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Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use of computers in police stations, make them write up all their reports by hand. I truly don't u

by cactus2093 5y ago

Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use of computers in police stations, make them write up all their reports by hand. I truly don't understand why there would be a line at facial recognition, it's just a law against making a process more efficient. It's clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at all. Don't replace the jury or public defenders with robots. But facial recognition could just be a way to look through a large amount of footage to find relevant clips that would then be reviewed in more detail by humans. Without facial recognition, you just pay cops overtime to look through footage themselves. It doesn't necessarily affect the outcome of the process at all. I think facial recognition just needs some help with its image, it's just a tool that would save tax dollars. Or a means to Defund The Police, if that's your thing.

microdrum 5y ago
This is the right take. Can't ban math. Facial rec is here. If you don't like it, win a public policy debate about making it evidentially weak in front of a judge. Banning facial rec is like saying "you can have security cameras and iPhones, but only human eyeballs can look through them, not computers!" Arbitrary, and doomed to fail.
- diamond_hands 5y ago
  The math is incorrect with Black people's faces more than White people's faces. "Can't ban math", that's like saying "can't ban words". Yes, but you can ban a combination of words in a location, such a "There's a fire!" in a crowded theater. You can ban a combination of math in a police station that leads to people going to jail.
  - bsenftner 5y ago
    The issue here is a complete lack on the behalf of the FR industry from impressing the importance of human oversight, and then validating that human oversight does not suffer racial blindness. It is pointless if the operators of an FR system cannot distinguish between similar age siblings or cousins of the ethnicity they are seeking via FR. This is far too often the case, and those police officers operating an FR system could simply be replaced by same ethnicity operators to receive significantly less bias.
  - tick_tock_tick 5y ago
    > The math is incorrect with Black people's faces more than White people's faces. That's a limiting aspect of the physical world less light back = less details. Flagging footage for manual review doesn't need to be bias free just the end component that actually effects the person in the video. Yelling fire in a crowded theater is legal..... https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
  - gamegoblin 5y ago
    Does anyone know of any data about the racial bias of human police officers vs. facial recognition software? That is, I am not sure if it makes sense to ban the software if it is less biased than the human. But it might make sense to ban it if it is more biased. There are loads of people of color who have been falsely imprisoned for looking like someone in a grainy security camera footage well before facial recognition technology was widespread.
  - microdrum 5y ago
    Wrong. It isn't. By your logic, CMOS cameras themselves are "racist" because they have exposure defaults that make just slightly more sense for light complexions than for dark. Or maybe you think highlight curves for TV shows must be adjusted so that lots of white things are blown out, but we can see the fine grained detail on a very dark object or person. Only then are we being antiracist! See how this stuff makes you into a numbskull?
matz1 5y ago
Right, this is like banning knife because it can be used to kill people. I much prefer they try to fix whatever it is that cause misery with the use of facial recognition, instead of banning it altogether.
_jal 5y ago
I think there are very good reasons to keep the government out of the FR business, at least for now. Facial recognition is the enabling technology for automated real-world repression. Maybe it is true that we can find a way to tame it to gain efficiency gains without destroying open society. But right now it looks like a dangerous one-way ratchet.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
NegativeLatency 5y ago
Laws can always be changed, seems sensible to me to prevent this stuff being rolled out when there are so many unresolved problems and abuses with it. I generally don’t want my government to “move fast and break things”
bsenftner 5y ago
There is a subtle misdirection when some jurisdiction "bans government use of facial recognition" - that ends up, or is by design, how private agencies are created that law enforcement then contracts with less oversight than before.
Arainach 5y ago
>it's just a tool that would save tax dollars No, nothing is "just a tool". Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks. Automation makes things feasible. Cheap storage that allows weeks or months of security footage to be preserved changes what's possible. License plate scanners are "just" a technology that could be done with a bunch of cops on corners with notepads, but in aggregate they're a tracking of where everyone is and has been that could never be done without the technology. Facial recognition is very similar.
- matz1 5y ago
  > Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks Sure, but like any other tools it also enable all sorts of new benefit. The preferable action would be to take advantage of the benefit while also try to fix whatever it is that cause problem with the tools instead of simply banning it.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    That's what they're doing. The problem is automated identification of faces. The solution is banning that.
