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Boston bans use of facial recognition technology
- 99_00 6y agoIs the American justice system so broken and law enforcement so incompetent that a computer flagging someone is basically an automatic conviction and the technology has to be banned? No evidence, by its self should be enough to get a conviction. Not your finger prints all over the scene of a crime, not a video of someone who looks like you, not even your DNA matching a rape kit. The fact that someone was arrested because of match shows a failure in basic criminal investigation more than anything else.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mazug 6y agoYes, if you're Black and/or poor.
- vinay427 6y agoDo you have a source for your claim?
- classified 6y agoDo you watch the news?
- hevelvarik 6y agoDo you read the threads you respond to?
- rodiger 6y agoDo you think the news is designed to provide an accurate representation of reality? I don't necessarily disagree with you, but pointing to the news isn't exactly convincing.
- hevelvarik 6y agoNo it’s not, and that isn’t the reason for the ban, because it’s not true.
- maldeh 6y agoDon't think OP is claiming that was the reason for the ban, they may be alluding to this separate incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628394 Edit: Agreed, no conviction was involved, so their statement looks exaggerated.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 99_00 6y ago>During Wednesday's meeting and before the vote, Wu said that Boston shouldn't be using racially discriminatory technology. She noted the reports of the first known case of a man arrested after being misidentified by facial recognition technology in Michigan.
- hevelvarik 6y agoAre you presenting that quote in support of some particular point I made or are you just being generally helpful? Yes, so a wrongful arrest was made, and thus the technology isn’t perfect, so we shouldn’t use it is the thinking? Well actually no, apparently wrongful arrests aren’t sufficient cause to ban a technology but only one believed to racially discriminate lol. Or maybe the real reason is because it’s become fashionable of late to fuck the police and the whole because reasons is an afterthought. In any case, the larger point, the one suggested by the OP, the one met with foolish acquiescence in response, the one suggesting that our justice system convicts people on the basis of facial recognition technology is wrong..
- 99_00 6y agoYour tone is completely inappropriate. You're making a lot of assumptions about what people are thinking and what position they are taking in the debate. I can discuss the topic with you when you are feeling better.
- mtgx 6y agoNot only that, but all of this "AI tech" that is starting to be used even by the judicial system is proprietary and the vendors declare trade secrets and copyright and whatnot so you can't take a look at how their algorithm shows someone "guilty". The US government is so corrupt at all levels that a black box weighing in on someone's innocence is somehow found acceptable now. Money in politics and stuff like people or companies being able to give "donations" to police departments and other agencies is a cancer on the American society, and I'm afraid it's in the terminal phase. Until more people realize that this "single issue" affects thousands of other issues in politics -- and do something about it -- it's only going to get worse from here. https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-criminals-must-stop-now/ https://www.wired.com/2017/04/courts-using-ai-sentence-crimi... https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithms-criminal-justice-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm... https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...
- mindslight 6y agoYes, it is that broken. First, simply being charged means you're automatically out $5k for a criminal defense attorney and missed employment. Second, the criminal justice system appears to have little respect for the fallibility of technology, especially when its results are highly correlated with other evidence (eg a police lineup).
- hevelvarik 6y agoThat’s terrible, perhaps we should implement some sort of right to representation system. We could have public attorneys and everything.
- kthejoker2 6y agoYou have to pay for public defendants unless you're indigent ...?
- hevelvarik 6y agoOk learned something. Well, unless there is financial redress for wrongful arrest then that’s a serious general problem. It’s not the problem suggested by OP but a serious one.
- wpdev_63 6y agoIt's because it can track the where abouts of everyone. It's a massive privacy issue. Do you want the gov't to know where you go, what you spend your money, and who you associate with? I sure as hell don't even if they wouldn't find problem with it. It really doesn't matter what the legislation says - no doubt they have already been doing and been calling it something else. It's going to be one of the worst things to come out of the 21st century.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Animats 6y agoIt's because it can track the whereabouts of everyone. It's a massive privacy issue. Do you want the gov't to know where you go, what you spend your money, and who you associate with? The government already knows that, via Google, Facebook, and the telcos.
- dr_hooo 6y agoSo what's the course of action? Give up and simply accept massive privacy infringement, or support laws that push back wherever (still) possible?
- acid303 6y agoYou can leave your phone at home, you can't do that with your face.
