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The AWS Rekognition study I believe you are referring to was fundamentally flawed in two ways. First, the threshold used was the default suggested for one-to-o
by jklontz 7y ago
The AWS Rekognition study I believe you are referring to was fundamentally flawed in two ways.
First, the threshold used was the default suggested for one-to-one matching (lower false reject rate, higher false accept rate). It doesn't make sense to use this threshold for search applications, and when the study was reproduced with a more appropriate (higher) threshold there were 0 mis-identifications.
Second, law enforcement use of face recognition doesn't even involve the algorithm making a lights-out identification decision. Instead, the most similar faces are presented to the user in ranked order by similarity (like a search engine). It's a tool for generating investigative leads, often preferable to publishing the face image of a wanted perpetrator on local news.
- reaperducer 7y agothe threshold used was the default What makes you think that a LEO would change the defaults? They're not computer scientists, they're people who bought a product to perform a specific function. It's a tool for generating investigative leads So were photo books, lie detectors, surveillance cameras, and other tools at first. They became a close enough proxy for "guilt" in the eyes of the users for people to automatically be treated as criminals, even if they'd done nothing wrong.
- HALtheWise 7y agoI believe that there were multiple defaults, and they intentionally chose the wrong one to make a point. Your quote cropping is embarrassing. The analogy would be blaming an anchor manufacturer when the "default anchor" for rowboats doesn't hold an oil tanker.
- skybrian 7y agoThe question is how do you prevent abuse without handicapping investigators too much, since presumably you do want cases to be solved if possible?
- manigandham 7y agoWas this the actual product used by law enforcement or just the same software workflow used for a study? Those are entirely different environments and there's no reason to expect the final offering to behave like the academic setup used in a specific report.