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Evem 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 tak

Evem 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.

winrid 6y ago
99.99% is probably better than actual cops right? Also there is the idea that such an infastructure would scare criminals into not doing incriminating things.
- badrabbit 6y ago
  Thats what I said, better than humans is not good enough. Humans can make mistakes but they can be held accountable and their mistake is not an accepted outcome of the system. To put it differently, facial recongition would be compared with explicitly accepting only low IQ people for cop jobs (which some PDs do!) as opposed to hiring the best people and expecting them to have 100% accuracy. Their mistake is a matter of judgement and negligence. Facial recongition's mistakes are a matter of the system accepting the mistake. Technical people often focus on the pure metrics but as in engineering,why faults happen is important. The metric should never be the goal. To put it differently, explicitly accepting injustice is incompatible with mine and I believe society's understanding of justice. This is the same reason why ML shouldn't be used to replace human judges regardless of improvements in outcome. The authority of judges,cops and legislators is legitimate because the people have a contract with them where the people's view of justice is implemented as law in return the people subject themselves to these laws. Facial recogntion and ML judges violate that contract and as a result the outcome is illegitimate,100% of convicts become wrongly convicted because as a people the views on justice of their society was nor enforced by a member of their society that is elected or appointed by the people but by a blackbox logic that only looks at the outcome as a metric. A defense attorney can claim eyewitness testimony is inaccurate for example and cross examine witnesses but that attorney cannot interrogate a ML presenting as evidence a blurry picture with a 99% accuracy match.
  - winrid 6y ago
    It seems a lot of arguments like this are based on immediate conviction. I'm totally not for that. I think your identity should be verified using other means before being arrested when possible.
    - badrabbit 6y ago
      You dont need any conviction, even setting aside the horrors of the US justice system, this is simply not a sacrifice I and many others are willing to make just to secure more convictions. There are manyblong standing issues of the system that must be fixed before something like this is even considered. To start, law enforcement acting with malicious and criminal intent repeatedly get away with framing suspects, falsifying evidence and brutalizing suspects. I don't need them to be tracking everyone's movements too. I think I'll pass on a genocide this morning (some of them actually say they want a race war). And thats just the very tip of the iceberg. Rule number 1 of getting out of a hole: stop digging it.
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  > Also there is the idea that such an infastructure would scare criminals into not doing incriminating things. Even if the criminals were afraid of the repercussion of their actions, and were aware of the system to catch them and be convinced it will work and would lead to their capture (that's already a LOT of if), this would only work on premeditated crimes, which is a minority of the ones commited in the street. A lot of crimes are not though in advance, but done on the moment. People fighting because they are angry. Somebody stealing because they saw an opportunity. We hear a lot about recurring pick pockets, or bank heists. But those are not the majority. Most bad things in the street happen without being planned, and without consideration for the consequences. Planned crimes are white colar crimes, and they don't get caught by cameras.
  - winrid 6y ago
    You also have to have a political system that can incriminate people caught on camera, for ex: (2019) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-02/california-car-burglaries-lawmakers-loophole%3f_amp=true https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/california/stor... I still think it makes a big difference. I spent time in China and honestly I felt safer in areas where terrorists were a concern than I do in downtown SF.
jariel 6y ago
"Evem 99.999% is not good enough be enough because you will have at least one person that is guaranteed a false arrest and prosecution " This isn't the right characterisation. Facial recognition at 95% can be very useful in helping to find people, initiate investigations. It doesn't have to provide grounds for arrest, let alone evidence for a trial. Of course, there are problems even there, depending on a variety of issues. Your license plate is being recorded in a variety of places, and for serious crimes, they will definitely use that information to 'look you up' FYI and face-matching isn't that much different. As for arrest and prosecution, obviously that's another can of worms, but even then, there is a threshold at which we will effectively call it 'evidence'. 99.999% ID + was in the vicinity, plus no alibi, plus motive and prior record? That's a case. If you think about it - we consider 'video evidence' to be fairly conclusive ... well I doubt humans are actually 99.999% accurate in their ability to matches faces to video! So it adds up. " When it comes to justice, mistakes are tolerable so long as adequate compensation exists" There doesn't need to be any compensation if there wasn't any malfeasance or incompetence in the system. To the extent our public servants are all acting above bar, using efficient, fair and lawful methods, then 'compensation' is not really the issue. "It's better to let actual guilty criminals get away than explicitly and systemically accept even one innocent person being punished incorrectly," "accepting any amount of injustice invalidates that legitimacy and authority." This is not true - by your very own logic. First - a justice system that 'lets people off who are 99.999% chance of being guilty' - implies quite a lot of injustice. Moreover, that in some instances, innocents will go to jail is tragic but absolutely inevitable. Not in 100 years will we have fixed this problem. Along with some of the racial injustice you mention, you know what is 'unjust'? The amount of crime, particularly murder that goes unpunished in the US due to low case clearances, particularly in violent communities. That means aggressive killers on the block go free, gloat in their crimes, and do it again. Can you imagine having your sibling or child killed, and essentially knowing 'who did it' - but having them go free? This is common. Facial recognition is not quite ready for prime-time, and it's invasive in ways that license plates are not, so it makes sense to ban it for the time being - however, there are thresholds at which it would make sense. Facial recognition in airports, near high value targets and such systems for alerting police to 'high value, dangerous targets' might make sense. But for everything else it's just not needed.
- 6y ago
PeterStuer 6y ago