    - matz1 5y ago
      >The problem is automated identification of faces Whats the problem with this ?
      - jacobwilliamroy 5y ago
        I had a dream a few months ago where I was standing in front of a computer. I typed in my name and got back a stream of video which showed every single moment of my life from multiple angles starting from the moment I was born. The footage came from a variety of sources, CCTV, smartphone cameras, dashcams. The system had videos of everything anyone had ever done. I didn't like it. Found it kind of disturbing.
tyingq 5y ago
>I think facial recognition just needs some PR help They are making their own bed in many cases. Here's one of several interesting moves by Clear View AI, for example: https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1220876741515702272 https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1220876741515702272
didibus 5y ago
I think it's a matter of accuracy and bias. If the tech keeps making false accusations, especially against the same kind of people over and over, then a ban might be in place. You could argue that humans make similar mistakes and bias, but the scale is always smaller when humans are involved, just because of how slow they are. Say a model is wrong 37% of the time, and so are humans, but the model runs 1000 times a minute, where as humans perform the task 10 times a minute. That means the model makes 370 false accusations a minute, where a human makes only 3 a minute. In effect, the number of people you bothered falsely accusing is still less when done manually, simply because it can't scale. Lastly, there's an argument that the police shouldn't be too efficient, because some crimes might be better off existing in a grey area. People do fear police supremacy and police states, the idea that they can find you for j-walking or jumping a fence as a dare, etc. Or that the state could become authoritarian, but you'd have no way to fight back as rebels due to advance tech of surveillance the police would have, etc. I'm not saying those are justified, but I think it plays into it, people are fine saying that only the highest risk cases are worth pursuing, but if a tech comes along that lets police pursue all cases, it might start to feel abusive to people. P.S.: I'm neither against nor in support of a ban here, I'm still making up my mind, just answering some of the reasons I know off for being for the ban.
- kenjackson 5y ago
  > I think it's a matter of accuracy and bias. If the tech keeps making false accusations, especially against the same kind of people over and over, then a ban might be in place. It seems like we should then ban eyewitness testimony. That has tons of accuracy issues and bias.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    Please read the full post. The issue is inaccuracy and scale.
    - kenjackson 5y ago
      The scale is a complete strawman. They aren’t falsely accusing 300 people for a crime. A great example is the Capitol Riots. They are narrowing the list down to manageable numbers. They aren’t suddenly arresting thousands of people for a crime committed by three.
mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
Would you make a similar argument that allowing the police to track location of all citizens 24/7 is just making the process of having officers follow people around more efficient?
anigbrowl 5y ago
Sure...just give the public the same access that police have. Then if dirty cops break the law or mislead the public, everyone will know.
paxys 5y ago
Everything else that you described – computers, digital records – has simple algorithms understandable by the average police officer or citizen. You type a document, it gets saved. You can do a full text search on it. You can pull up an old case and look at photos. You can quickly cross reference. All these tasks could be done step by step by a person and it would just take more time. When it comes to facial recolonization or AI in general, could anyone really tell you why the computer decided to flag your face and why another similar one was rejected? Would you accept a search warrant when the judgement wasn't based on any human's perception but something which came out a black box? Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias?
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Since when do search warrants get automatically approved by a black box? It is on the judge to approve, not a machine. If that's not enough, make a human sign off that they have confirmed or at least agree with the black box's conclusion, and put the department on the hook if it was obviously wrong. > Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias? The box is comparing a source image to an image with a name attached to it. Like you said, no different than a human would do, with all of their own biases in play. We aren't talking minority report here, so there's no reason to think this is a hurdle that would be difficult to overcome.
  - 542458 5y ago
    I mean, FISA warrants had (have?) a 99+% approval rate despite many applications having serious deficiencies. Utah’s e-warrant program has a 98% approval rate. Some warrants are approved in less than 30 seconds. Warrants across the US are frequently approved on evidence as shaky as a single anonymous tip. The problem (at least in my opinion) isn’t that facial recognition itself is inherently evil, it’s that: a) There are no standards around the algorithms themselves in terms of reliability. Worse still, this can inadvertently lead to serious racial bias. b) It can launder lousy evidence (this person looks vaguely like this grainy photo) into solid scientific evidence (the algorithm says it’s a 99.5% match!) providing justification for all sorts of warrants and raids on even flimsier ground. c) It creates lousy incentives in favour of creating a surveillance state. The police already have out-of-control hardware budgets, and many don’t like the idea of that budget being used to monitor and record people at all times they’re in public. If we had better police and court systems and better privacy law this might not have been necessary - but we live in the world we live in so I can see why this county would do this.
