no privacy as a baseline and then still results in an everybody-loses arms race to top it off.
- izzydata 7y agoPeople will start walking around with masks on at all times.
- mlindner 7y agoV for Vendetta becoming real.
- rhcom2 7y agoThen make masks illegal and you can arrest everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws
- jammygit 7y agoCanada made it illegal to take part in a public protest while concealing your face under the Harper government...
- craftyguy 7y agoNYC is not in Canada. In the US, the 1st amendment would likely protect citizens from any such law like this.
- chachachoney 7y agoYou should take a look at New York Penal Law 240.35(4). Also, 1st amendment challenges only protect you if the supreme court is sympathetic.
- drawkbox 7y agoWe still have our thoughts, for now. We should at least know when our face is being accessed on demand and in some ai process. Same with our data. We'll get there eventually but there will be lots of issues along the way.
- jschwartzi 7y agoDissent is useless if you can't give voice to it, and that's exactly what these systems seek to do -- make it dangerous to do anything the state doesn't want you to do. From speaking in public to peaceful protest these databases will eventually be used to identify anyone who has ever peacefully participated in a democratic society. This was what the FBI wanted in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and now, 70 years later, they finally have it.
- jammygit 7y agoFacebook is apparently researching brain-machine interfaces
- whyenot 7y agoBecause these are all pictures of juveniles. Not even children who were convicted of a crime, those who were arrested. Children should be able to make mistakes and to learn and recover, without a bad decision following them for the rest of their lives. That's not only good for the child, it's good for society. It's why juvenile records are usually sealed and/or expunged and why data like this should never ever be public, even if "privacy is dead."
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aasasd 7y agoA real answer: because I personally don't want to make job easier for crazies. Your comments stick around on the web instead of evaporating in thin air. Among hundreds who may read them, there may occur a couple angry people with skewed priorities. I don't want such people to easily know how I look and where I live.
- not_a_cop75 7y agoHonestly, I have no problem with a database of public images showing/tracking people's public actions. It used to be in a small town you knew who was good and bad by their actions. With the population explosion, the only way we have a practical means to return to that is with facial recognition databases.
- acollins1331 7y agoThis guy is DEFINITELY not a cop.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoPray your doppelgangers don't ever break the law.
- not_a_cop75 7y agoThey have, and I went to court for it, and won. It's not easy, but stating that any system that can make mistakes is not worthwhile is frankly bad logic. Can police make mistakes today?
- cheeze 7y agoYou may not. I don't want my government spying on me. What if I was gay and was seen leaving a gay club? Now what if I ended up in the Kingdom of Saud and that data was shared or leaked?
- imgabe 7y agoIf you're gay, you should know the risks about going to Saudi Arabia or any place with similar laws and avoid going there. One does not usually "end up" in a different country unless they're kidnapped and at that point the homosexuality laws are really the least of your problems.
- ilikehurdles 7y agoHow do you avoid being born in a place like that?
- maximente 7y ago> “We have these photos. It makes sense,” Chief Shea said in the interview. ah, yeah, outstanding argument - looking forward to seeing it applied to all other electronic data ever produced, no matter how old they are
- drawkbox 7y agoWe have these AR-15s and all dressed up in SWAT gear, why not start something where we get to use them. /s Sometimes when you get all the equipment, it can encourage usage, just like military gear to police, or large databases gained from surveillance that make detective work way too easy. I feel like law enforcement has relied on data from surveillance for so long that everyone has forgotten real detective work and there is just lots of data noise and toys they are using to up budgets, in the end it might be the end of us.
- reaperducer 7y agoHe also has a mailing list of all the police officers in his department. Why not make those public? It makes sense.
- pixl97 7y agoNeed to get a picture of everyone that has ever been in a law enforcement class. Then the drug cartels can weed out all the undercover agents.
- SN76477 7y agoYou can but should you.
- kumbel 7y agoCan't this help with stuff like missing children? It's not clear why there would be age limits.
- moate 7y agoBetter idea: You have a surveillance network capable of facial recognition. My child goes missing. The only way for you (the police and your network) to know about this is if I inform you. At that point, you can request images of the child and feed them into your machine to see if you can get a hit. OPT IN is always the choice of liberty.
- Aperocky 7y agoThe whole problem is how do you selectively use facial recognition? It's not like there's a human judging whether the camera took a photo of someone underage, and somehow classify it by hands. The system is probably deployed by 90% software engineer and NONE of them probably even saw 0.01% of the actual database outside of the few example they used to debug. Those images will never be visited again unless there's a specific need to see them.
- DocTomoe 7y ago> The system is probably deployed by 90% software engineer And this is the problem: The ruthlessness of engineers who then will wash their hands in innocence. Physicists creating nuclear weapons. Chemists creating chemical weapons. Software Engineers creating an Orwellian surveillance wet dream. These people need to get the Perillos of Athens treatment, so they and those who come after them can learn that ethics is a thing in their profession.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago>The New York Police Department has been loading thousands of arrest photos of children and teenagers into a facial recognition database despite evidence the technology has a higher risk of false matches in younger faces. They already have the photos from arrest records. They already have footage from security cameras, etc. I don't see a problem in using computer algorithms to try to find possible matches between these two data sets. We do this for fingerprints and DNA all the time, matching data that was collected during an arrest to that from a crime scene. Frankly, I do not have a problem with this, and actually think the police would be derelict in their duty if they were not doing this.