"There is inaccuracy with other methods as well but you have humans being held accountable." How would the use of a technology make the person acting on the results of the information provided not accountable? There is no agency in those systems, so accountability can not be deferred to them. "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. " Actually that is exactly how the food industry operates.
- bskap 6y ago
  We're already giving people harsher treatment because The Machine says they deserve it, with no ability for defendants to question The Machine and no one accountable for v its recommendations. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithms-criminal-justice-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm...
  - PeterStuer 6y ago
    "The Machine" excuse has been used for every technology in existence, but that does not mean attributing agency to machines is acceptable. Those deploying and operating the 'machines' are accountable as no other option makes sense. Note that I am not arguing for nor against the specific use of the facial recognition systems by city officials.
    - bskap 6y ago
      Are you talking about in theory or in reality? Who or what do you think the people deploying these technologies are accountable to, and what prevents the accountability system from accepting "I did it because the algorithm said I should' as a valid justification?
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure most people don't accept food from a chef that explicitly treats toilet water, although your main point about how the food industry operates is correct.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
99.999% is better than most fingerprints - maybe all of them really https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249890.pdf https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249890.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093498/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093498/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ptd 6y ago
  It’s interesting to me that the theme of your comment wasn’t “stop fingerprinting”, it was well fingerprinting is fucked too, and we use that to arrest people! The majority of people dealing with cops are black but who cares...
  - thatoneuser 6y ago
    "The majority of people dealing with cops are black" Um, source? Using the link below, that's clearly not the case. https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2 https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    you seem to be a person who has a great ability to read a lot into a comment and find a good way to insult someone with that reading, it must be nice.
- cool_dude85 6y ago
  I'm willing to come out against anyone developing a fingerprint gun that allows them to take fingerprints from everyone attending a mass gathering, too.
- hprotagonist 6y ago
  do you take everyone’s fingerprints, at 60 frames per second? if you sample enough, nearly any real world classifier will have a nontrivial false positive rate.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
amelius 6y ago
> 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. How would this work for the acceptance of self driving cars?
- antris 6y ago
  If the self driving cars are significantly safer than human drivers, it's a bit hard to argue that self driving cars should be banned.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    In that analogy if you ban self driving cars you also have ban humans driving cars. After all we have plenty of proof of the bad reliability of humans driving vehicles at any speed.
roenxi 6y ago
> ...you will have at least one person that is guaranteed a false arrest and prosecution... There have already been some other comments pointing out that this is an unreasonable standard, but they aren't really thinking big enough - the court-based system of justice isn't even that accurate. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" isn't going to be a standard of evidence even reaching 99% of evidence. Out of every 100 people in jail for murder, some of them just didn't do it. 100 people is a lot.
shultays 6y ago
No one is saying this system should flag people in cameras and send the kill drones to eliminate targets or send robocops to make arrests. But if we have a reliable percentage that won't create too many false positives that can alert polices if a suspect is seen on a camera so that they would start the investigation, what is wrong with that?
- spurgu 6y ago
  In terms of technology, yes. In terms of civil liberties, no. I predict a lot of cities and countries will follow suit and start banning facial recognition technology altogether. If not then we're screwed. I already avoid traveling to the UK for the insane privacy invasion of their CCTV system. I get that there are benefits for crime investigation but it's far from worth it, the whole concept feels incredibly surreal (and wrong) to me. Edit: To further your point, even if fingerprints were 100% accurate, there's still the off chance that someone planted your fingerprints. And someone could be wearing a you-mask, so you cannot rely on fingerprints or facial recognition for waterproof evidence. Which is why proper trials require multiple sources of evidence (I hope - IANAL).
  - shultays 6y ago
    I think the invasion of privacy is a trade off. One day we will have the technology and capability for doing large scale accurate facial recognition and I would gladly take that if that means greatly reducing crimes. The question is if we can do this without the people in charge abusing or not. If we can guarantee that it will be only being used for catching people with arrest warrant then I would have no problem with increasing the efficiency of cops
    - spurgu 6y ago
      I agree to disagree with it being an acceptable trade-off. > The question is if we can do this without the people in charge abusing or not. I think this is the main question and goes hand in hand with whether governments should be able to decrypt the internet. Please let me move around freely, meet the people I want to meet, without having me added to some database of people with suspect contacts. I am fine with granting "criminals" the same privileges (as I posted in a comment yesterday[0] I am definitely a criminal, given the definition of the word). You start with cameras everywhere for facial recognition, then you add microphones... it's hard to encrypt real-life discussion without inventing a new language, which could be easily decrypted anyways. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23630386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23630386
easytiger 6y ago
> that is guaranteed a false arrest and prosecution (which 90%+ prosecuted take a plea deal). No one is presenting the outcome of a facial recognition algorithm's certainty in prosecutions. This is fundamentally incorrect
wongarsu 6y ago
99.999% accuracy is indeed extremely bad once you multiply it with the expected number of searches. But what you are describing is really a problem with your "justice" system. A system where most people are coerced not to use their right to trial ("accept the plea deal or your sentence will be much worse", with many innocent people taking the plea deal) is simply incapable of delivering justice.