an_opabinia 5y ago
> Or a means to Defund The Police, if that's your thing. Are there many sincere researchers studying flaws in facial recognition advocating its unequivocal ban forever? Joy Boulamwini: > At a minimum, Congress should require all Federal agencies and organizations using Federal funding to disclose current use of face-based technologies. We cannot afford to operate in the dark. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-116hhrg36663/pdf/CHRG-116hhrg36663.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-116hhrg36663/pdf/CH... Timnit Gebru in the NYTimes: > Do you see a way to use facial recognition for law enforcement and security responsibly? > It should be banned at the moment. I don’t know about the future. https://archive.is/JqiqP https://archive.is/JqiqP Are the flaws Algorithmic Justice League finding real? Someone has definitely been wrongly accused by a facial recognition error (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...). Is there certainly an impression that activists want a forever ban? Yes, Joy Buolomwini and Timnit Gebru are frequently represented as advocating against even "perfect" facial recognition. It's true, lawyers tend to advocate for a forever ban. I don't think these researchers advocate for a forever ban. If you read their raw words, they are much more intellectually honest than the press allows. Is your line of thinking co-opted by people acting in bad faith? Certainly. You would feel very differently about the deployment of the system if you were so much more likely to be falsely accused by it due to the color of your skin. Every intellectually honest person's opinion of the justice system eventually matures. You'll come around to delegating authority to researchers over lawyers and police.
- hik 5y ago
  Timnit Gebru is not a sincere researcher, in any respect. She has proven to be willing to act in bad faith on numerous occassions when she is losing an argument. Not to say that a researcher is forbidden to hold any political opinions whatsoever - but her research is primarily political activism, and when political activism goes into research, what you get out is political activism, not research. The whole Algorithmic Justice League concept is the process of overstating the impact of difficult-to-handle problems in order to secure laudable research positions and book deals. Which - there actually should be someone willing to pose those arguments, but treating them as sincere researchers and not motivated
abeppu 5y ago
I think the tough part is you can't really ban failing to think in the presence of an algorithm. People see an algorithm produce a result and often assign far too much confidence to it. "The satnav directions say to turn onto this pier." "The model says this house is worth 200k less than the ones in the whiter neighborhood a quarter mile away." "The system recommends the patient have 40% allocated home health care hours per week going forward." "The algorithm says this grainy footage of someone far away from the camera in the dark and the rain is X." If you put humans in the loop informed by an algorithm making judgements, the human will often defer to the algorithm. Does the algorithm give an output that indicates its uncertainty? Based on what model? How equipped is the human to consider that?
- wang_li 5y ago
  Depending on how you read the specific text of the statute, I think they banned the usage of electronic mug shot databases. >"Facial recognition" means an automated or semiautomated process that assists in identifying, or verifying the identity of, an individual based on the physical characteristics of an individual's face. So I have a still from security camera footage. And I have 50,000 mug shots stored in the mug shot data base. I can see that it's a man in the image, he's white, between the ages of 15 - 50. So I go to my computer and put in the filter for the mug shot database to include those criteria. Sounds to me like I just used a semi-automated method to attempt to identify the person in the still image. This ordinance is dumb. The use of a computer to pattern match, to automate what a person can do, is a lever that makes everyone more efficient. What's the logic in making someone thumb, or click through, every photo in the state's mug shot collection instead of allowing a system to reduce the possible candidates, if any.
  - abeppu 5y ago
    If when you take people's mug shots, you also record their age, gender and race (should you?), then you can filter by those characteristics without the automated process being "based on the physical characteristics of an individual's face" -- you'd just be filtering on a DB column like any other. But if you didn't record or have access to those fields, and you tried to infer age, gender and race from the photo, and then filter -- well, what if your system is much more accurate guessing ages for some racial groups than others, or more accurate in distinguishing between white and latinx than between latinx and asian? Suddenly your "filtering" process can also have a bias problem, where some people are more likely than others to be included in the results for a query which shouldn't actually include them.
FridayoLeary 5y ago