- lovelyviking 6y agoTherefore those data collection activities should be prohibited completely for those companies or anyone else.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>Do you want the gov't to know where you go, what you spend your money, and who you associate with? For better or worse (and better only being in the sense that things need to get worse before they get better) there are a great many in Massachusetts do believe all-seeing government surveillance (though if you phrased it like that they'd probably take issue) is a net plus to society.
- sp332 6y agoThere's at least one prominent case of someone being arrested solely on a face-recognition match https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628394 and there are at least a few cases where someone was convicted due to mistaken identity, let me just pick one https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kansas-man-who-blamed-wrongful-conviction-doppleganger-gets-1-1-n949861 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kansas-man-who-blamed-w... So I wouldn't call it "automatic" but since there is a false-positive rate in convictions, it's important to try to reduce false positives at earlier steps as well.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Is the American justice system so broken and law enforcement so incompetent Structurally—not necessarily individually, though often that too—malevolent, not incompetent, at least as is most relevant to the issue at hand.
- an_opabinia 6y agoIf the basis of banning facial recognition technology is its poor accuracy, will facial recognition technology be unbanned if it is 99% accurate for everyone?
- colechristensen 6y agoIf you assume the best then poor accuracy is just the easiest justification not necessarily the only, the best, or the most important. I’ll take it. There are narrow use cases where i think facial recognition in law enforcement would be a good thing, but it is ultimately too much power and too easily abused to trust legal systems to adhere to right usage. Banning is the correct action when misuse is as bad and correct use as complex as they are.
- raverbashing 6y ago> if it is 99% accurate for everyone? Think 99.99% and even then 99% accuracy in a city setting means (more or less) that you'll get the wrong person 1 in 100 times. If you're scanning a crowd with this, you can imagine what can happen
- badrabbit 6y agoEvem 99.999% is not good enough be enough because you will have at least one person that is guaranteed a false arrest and prosecution (which 90%+ prosecuted take a plea deal). There is inaccuracy with other methods as well but you have humans being held accountable. When it comes to justice,mistakes are tolerable so long as adequate compensatiom exists but when the mistake is systemic it becomes intolerable due to the preexisting guarantee of a mistake as opposed to a specific human making an error as a matter of chance. This is all exacerbated by other systemic cruelties of the US justice system where even an arrest and release for no cause means days if not weeks of imprisonment and if charged most people accept a plea bargain deal regardless of actual guilt. It's better to let actual guilty criminals get away than explicitly and systemically accept even one innocent person being punished incorrectly, because among other reasons, the justice system has legitimacy because its goal is to administer justice, accepting any amount of injustice invalidates that legitimacy and authority. A good analogy would be a chef tolerating fecal matter in their food. Yes, there is always some small chance of that happening, but no one accepts food from s chef that explicitly treats toilet water and claims 99% of the fecal matter is gone and only one in 100 people will get sick from it.
- throwawaysea 6y agoThe stated complaint against the article is accuracy. It also says Boston PD doesn’t use it yet - this is preemptive. I wonder if they are aware that tests conducted by the ACLU and the like didn’t use the recommended configurations for precision. Not to mention that false positives don’t matter as long as there’s a human in the loop to validate the match, because then it is no worse than the minor risk of a false match we accept even without facial recognition.
- mola 6y agoFalse positive matter. Being arrested for something you didn't do is horrific and life changing. The human in the loop is human. We unconsciouly tend to trust machines as objective and accurate. This is not as simple as you make it to be.
- throwawaysea 6y agoWe already trust human police to make matches using their eyes to apprehend suspects. This is fundamentally necessary to enforce laws and ensure a safe society. Since a human match is required with or without facial recognition, a false positive from an algorithm doesn’t make the problem any worse.
- mulmen 6y agoYeah but here’s the problem, you massively increased one of the humans capabilities but none of the others. Like judgement or even perception. With their superhuman search capability one person with a bias can discriminate against everyone in the database instead of just whoever is standing in front of them.
- raxxorrax 6y agoI would be pretty angry about a false suspicion. It is a constant additional life risk without any practical advantages. Sure, maybe I get to be victim of some crime and then be glad a video exists. Be that as it may, it isn't worth it to me.
