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When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them? We are not talking about using cameras on the

When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them? We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught?

Ensorceled 6y ago
Facial recognition has a disturbing habit of "catching" the wrong people. "We have video of a crime, arrest these people", is how facial recognition is advertised (and you bought the story). But it keeps being used as "there is a <19 times in 20> 87% chance that this person walking down the street in Atlanta is the person who robbed a liquor store in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 2006, go <violently> arrest that guy"
- Jkvngt 6y ago
  Is this actually true though? It sounds great, but where’s the data? * we need more than just the occasional anecdote to determine if this is a real issue
  - keiferski 6y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    There are literally dozens of news stories about the wrong person being arrested for a crime they could not have committed. It's literally why cities have been banning the practice in the original news story.
  - giardini 6y ago
    Facial recognition software fails legal tests if used with large datasets. It does so b/c software does not discriminate in the same way the human mind does. For example, some facial recognition software identifies this picture of a man wearing glasses as actress Milla Jovovitch: https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/01160657/unknown.jpg?width=800 https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/0... [The New Scientist article from which the above picture is taken is "Glasses make face recognition tech think you're Milla Jovovich": https://www.newscientist.com/article/2111041-glasses-make-face-recognition-tech-think-youre-milla-jovovich/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2111041-glasses-make-fa... ] The (PDF) original paper: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf Steven Talley was identified by the FBI as the primary suspect in two bank robberies using a facial recognition algorithm. He had an iron-clad alibi, but the police and FBI weren't convinced. In court one of the bank tellers said Talley definitely wasn't the robber. Nonetheless Talley lost his job, his wife and his family and was held in prison for months. For more details read: "LOSING FACE: How a Facial Recognition Mismatch Can Ruin Your Life" https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-recognition-mismatch-can-ruin-your-life/ https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-recognition... I found out about the facial recognition failures from he outstanding book "Hello World" by Hannah Fry. Fry tells the story of Steven Talley as part of a chapter on crime, AI and facial recognition. https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-Algorithms/dp/039363499X https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-Algorithms/dp... Fry's book shows how/why facial recognition software simply does not work well enough to use in police work. She provides the studies and footnotes them. As Fry says: "If you're searching for a particular criminal in digital line-up of millions...the best-case scenario is that you won't find the right person one in six times...". That is not nearly good enough for law enforcement and the courts. -from "Hello World" by Hannah Fry
  - glenda 6y ago
    The police chief in Detroit said their facial recognition system had a 4% success rate. Presumably this means that 96% of the time they were targeting someone with absolutely no relation to the actual crime. What a complete waste of time and disregard for our civil liberties. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/detroit-police-chief-admits-facial-recognition-is-wrong-96-of-the-time/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/detroit-police-c...
- bsenftner 6y ago
  Facial recognition needs to be paired with a screening for Racial Blindness with any operator of FR software. FR software provides a filtering, given many faces, here are the best matches. This is where the FR software operator is critical because it is then their task to pick the best match. The final step in FR is always a human making the selection, primarily due to a lack of image quality the "best match" cannot be assured to be the correct match, and even then the correct person may not even be in the FR database. This is the type of understanding and analysis that needs to be present in an FR software operator, but as far as I can tell this area is completely ignored by both the producers of FR and the customers of FR. Disclosure: I am the lead developer of a global leading FR solution.
- mytailorisrich 6y ago
  That's a problem with police procedures and training of those who use facial recognition, not facial recognition per se.
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    Yes? Cities banned facial recognition use because police have proven unable to create effective procedures and training to prevent the problems.
  - dhimes 6y ago
    Indeed. Let's not forget, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable as well.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them? Because trespass by itself is not a big enough crime to handle in that manner. Trespass is a crime that exists solely as a means to prosecute people for other not criminal enough to violate the letter of the law type behavior. There need to be other factors to make it worth tracking people down (theft, vandalism, stalking, etc). A pure trespass charge is not worth it. By all means prosecute the people who smashed stuff but in this day and age you don't need to go after everyone in order to do that. >We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. Do you know what the MA state police use their ALPRs for since we don't really have a car theft problem big enough to warrant running plates all the time? They park on a main road by an intersection and automate the sending of expired inspection sticker tickets. Government programs are under immense pressure to justify their budget. This is why you have swat teams responding to BS, gotta use it or lose it. Dragnet crap inevitably gets used on petty crimes in order to justify it. All the incentives point that way so that's what you get. >If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught? Looters, not trespassers. > We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. But that is exactly where it winds up leading. But because it's not politically popular to prosecute jaywalking and rich people jaywalk they do things like prosecute all the weed dealers and backyard mechanics for not obtaining all the proper licensing and paying proper taxes. Also as an aside I find your username very fitting. I've lived in half a dozen states and only the DMV areas gives the Boston area a run for its money when it comes to approval of doing anything to enforce the law paired with blindness to downsides of enforcing the law to the letter. (Yes I am aware this is a sweeping generalization but I think it's an accurate enough one that I don't feel bad about making it.) Though I will admit that I have not lived in the wealthy suburbs of NYC and I have my suspicions about them.
- exporectomy 6y ago
  > automate the sending of expired inspection sticker tickets I think that's an excellent use of the technology. These are minor offences that would be too expensive and burdensome to pursue individually by hand. If it were enforced reliably, almost nobody would do be doing it. People get charged a late penalty for not paying their power bill. It's enforced with 100% reliability. But expired inspection tickets is less obnoxious because you can just stop driving your car when it becomes illegal to do so. You can't just return electricity you already used but haven't paid for yet. If you believe people should drive cars without safety certifications, that's a different issue. In that case, the solution isn't haphazard enforcement but no enforcement at all.