At least ban speed cameras! I think we can all agree on that. Also, all those cameras that detect when you make illegal turns and send you nasty fines through the post.
_fullpint 5y ago
The lack of understanding of the downfalls and conflicts with facial recognition with justice system and this post is every reason why it shouldn’t be near the justice system.
kderbyma 5y ago
it's about security and convenience.....it's a tradeoff so it's impossible to achieve both perfectly. typically you find the balance....right now you are suggesting that the improvement is a convenient way of increasing security but the reality is, that security in one sense can lead to loss of it in another. example. Assuming all things are Good and no possibility for corruption then it would be purely beneficial....but since those aren't controls, and not realistic either, we cannot sacrifice security for convenience in this case.....if that makes sense.
kenjackson 5y ago
I agree. It's hard to understand how this is different than using a computer to detect, for example, credit card fraud. Both pour through tons of private data (typically using algorithms that don't make sense to a layperson -- or maybe even to experts since they likely use some DNNs) to determine is something problematic may have occurred. Both technologies can be used for nefarious purposes, but both can have safeguards that minimize the likelihood and impact of these purposes. I'm way more scared of guns than I am of facial recognition and as a country we will never ban guns.
- _jal 5y ago
  You won't have to choose. We'll see guns attached to facial recognition systems soon enough, both "authorized" and not.
throwawaysea 5y ago
I agree with you - this is just forcing policing to be more expensive and inefficient. It would be absurd to ban a police department from using Microsoft Office for example, and instead forcing them to track data in physical spreadsheets. Banning facial recognition is equivalent to forcing a police department to hire enough staff to monitor county-wide feeds and match feeds against a long list of criminals they're looking out for. With humans in the loop and requirements for when facial recognition can be used, I feel like there isn't a "real problem" here. But when we look at quotes from this article, for example the person quoted from Latino Advocacy who is concerned about ICE enforcing the law against illegal immigrants, it's clear that the motivation to ban facial recognition is really more political in nature - it's about letting some people get away with breaking the law more so than fundamental concerns with facial recognition.
starkd 5y ago
I was thinking much the same thing. Facial recognition is just a tool that makes it easier. If there are problems with false detections, you should be able to insert a human check in the process. But banning something makes it look like they are doing something. Meanwhile, it makes the job harder for police.
alach11 5y ago
There are many things the law permits at a small/manual scale but forbids at a larger/automated scale. This makes sense because in the latter case, the cost to the person doing the act is smaller. For example, there's no law against making one phone call to a random number in the phone book. But if you use an autodialer to call everyone in the city, you're breaking the law.
yarg 5y ago
Watch Netflix' Coded Bias if you want a deeper understanding of the political motivations here - and they really are almost purely political. I'm not for an instant saying that there aren't any implications in terms of how the technology can and should be deployed - but some people just want to be angry and offended despite a lack of understanding of what they're actually on about. Facial recognition struggles to accurately identify black people and women. The difficulties around both are probably around edge and contour detection: Black people have darker skin and less angular features - the shadows on their faces are not only harder to see (due to blending with skin-tone), but softer to begin with. Women routinely leave the home wearing enough makeup to not only look less like themselves, but often look more like other women. There are ways to mitigate these issues to some extent: cameras that work better in low light and codecs that do a better job of encoding relative rather than absolute light levels will do a better job of preserving the information in the faces of people with darker complexions. As far as makeup is concerned, it can misrepresent the shape of a face - if you only have one angle. Treating the face shape as invariant as Δt -> 0 and running on video (even better with multiple synchronised cameras) will allow for topography extraction despite dealing with someone deliberately misrepresenting what they look like.
- Smarjerry 5y ago
  That's all very true but any person using their own eyesight would have the same issues. This should be used as a narrowing of a search, same as Google's algorithm. Google doesn't give you the answers to your questions, they hopefully point you in the right direction, but sometimes don't give you a clear answer at all, but in clear and obvious cases it does match. Google also has programmed biases, but we all accept Google is one of the best tools.
  - yarg 5y ago
    Not to the same extent - we've got good enough binocular vision and pretty good handling of dynamic lighting. Compare that with the usable colours and bad blacks of standard absolute colour encoded video.
newscracker 5y ago
Your (poorly informed view, IMO) of the world does not consider immoral and illegal activities carried out by law enforcement and those with authority. Stalking, and harassment and abuse based on stalking, is a problem. Making it easier and simpler with facial recognition causes bigger problems. And this is just one example.