winrid 6y ago

99.99% is probably better than actual cops right? Also there is the idea that such an infastructure would scare criminals into not doing incriminating things.

badrabbit 6y ago
Thats what I said, better than humans is not good enough. Humans can make mistakes but they can be held accountable and their mistake is not an accepted outcome of the system. To put it differently, facial recongition would be compared with explicitly accepting only low IQ people for cop jobs (which some PDs do!) as opposed to hiring the best people and expecting them to have 100% accuracy. Their mistake is a matter of judgement and negligence. Facial recongition's mistakes are a matter of the system accepting the mistake. Technical people often focus on the pure metrics but as in engineering,why faults happen is important. The metric should never be the goal. To put it differently, explicitly accepting injustice is incompatible with mine and I believe society's understanding of justice. This is the same reason why ML shouldn't be used to replace human judges regardless of improvements in outcome. The authority of judges,cops and legislators is legitimate because the people have a contract with them where the people's view of justice is implemented as law in return the people subject themselves to these laws. Facial recogntion and ML judges violate that contract and as a result the outcome is illegitimate,100% of convicts become wrongly convicted because as a people the views on justice of their society was nor enforced by a member of their society that is elected or appointed by the people but by a blackbox logic that only looks at the outcome as a metric. A defense attorney can claim eyewitness testimony is inaccurate for example and cross examine witnesses but that attorney cannot interrogate a ML presenting as evidence a blurry picture with a 99% accuracy match.
- winrid 6y ago
  It seems a lot of arguments like this are based on immediate conviction. I'm totally not for that. I think your identity should be verified using other means before being arrested when possible.
  - badrabbit 6y ago
    You dont need any conviction, even setting aside the horrors of the US justice system, this is simply not a sacrifice I and many others are willing to make just to secure more convictions. There are manyblong standing issues of the system that must be fixed before something like this is even considered. To start, law enforcement acting with malicious and criminal intent repeatedly get away with framing suspects, falsifying evidence and brutalizing suspects. I don't need them to be tracking everyone's movements too. I think I'll pass on a genocide this morning (some of them actually say they want a race war). And thats just the very tip of the iceberg. Rule number 1 of getting out of a hole: stop digging it.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
> Also there is the idea that such an infastructure would scare criminals into not doing incriminating things. Even if the criminals were afraid of the repercussion of their actions, and were aware of the system to catch them and be convinced it will work and would lead to their capture (that's already a LOT of if), this would only work on premeditated crimes, which is a minority of the ones commited in the street. A lot of crimes are not though in advance, but done on the moment. People fighting because they are angry. Somebody stealing because they saw an opportunity. We hear a lot about recurring pick pockets, or bank heists. But those are not the majority. Most bad things in the street happen without being planned, and without consideration for the consequences. Planned crimes are white colar crimes, and they don't get caught by cameras.
- winrid 6y ago
  You also have to have a political system that can incriminate people caught on camera, for ex: (2019) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-02/california-car-burglaries-lawmakers-loophole%3f_amp=true https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/california/stor... I still think it makes a big difference. I spent time in China and honestly I felt safer in areas where terrorists were a concern than I do in downtown SF.