- lettergram 7y agoExcept DNA and Fingerprints are far less accurate than you’re led to believe [1]. Having worked with DNA, contamination is likely insanely probable and I doubt the validity of all cases it is used as the only piece of hard evidence (it’s alright circumstantial evidence). The greater question has to do with what our rights are. The reality is, our system has been setup such that everyone commits crimes. By applying highly effective methods, you’re essentially enslaving the population. That’s why we had laws protecting freedom of speech and unreasonable search and seizure. The U.S. was setup to be particularly sensitive to those issues. The reason they are in the constitution is it was believed government would eventually try to chip away at the freedom and it did. That’s why people are concerned. Their duty is to keep the peace. That does not necessarily mean or need to mean spying 24/7. [1] http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~mueller/pdf/forensic_dna_dec_p12-23.pdf http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~mueller/pdf/forensic_dna_dec_p12-...
- paganel 7y agoPresumably the documented higher risk of false positives outweighs the "advantages" of catching a couple of kids doing what kids usually do.
- TomK32 7y agoThey are young and learning and deserve a chance to better themselves without being hassled by computers. Also, what chance has facial recognition to match a 11 year old kid three years later? It quickly becomes useless data, don't you agree?
- crazygringo 7y agoFacial recognition helps catch criminals. Young people can be criminals too. And if the police catch them while still juvenile, they might have more of a chance to turn their life around. Young people can also go missing, and facial recognition of security cams could help find them. I honestly can't see any reason why children shouldn't be included like everyone else. It goes without saying that a conviction should never depend on computer matching, and that safeguards need to be in place to prevent abuse and limit to legitimate law-enforcement purposes. But trying to locate suspects or victims in the first place? Children are no less important here than adults.
- lm28469 7y agoYou can reuse that comment when we get mandatory under skin gps tracker from birth. We could even sacrifice all our liberties and get rid of every single crimes if we went further. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoThere is a big difference between your skin gps tracker and facial recognition. The skin gps tracker is a new data source. Facial recognition is making better use of already existing data from mug shots and security cameras. If you are concerned about privacy, then let's regulate what data you can collect and from whom you can collect it. However, once you have the data, police should be able to use computers to better understand, filter, and generally make the data more useful to solving crimes.
- lm28469 7y agoEverything is new data source at some point, everyone gets outraged for a bit and then it's business as usual. There is no stopping ""progress"" and technology.
- owlninja 7y agoThere was a story here locally where a young boy wandered out of his house while he was thought to be napping. The parents noticed and a search was started, but after a few hours they found him inside a neighbors car, dead from the Texas heat. A GPS tracker would have saved his life. I understand the privacy and personal liberty concerns, but I have a hard time coming to a decision on this one myself.
- _lessthan0 7y agoSooo... where are all the people against the Chinese on this thread?
- chronic84920 7y agoDownvoted to hell by the Chinese internet manipulation squad.
- emiliobumachar 7y agoProbably right here, discussing the USA this time because that's the topic. It would probably not contribute to the discussion to drop references to China.
- hogFeast 7y agoThey aren't children. They are future criminals.
- nickpeterson 7y agoExactly, I hear many of them are already in the system...
- b_tterc_p 7y agoI wonder how this affects their system. If you have 10 years of a changing facial profile on someone, is their algorithm smart enough to drop older items? Or do you, in your 20s, look like your ten year old brother?
- TuringNYC 7y agoI'd imagine the problems are far more fundamental -- do they work at all given the typically poorly constructed training sets. And also what is their FP/FN rates for subsets of the population -- do they work as well/poorly for everyone? The problem I see with many of these systems are -- they are trained on one population and used for inference on a very different distribution (minorities.) OR their accuracy is only high on the overall population, not universally accurate across all subsets. When those in charge, those with political power, etc (usually non-minorities) "see" the performance of the system, they experience it in their own context where it works. They don't feel the pain from the experience of the sub-populations where false positives/negatives are larger.
- modriano 7y agoMy guess is that these facial rec systems aren't very sophisticated. I suspect that they just compare a sample image with their database of images, so as people age, they just look less like their image in the database, so the similarity scores will simply decrease as the data grows more stale.
- phil248 7y agoThis reminds me of when I was a little kid, maybe 2nd grade, and our class took a field trip to the police station. We all had our fingerprints taken. At the time, it just seemed like a fun activity to show us a little bit about how police work is done.
- MegaButts 7y agoAre they legally allowed to do this without the parents' permission?
- completelylegit 7y agoFingerprints were collected with their permission. There was a lot of stranger-danger anxiety back then. I guess it’d be good if I had been kidnapped and they could find my fingerprints at the kidnappers house, or prove that I am “me” if I was kidnapped and escaped years later. My parents bought it as did many others.
- Operyl 7y agoHmm, did they actually file the fingerprints? I did the same thing, but I specifically remember keeping the actual fingerprints (we used ink).
- driverdan 7y agoFingerprinting kids is a regular thing in the US. I had it done when I was young, maybe 30 years ago. I believe it's used to help identify kidnapped (murdered?) children. It was so long ago I don't know if they still do it or what's done with the fingerprints now.
- JauntTrooper 7y agoYup. 30 years ago or so, I was in 1st or 2nd grade and I remember they fingerprinted all of us in the school cafeteria. i think they told us it was in case we get kidnapped.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gregsadetsky 7y agoOn a related note, I was recently disgusted by Bunk1 [0], a SaaS for summer camps that allows parents to stay connected with their children, as it highlights "Facial Recognition" as one of its features on its homepage. A friend's child is in a camp that unfortunately uses them, and "invited me" so that I could send a letter to the child (which is a useful feature). The URL of the child's photo is: https://.../trained_face/image/...jpg https://.../trained_face/image/...jpg --- "Facial Recognition When parents upload a photo of their camper, our facial recognition software scans each photo posted by camp and notifies parents when photos of their camper are available. Family members can easily see their camper in action without hunting through the camp’s entire gallery." [0] https://bunk1.com/ https://bunk1.com/
- OrgNet 7y agoaround here (florida), they try to fingerprint children (some less than 5 year old) at special events... (in case they get kidnapped)