microdrum 5y ago

This is the right take. Can't ban math. Facial rec is here. If you don't like it, win a public policy debate about making it evidentially weak in front of a judge. Banning facial rec is like saying "you can have security cameras and iPhones, but only human eyeballs can look through them, not computers!" Arbitrary, and doomed to fail.

diamond_hands 5y ago
The math is incorrect with Black people's faces more than White people's faces. "Can't ban math", that's like saying "can't ban words". Yes, but you can ban a combination of words in a location, such a "There's a fire!" in a crowded theater. You can ban a combination of math in a police station that leads to people going to jail.
- bsenftner 5y ago
  The issue here is a complete lack on the behalf of the FR industry from impressing the importance of human oversight, and then validating that human oversight does not suffer racial blindness. It is pointless if the operators of an FR system cannot distinguish between similar age siblings or cousins of the ethnicity they are seeking via FR. This is far too often the case, and those police officers operating an FR system could simply be replaced by same ethnicity operators to receive significantly less bias.
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  > The math is incorrect with Black people's faces more than White people's faces. That's a limiting aspect of the physical world less light back = less details. Flagging footage for manual review doesn't need to be bias free just the end component that actually effects the person in the video. Yelling fire in a crowded theater is legal..... https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
- gamegoblin 5y ago
  Does anyone know of any data about the racial bias of human police officers vs. facial recognition software? That is, I am not sure if it makes sense to ban the software if it is less biased than the human. But it might make sense to ban it if it is more biased. There are loads of people of color who have been falsely imprisoned for looking like someone in a grainy security camera footage well before facial recognition technology was widespread.
- microdrum 5y ago
  Wrong. It isn't. By your logic, CMOS cameras themselves are "racist" because they have exposure defaults that make just slightly more sense for light complexions than for dark. Or maybe you think highlight curves for TV shows must be adjusted so that lots of white things are blown out, but we can see the fine grained detail on a very dark object or person. Only then are we being antiracist! See how this stuff makes you into a numbskull?

matz1 5y ago

Right, this is like banning knife because it can be used to kill people. I much prefer they try to fix whatever it is that cause misery with the use of facial recognition, instead of banning it altogether.

_jal 5y ago

I think there are very good reasons to keep the government out of the FR business, at least for now. Facial recognition is the enabling technology for automated real-world repression. Maybe it is true that we can find a way to tame it to gain efficiency gains without destroying open society. But right now it looks like a dangerous one-way ratchet.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

NegativeLatency 5y ago

Laws can always be changed, seems sensible to me to prevent this stuff being rolled out when there are so many unresolved problems and abuses with it. I generally don’t want my government to “move fast and break things”

bsenftner 5y ago

There is a subtle misdirection when some jurisdiction "bans government use of facial recognition" - that ends up, or is by design, how private agencies are created that law enforcement then contracts with less oversight than before.