jariel 6y ago

"Evem 99.999% is not good enough be enough because you will have at least one person that is guaranteed a false arrest and prosecution " This isn't the right characterisation. Facial recognition at 95% can be very useful in helping to find people, initiate investigations. It doesn't have to provide grounds for arrest, let alone evidence for a trial. Of course, there are problems even there, depending on a variety of issues. Your license plate is being recorded in a variety of places, and for serious crimes, they will definitely use that information to 'look you up' FYI and face-matching isn't that much different. As for arrest and prosecution, obviously that's another can of worms, but even then, there is a threshold at which we will effectively call it 'evidence'. 99.999% ID + was in the vicinity, plus no alibi, plus motive and prior record? That's a case. If you think about it - we consider 'video evidence' to be fairly conclusive ... well I doubt humans are actually 99.999% accurate in their ability to matches faces to video! So it adds up. " When it comes to justice, mistakes are tolerable so long as adequate compensation exists" There doesn't need to be any compensation if there wasn't any malfeasance or incompetence in the system. To the extent our public servants are all acting above bar, using efficient, fair and lawful methods, then 'compensation' is not really the issue. "It's better to let actual guilty criminals get away than explicitly and systemically accept even one innocent person being punished incorrectly," "accepting any amount of injustice invalidates that legitimacy and authority." This is not true - by your very own logic. First - a justice system that 'lets people off who are 99.999% chance of being guilty' - implies quite a lot of injustice. Moreover, that in some instances, innocents will go to jail is tragic but absolutely inevitable. Not in 100 years will we have fixed this problem. Along with some of the racial injustice you mention, you know what is 'unjust'? The amount of crime, particularly murder that goes unpunished in the US due to low case clearances, particularly in violent communities. That means aggressive killers on the block go free, gloat in their crimes, and do it again. Can you imagine having your sibling or child killed, and essentially knowing 'who did it' - but having them go free? This is common. Facial recognition is not quite ready for prime-time, and it's invasive in ways that license plates are not, so it makes sense to ban it for the time being - however, there are thresholds at which it would make sense. Facial recognition in airports, near high value targets and such systems for alerting police to 'high value, dangerous targets' might make sense. But for everything else it's just not needed.

6y ago

PeterStuer 6y ago

"There is inaccuracy with other methods as well but you have humans being held accountable." How would the use of a technology make the person acting on the results of the information provided not accountable? There is no agency in those systems, so accountability can not be deferred to them. "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. " Actually that is exactly how the food industry operates.

bskap 6y ago
We're already giving people harsher treatment because The Machine says they deserve it, with no ability for defendants to question The Machine and no one accountable for v its recommendations. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithms-criminal-justice-ai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/01/21/137783/algorithm...
- PeterStuer 6y ago
  "The Machine" excuse has been used for every technology in existence, but that does not mean attributing agency to machines is acceptable. Those deploying and operating the 'machines' are accountable as no other option makes sense. Note that I am not arguing for nor against the specific use of the facial recognition systems by city officials.
  - bskap 6y ago
    Are you talking about in theory or in reality? Who or what do you think the people deploying these technologies are accountable to, and what prevents the accountability system from accepting "I did it because the algorithm said I should' as a valid justification?
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
I'm pretty sure most people don't accept food from a chef that explicitly treats toilet water, although your main point about how the food industry operates is correct.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