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- Pinegulf 6y ago>"Until this technology is 100%, I'm not interested in it," he said. Umm... I'd like to see technology, which passes this test. Relevant obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- mola 6y agoMaybe that's his point? That he assumes this is unusuable unless he has extreme indication otherwise. Also, he said this technology, not any technology.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoThere is however a huge loophole From the ban: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6956465/Boston-City-Council-face-surveillance-ban.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6956465/Boston-Ci... "Nothing in (b)(1) shall prohibit Boston or any Boston official from: a. using evidence relating to the investigation of a specific crime that may have been generated from a face surveillance system, so long as such evidence was not generated by or at the the request of Boston or any Boston official;" So if a third-party, say the FBI or DEA, provides info from face surveilance systems to Boston with them specifically requesting it, they could use that.
- lvs 6y agoOr a State agency.
- bsenftner 6y agoOr a private firm that sets up to perform FR as a "public service" while collecting valuable person traffic marketing data. Realize people, FR enables the physical world to be overlaid with web-site-like tracking ability. This is hugely valuable to business, and if they figure that out, they will push FR just like they pushed evasive tracking advertising all over the web.
- notwhereyouare 6y agoWouldn't that private firm fall under a 3rd party? From the article: The city council unanimously voted on Wednesday to ban the use of the technology and prohibit any city official from obtaining facial surveillance by asking for it through third parties. The measure will now go to Mayor Marty Walsh with a veto-proof majority. Walsh's office said he would review the ban.
- bsenftner 6y agoWhat if they "don't ask for it" but is made available?
- deleted 6y ago
- Jonanin 6y agoPresumably facial recognition technology is only banned for use by city officials, but the title and article are unclear. I would hope FaceID is fine.
- mweibel 6y agoit's in the second paragraph of the article: The city council unanimously voted on Wednesday to ban the use of the technology and prohibit any city official from obtaining facial surveillance by asking for it through third parties.
- golemiprague 6y agoI don't understand what's the problem? Is it better that some guy will go through file cases or some old detective will pop in and say "I know this guy" or whatever other way people used to identify people? All those methods can produce wrong results exactly like a computer. All the police have to do is let the computer give them some results then view it with their own eyes and see if it matches. The fact that some stupid cop went to arrest someone without even taking a look by himself is just lousy policing, it has nothing to do with the software. This is just part of the agenda to make police dysfunctional so black criminals will be able to go away from serious crimes. Father day in Chicago was just the beginning of the no policing nonsense, it is going to get worst.
- thatoneuser 6y agoLet's just look at automatic flagging systems that currently exist, ie youtube or Facebook. Has anyone here seen objectionable flagging? If so, now just imagine that instead of your youtube channel being shut down, it's your freedom and rights.
- kbos87 6y agoSo much attention is always paid to accuracy when facial recognition comes up. Even if it was 100% accurate, it’s a technology that makes mass surveillance too efficient. Prohibitions need to also extend to the private sector, with the exception of, say, facial recognition for personal use (eg FaceID.)
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>So much attention is always paid to accuracy when facial recognition comes up. Because many people are ok with mass-survielince as long as long as it's used fairly. The problem they see with this tech isn't that it's going to create the kind of world we don't want to live in but that it unfairly targets minorities and/or the poors more than other people. They don't understand that it can never be fair because the institutions that run it can never be fair because there will always be out-groups because that's how human nature works and they will get disproportionately screwed unless we limit the ability of the majority to screw them.
- ahelwer 6y agoI have yet to encounter a single person IRL that wants to live in a society where the authorities know their exact location at all times (yeah yeah cell phones are gps trackers, whatever, you can leave them at home but you can't leave your face).
- kbos87 6y agoOr other private citizens. What’s stopping someone from creating a mesh of ring cameras and using photos scraped from social profiles to let individuals track one anothers‘ whereabouts in real time?
- kachnuv_ocasek 6y agoTechnically? Nothing. Legally, this would be huge privacy incursion. In the EU, we have, among other things, (usually constitutional) right to privacy, anti-harassment and anti-stalking laws etc.
- jp_sc 6y ago“We really have a tendency (...) to let our technology go ahead of our common sense about how we want to live together" Bravo!