Arainach 5y ago

>it's just a tool that would save tax dollars No, nothing is "just a tool". Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks. Automation makes things feasible. Cheap storage that allows weeks or months of security footage to be preserved changes what's possible. License plate scanners are "just" a technology that could be done with a bunch of cops on corners with notepads, but in aggregate they're a tracking of where everyone is and has been that could never be done without the technology. Facial recognition is very similar.

matz1 5y ago
> Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks Sure, but like any other tools it also enable all sorts of new benefit. The preferable action would be to take advantage of the benefit while also try to fix whatever it is that cause problem with the tools instead of simply banning it.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  That's what they're doing. The problem is automated identification of faces. The solution is banning that.
  - matz1 5y ago
    >The problem is automated identification of faces Whats the problem with this ?
    - jacobwilliamroy 5y ago
      I had a dream a few months ago where I was standing in front of a computer. I typed in my name and got back a stream of video which showed every single moment of my life from multiple angles starting from the moment I was born. The footage came from a variety of sources, CCTV, smartphone cameras, dashcams. The system had videos of everything anyone had ever done. I didn't like it. Found it kind of disturbing.

tyingq 5y ago

>I think facial recognition just needs some PR help They are making their own bed in many cases. Here's one of several interesting moves by Clear View AI, for example: https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1220876741515702272 https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1220876741515702272

didibus 5y ago

I think it's a matter of accuracy and bias. If the tech keeps making false accusations, especially against the same kind of people over and over, then a ban might be in place. You could argue that humans make similar mistakes and bias, but the scale is always smaller when humans are involved, just because of how slow they are. Say a model is wrong 37% of the time, and so are humans, but the model runs 1000 times a minute, where as humans perform the task 10 times a minute. That means the model makes 370 false accusations a minute, where a human makes only 3 a minute. In effect, the number of people you bothered falsely accusing is still less when done manually, simply because it can't scale. Lastly, there's an argument that the police shouldn't be too efficient, because some crimes might be better off existing in a grey area. People do fear police supremacy and police states, the idea that they can find you for j-walking or jumping a fence as a dare, etc. Or that the state could become authoritarian, but you'd have no way to fight back as rebels due to advance tech of surveillance the police would have, etc. I'm not saying those are justified, but I think it plays into it, people are fine saying that only the highest risk cases are worth pursuing, but if a tech comes along that lets police pursue all cases, it might start to feel abusive to people. P.S.: I'm neither against nor in support of a ban here, I'm still making up my mind, just answering some of the reasons I know off for being for the ban.

kenjackson 5y ago
> I think it's a matter of accuracy and bias. If the tech keeps making false accusations, especially against the same kind of people over and over, then a ban might be in place. It seems like we should then ban eyewitness testimony. That has tons of accuracy issues and bias.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  Please read the full post. The issue is inaccuracy and scale.
  - kenjackson 5y ago
    The scale is a complete strawman. They aren’t falsely accusing 300 people for a crime. A great example is the Capitol Riots. They are narrowing the list down to manageable numbers. They aren’t suddenly arresting thousands of people for a crime committed by three.

mandelbrotwurst 5y ago

Would you make a similar argument that allowing the police to track location of all citizens 24/7 is just making the process of having officers follow people around more efficient?

anigbrowl 5y ago

Sure...just give the public the same access that police have. Then if dirty cops break the law or mislead the public, everyone will know.

paxys 5y ago

Everything else that you described – computers, digital records – has simple algorithms understandable by the average police officer or citizen. You type a document, it gets saved. You can do a full text search on it. You can pull up an old case and look at photos. You can quickly cross reference. All these tasks could be done step by step by a person and it would just take more time. When it comes to facial recolonization or AI in general, could anyone really tell you why the computer decided to flag your face and why another similar one was rejected? Would you accept a search warrant when the judgement wasn't based on any human's perception but something which came out a black box? Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias?