Ensorceled 6y ago

Facial recognition has a disturbing habit of "catching" the wrong people. "We have video of a crime, arrest these people", is how facial recognition is advertised (and you bought the story). But it keeps being used as "there is a <19 times in 20> 87% chance that this person walking down the street in Atlanta is the person who robbed a liquor store in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan in 2006, go <violently> arrest that guy"

Jkvngt 6y ago
Is this actually true though? It sounds great, but where’s the data? * we need more than just the occasional anecdote to determine if this is a real issue
- keiferski 6y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  There are literally dozens of news stories about the wrong person being arrested for a crime they could not have committed. It's literally why cities have been banning the practice in the original news story.
- giardini 6y ago
  Facial recognition software fails legal tests if used with large datasets. It does so b/c software does not discriminate in the same way the human mind does. For example, some facial recognition software identifies this picture of a man wearing glasses as actress Milla Jovovitch: https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/01160657/unknown.jpg?width=800 https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/0... [The New Scientist article from which the above picture is taken is "Glasses make face recognition tech think you're Milla Jovovich": https://www.newscientist.com/article/2111041-glasses-make-face-recognition-tech-think-youre-milla-jovovich/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2111041-glasses-make-fa... ] The (PDF) original paper: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf Steven Talley was identified by the FBI as the primary suspect in two bank robberies using a facial recognition algorithm. He had an iron-clad alibi, but the police and FBI weren't convinced. In court one of the bank tellers said Talley definitely wasn't the robber. Nonetheless Talley lost his job, his wife and his family and was held in prison for months. For more details read: "LOSING FACE: How a Facial Recognition Mismatch Can Ruin Your Life" https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-recognition-mismatch-can-ruin-your-life/ https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-recognition... I found out about the facial recognition failures from he outstanding book "Hello World" by Hannah Fry. Fry tells the story of Steven Talley as part of a chapter on crime, AI and facial recognition. https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-Algorithms/dp/039363499X https://www.amazon.com/Hello-World-Being-Human-Algorithms/dp... Fry's book shows how/why facial recognition software simply does not work well enough to use in police work. She provides the studies and footnotes them. As Fry says: "If you're searching for a particular criminal in digital line-up of millions...the best-case scenario is that you won't find the right person one in six times...". That is not nearly good enough for law enforcement and the courts. -from "Hello World" by Hannah Fry
- glenda 6y ago
  The police chief in Detroit said their facial recognition system had a 4% success rate. Presumably this means that 96% of the time they were targeting someone with absolutely no relation to the actual crime. What a complete waste of time and disregard for our civil liberties. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/detroit-police-chief-admits-facial-recognition-is-wrong-96-of-the-time/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/detroit-police-c...
bsenftner 6y ago
Facial recognition needs to be paired with a screening for Racial Blindness with any operator of FR software. FR software provides a filtering, given many faces, here are the best matches. This is where the FR software operator is critical because it is then their task to pick the best match. The final step in FR is always a human making the selection, primarily due to a lack of image quality the "best match" cannot be assured to be the correct match, and even then the correct person may not even be in the FR database. This is the type of understanding and analysis that needs to be present in an FR software operator, but as far as I can tell this area is completely ignored by both the producers of FR and the customers of FR. Disclosure: I am the lead developer of a global leading FR solution.
mytailorisrich 6y ago
That's a problem with police procedures and training of those who use facial recognition, not facial recognition per se.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  Yes? Cities banned facial recognition use because police have proven unable to create effective procedures and training to prevent the problems.
- dhimes 6y ago
  Indeed. Let's not forget, eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable as well.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>When people unlawfully break into a building, why the heck shouldn't facial recognition be used to identify them? Because trespass by itself is not a big enough crime to handle in that manner. Trespass is a crime that exists solely as a means to prosecute people for other not criminal enough to violate the letter of the law type behavior. There need to be other factors to make it worth tracking people down (theft, vandalism, stalking, etc). A pure trespass charge is not worth it. By all means prosecute the people who smashed stuff but in this day and age you don't need to go after everyone in order to do that. >We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. Do you know what the MA state police use their ALPRs for since we don't really have a car theft problem big enough to warrant running plates all the time? They park on a main road by an intersection and automate the sending of expired inspection sticker tickets. Government programs are under immense pressure to justify their budget. This is why you have swat teams responding to BS, gotta use it or lose it. Dragnet crap inevitably gets used on petty crimes in order to justify it. All the incentives point that way so that's what you get. >If you owned a business that was looted, and you had video of the looters, wouldn't you want them caught? Looters, not trespassers. > We are not talking about using cameras on the street to give people jaywalking tickets. But that is exactly where it winds up leading. But because it's not politically popular to prosecute jaywalking and rich people jaywalk they do things like prosecute all the weed dealers and backyard mechanics for not obtaining all the proper licensing and paying proper taxes. Also as an aside I find your username very fitting. I've lived in half a dozen states and only the DMV areas gives the Boston area a run for its money when it comes to approval of doing anything to enforce the law paired with blindness to downsides of enforcing the law to the letter. (Yes I am aware this is a sweeping generalization but I think it's an accurate enough one that I don't feel bad about making it.) Though I will admit that I have not lived in the wealthy suburbs of NYC and I have my suspicions about them.

exporectomy 6y ago
> automate the sending of expired inspection sticker tickets I think that's an excellent use of the technology. These are minor offences that would be too expensive and burdensome to pursue individually by hand. If it were enforced reliably, almost nobody would do be doing it. People get charged a late penalty for not paying their power bill. It's enforced with 100% reliability. But expired inspection tickets is less obnoxious because you can just stop driving your car when it becomes illegal to do so. You can't just return electricity you already used but haven't paid for yet. If you believe people should drive cars without safety certifications, that's a different issue. In that case, the solution isn't haphazard enforcement but no enforcement at all.