- acomjean 6y agoSounds a little Amish. I ended up in Amish country when traveling last century, and it was a little weird. But I went to a house museum, and it was interesting. One of the things that stuck with me as different: They take a little time to look at a new technology a decide if they want to use it. I wonder if our embrace of tech as being "neutral" is correct sometimes. "They're more cautious — more suspicious — wondering is this going to be helpful or is it going to be detrimental? Is it going to bolster our life together, as a community, or is it going to somehow tear it down?"" https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/09/02/217287028/amish-community-not-anti-technology-just-more-thoughful https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/09/02/21... Of course predicting where things end up when new tech disrupts is difficult.
- take_a_breath 6y ago==I wonder if our embrace of tech as being "neutral" is correct sometimes.== It feels more and more like the “neutral” part is a shield we’ve created to exempt ourselves from responsibility.
- strgcmc 6y agoTangent here, but after visiting the Pennsylvania Dutch area a few years ago, I had this mini-epiphany of a vision of an alternate universe where most of society lived in small communities like the Amish do, that were mostly self-reliant and farm-based with cottage industries, BUT in which the communities embraced technology. Basically, with 3D printers and solar power and local grids and machine shops to fabricate for local needs, and a loose mesh network to connect these decentralized nodes/communities together (like Mastodon, instead of the paper-and-print Amish newspapers that exist). A kind of techno-libertarian-Amish blend, to form a society that was more resilient and modular, rather than hyper-centralized, dense, and easily swayed by viral influence/behavior/trends or literal biological viruses. EDIT: Of course it would never "scale" since such a system probably could not support higher population levels at all, but maybe that's okay in the ultra-long-run or some post-apocalyptic rebuilding future (also dangerously veering into population control and genocide-ish topics).
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI would really like to see one of those movies now where they identify the unknown guy by photo as a big time terrorist only this time it turns out he's a janitor in the local high school, then it can be one of those feel-good cop - unlikely partner action-comedy flicks, but only halfway through, the first part will be trying to catch the terrorist who keeps getting away from them by doing janitorial work at unexpected junctures.
- deeblering4 6y agoBeverly Hills Mop 2
- bryanrasmussen 6y agothe janitor could be played by Ryan Reynolds, when they find out he is a janitor they don't believe it "you're too attractive" then he gets upset because being too attractive for being a janitor has kept him from getting promoted all these years. Cop played by Samuel Jackson the terrorist played by Ryan Gosling, "these guys don't even look alike" response Samuel Jackson: they're both too good looking to be janitors. Ryan Reynolds: why does everyone keep saying that! later in the movie - Samuel Jackson - I have had it up to here with all these good looking white guys fing up the mf*ing facial recognition! Idris Elba should be in this too. somehow. on edit: maybe at the end Idris Elba is brought in as another person the facial recognition identified as the terrorist. everyone is "how is this possible!" Ryan Gosling: I don't know, he's pretty good looking, I'm kinda flattered. Ryan Reynolds: yeah, the computer thinks I look like this guy, wow maybe I am too attractive to be a janitor! The ask Idris Elba what he does for a living - custodial technician.
- gus_massa 6y agoIt's easier to get money for a sequel of 24. But some movies with a minimally similar argument: "Presumed Innocent" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100404/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100404/ "No way out" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093640/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093640/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kgin 6y agoIt’s not just about the percentage of false positives, it’s about how much easier it is to generate false positives. Human face-matching accuracy is worse than software in many scenarios (“is this the man that robbed you?”) but it requires so much effort that the absolute number of false positives are low. On the other hand, facial recognition hooked up to cctv can passively generate mountains of matches all day long for pennies.
- criddell 6y agoThis must just be a ban of the technology for government use, right? Can retailers still use facial recognition as part of their in-store analytics? Can Apple still sell FaceID products in Boston?
- zatel 6y agoI think I fall with the HN majority in my privacy views. Yesterday however I talked to someone who said that they prefer someone is always watching, so that they can feel safer. Interestingly they also said they don't want to know the specifics of anyone watching. I wonder if laws like this, that in actuality seem fairly toothless, will result in more of that. "Safety, and ignorance of where/who the watchers are."