99.999% is better than most fingerprints - maybe all of them really https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249890.pdf https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/249890.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093498/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3093498/

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ptd 6y ago
It’s interesting to me that the theme of your comment wasn’t “stop fingerprinting”, it was well fingerprinting is fucked too, and we use that to arrest people! The majority of people dealing with cops are black but who cares...
- thatoneuser 6y ago
  "The majority of people dealing with cops are black" Um, source? Using the link below, that's clearly not the case. https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2 https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  you seem to be a person who has a great ability to read a lot into a comment and find a good way to insult someone with that reading, it must be nice.
cool_dude85 6y ago
I'm willing to come out against anyone developing a fingerprint gun that allows them to take fingerprints from everyone attending a mass gathering, too.
hprotagonist 6y ago
do you take everyone’s fingerprints, at 60 frames per second? if you sample enough, nearly any real world classifier will have a nontrivial false positive rate.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

amelius 6y ago

> 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. How would this work for the acceptance of self driving cars?

antris 6y ago
If the self driving cars are significantly safer than human drivers, it's a bit hard to argue that self driving cars should be banned.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  In that analogy if you ban self driving cars you also have ban humans driving cars. After all we have plenty of proof of the bad reliability of humans driving vehicles at any speed.

roenxi 6y ago

> ...you will have at least one person that is guaranteed a false arrest and prosecution... There have already been some other comments pointing out that this is an unreasonable standard, but they aren't really thinking big enough - the court-based system of justice isn't even that accurate. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" isn't going to be a standard of evidence even reaching 99% of evidence. Out of every 100 people in jail for murder, some of them just didn't do it. 100 people is a lot.

shultays 6y ago

No one is saying this system should flag people in cameras and send the kill drones to eliminate targets or send robocops to make arrests. But if we have a reliable percentage that won't create too many false positives that can alert polices if a suspect is seen on a camera so that they would start the investigation, what is wrong with that?

spurgu 6y ago
In terms of technology, yes. In terms of civil liberties, no. I predict a lot of cities and countries will follow suit and start banning facial recognition technology altogether. If not then we're screwed. I already avoid traveling to the UK for the insane privacy invasion of their CCTV system. I get that there are benefits for crime investigation but it's far from worth it, the whole concept feels incredibly surreal (and wrong) to me. Edit: To further your point, even if fingerprints were 100% accurate, there's still the off chance that someone planted your fingerprints. And someone could be wearing a you-mask, so you cannot rely on fingerprints or facial recognition for waterproof evidence. Which is why proper trials require multiple sources of evidence (I hope - IANAL).
- shultays 6y ago
  I think the invasion of privacy is a trade off. One day we will have the technology and capability for doing large scale accurate facial recognition and I would gladly take that if that means greatly reducing crimes. The question is if we can do this without the people in charge abusing or not. If we can guarantee that it will be only being used for catching people with arrest warrant then I would have no problem with increasing the efficiency of cops
  - spurgu 6y ago
    I agree to disagree with it being an acceptable trade-off. > The question is if we can do this without the people in charge abusing or not. I think this is the main question and goes hand in hand with whether governments should be able to decrypt the internet. Please let me move around freely, meet the people I want to meet, without having me added to some database of people with suspect contacts. I am fine with granting "criminals" the same privileges (as I posted in a comment yesterday[0] I am definitely a criminal, given the definition of the word). You start with cameras everywhere for facial recognition, then you add microphones... it's hard to encrypt real-life discussion without inventing a new language, which could be easily decrypted anyways. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23630386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23630386

easytiger 6y ago

> that is guaranteed a false arrest and prosecution (which 90%+ prosecuted take a plea deal). No one is presenting the outcome of a facial recognition algorithm's certainty in prosecutions. This is fundamentally incorrect

wongarsu 6y ago

99.999% accuracy is indeed extremely bad once you multiply it with the expected number of searches. But what you are describing is really a problem with your "justice" system. A system where most people are coerced not to use their right to trial ("accept the plea deal or your sentence will be much worse", with many innocent people taking the plea deal) is simply incapable of delivering justice.