- e8e73ieurj 6y agoDespite good intentions and my own discomfort, I can't help but feel like the anti-surveilance movement is mostly an extension of privilege politics and virtue signaling. Police brutality is a real problem, but a wildly common observation of life in the hood/ghetto/LI-housing is the prevalence of crime. You could make neighborhoods a lot safer with a lot fewer police by using modern methods like facial recognition cameras and unmanned aerial surveillance. Break-ins and robberies suddenly become wildly easy to punish afterwards and a lot of investigative work like tracking gang members to get a sense of their operations morphs into a trivial affair. We're rapidly approaching the point where basic physical crime is optional and while there should obviously be oversight and moral considerations at every step I can't help but feel it's a bit entitled of me to live in an okay neighborhood (some crime but its mostly kids drinking in parks and hobo drama) while telling people that the risks are too great to use this kind of tech in any circumstance.
- ch4s3 6y agoPlaces like Baltimore's East/West sides and South Chicago already have arial surveillance, shot spotter, street corner camera, nearly limitless police power, and CommStat operations. These things have been in place for at least a decade and don't seem to be moving the needle.Sure, they could go full PRC, but I doubt anyone has the appetite for that level of draconian surveillance. In my experience living in one of these places, police mostly don't investigate crime even when there's clear video.
- Siira 6y agoThen the problem is with the police, not the tech, right? Safety is a really big privilege.
- mncharity 6y agoFor those unfamiliar with Boston governance, "Boston" here means the "City of Boston", population 0.7 Mppl. A Seattle or El Paso. Rather than a "Greater Boston" aggregation of municipalities of 2 to 8 Mppl. For a NYC analogy, imagine its historical consolidation was more limited, and many of its towns and cities remain independent, never having consolidated into boroughs, and the boroughs into one big city. Flushing, Brooklyn Heights, Kingsbridge, are still independent towns. Here, the city council of a city occupying only lower Manhattan, but confusingly named "City of New York", just voted on face recognition.
- Sandvich 6y agoSomerville, Brookline, and Cambridge have similar bans in place as well. That covers about 250k more people, for what it's worth.
- stx 6y agoLet me start off by saying that I think we need to be careful with this type of tech. Assuming it never makes mistakes can be deadly. As someone who has done some work with building deep learning models what is it that makes this unfairly target minorities? Is it that the people who trained the model did not present enough example images of minorities during training? Is it because darker (presumably black) skin does not show up as well on poor quality videos (presumably because the metering of the camera exposed for the surrounding background which was bright)? Or is it the law enforcement using it was poorly trained and assumed the computer was infallible combined with possible prejudice they already had against minorities? The first problem I would think could be easily solved. The second problem I would think would be rather difficult. The last would require extensive training but I am sure we humans would screw that up also.
- elliekelly 6y agoI think you’re starting from the wrong place in your analysis. The first question we should be asking is why we would want this technology at all. The potential for bias is a moot point if we as a society decide that we don’t want this kind of government surveillance. Even if the systems were perfectly fair and not the least bit biased and were operated by a perfect utopian police force I still wouldn’t want facial recognition. I’ve yet to hear a potential benefit of this sort of software that would justify the huge cost to citizen privacy. Just because we can train computers to recognize faces doesn’t mean that we should.
- stx 6y agoYeah, I fully agree. While I do not want government to have this surveillance I was curious about the problem with the tech itself. As in why was it being biased.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago>I’ve yet to hear a potential benefit of this sort of software that would justify the huge cost to citizen privacy. // It makes it easy to find suspects and narrow down suspect lists. Meaning far fewer police are needed to catch a greater proportion of known criminals. Most people consider that a huge benefit. Let's say you have a db of all faces in country of 60M people. You have a photo/video of a person committing a crime, robbery. False positive rate is 1:100,000. Your search returns 600 people; address match finds 60 with connections to the locality; 5 of those have records, one for robbery. You'd at least sit a person down for an hour to review the matches, consider the records, list people for interview. According to UK ONS stats, those adults released from prison, in Jan-Mar 2018, had a reoffending rate of 65%. It seems just tracking known offenders would find the perpetrator in many cases if visual recognition is possible. I mean, this is _the_ principle benefit.
- shadowgovt 6y agoInteresting. So the city's tying its own hands. I assume private companies can still use their own resources to do their own individual identification, though.
- x87678r 6y agoYeah fingers crossed I can get our own private building to get facial recognition set up.
- AbrahamParangi 6y agoSurveillance should be banned instead.
- x87678r 6y agoSeems dumb, facial recognition has a lot of potential. I love entering UK with facial recognition and passport to go straight through the border, no lines no talking.
- EmilioMartinez 6y ago"Technology should improve so we can slide into a dystopia in harmony"