zdragnar 5y ago
Since when do search warrants get automatically approved by a black box? It is on the judge to approve, not a machine. If that's not enough, make a human sign off that they have confirmed or at least agree with the black box's conclusion, and put the department on the hook if it was obviously wrong. > Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias? The box is comparing a source image to an image with a name attached to it. Like you said, no different than a human would do, with all of their own biases in play. We aren't talking minority report here, so there's no reason to think this is a hurdle that would be difficult to overcome.
- 542458 5y ago
  I mean, FISA warrants had (have?) a 99+% approval rate despite many applications having serious deficiencies. Utah’s e-warrant program has a 98% approval rate. Some warrants are approved in less than 30 seconds. Warrants across the US are frequently approved on evidence as shaky as a single anonymous tip. The problem (at least in my opinion) isn’t that facial recognition itself is inherently evil, it’s that: a) There are no standards around the algorithms themselves in terms of reliability. Worse still, this can inadvertently lead to serious racial bias. b) It can launder lousy evidence (this person looks vaguely like this grainy photo) into solid scientific evidence (the algorithm says it’s a 99.5% match!) providing justification for all sorts of warrants and raids on even flimsier ground. c) It creates lousy incentives in favour of creating a surveillance state. The police already have out-of-control hardware budgets, and many don’t like the idea of that budget being used to monitor and record people at all times they’re in public. If we had better police and court systems and better privacy law this might not have been necessary - but we live in the world we live in so I can see why this county would do this.

an_opabinia 5y ago

> Or a means to Defund The Police, if that's your thing. Are there many sincere researchers studying flaws in facial recognition advocating its unequivocal ban forever? Joy Boulamwini: > At a minimum, Congress should require all Federal agencies and organizations using Federal funding to disclose current use of face-based technologies. We cannot afford to operate in the dark. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-116hhrg36663/pdf/CHRG-116hhrg36663.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-116hhrg36663/pdf/CH... Timnit Gebru in the NYTimes: > Do you see a way to use facial recognition for law enforcement and security responsibly? > It should be banned at the moment. I don’t know about the future. https://archive.is/JqiqP https://archive.is/JqiqP Are the flaws Algorithmic Justice League finding real? Someone has definitely been wrongly accused by a facial recognition error (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...). Is there certainly an impression that activists want a forever ban? Yes, Joy Buolomwini and Timnit Gebru are frequently represented as advocating against even "perfect" facial recognition. It's true, lawyers tend to advocate for a forever ban. I don't think these researchers advocate for a forever ban. If you read their raw words, they are much more intellectually honest than the press allows. Is your line of thinking co-opted by people acting in bad faith? Certainly. You would feel very differently about the deployment of the system if you were so much more likely to be falsely accused by it due to the color of your skin. Every intellectually honest person's opinion of the justice system eventually matures. You'll come around to delegating authority to researchers over lawyers and police.

hik 5y ago
Timnit Gebru is not a sincere researcher, in any respect. She has proven to be willing to act in bad faith on numerous occassions when she is losing an argument. Not to say that a researcher is forbidden to hold any political opinions whatsoever - but her research is primarily political activism, and when political activism goes into research, what you get out is political activism, not research. The whole Algorithmic Justice League concept is the process of overstating the impact of difficult-to-handle problems in order to secure laudable research positions and book deals. Which - there actually should be someone willing to pose those arguments, but treating them as sincere researchers and not motivated

abeppu 5y ago

I think the tough part is you can't really ban failing to think in the presence of an algorithm. People see an algorithm produce a result and often assign far too much confidence to it. "The satnav directions say to turn onto this pier." "The model says this house is worth 200k less than the ones in the whiter neighborhood a quarter mile away." "The system recommends the patient have 40% allocated home health care hours per week going forward." "The algorithm says this grainy footage of someone far away from the camera in the dark and the rain is X." If you put humans in the loop informed by an algorithm making judgements, the human will often defer to the algorithm. Does the algorithm give an output that indicates its uncertainty? Based on what model? How equipped is the human to consider that?

wang_li 5y ago
Depending on how you read the specific text of the statute, I think they banned the usage of electronic mug shot databases. >"Facial recognition" means an automated or semiautomated process that assists in identifying, or verifying the identity of, an individual based on the physical characteristics of an individual's face. So I have a still from security camera footage. And I have 50,000 mug shots stored in the mug shot data base. I can see that it's a man in the image, he's white, between the ages of 15 - 50. So I go to my computer and put in the filter for the mug shot database to include those criteria. Sounds to me like I just used a semi-automated method to attempt to identify the person in the still image. This ordinance is dumb. The use of a computer to pattern match, to automate what a person can do, is a lever that makes everyone more efficient. What's the logic in making someone thumb, or click through, every photo in the state's mug shot collection instead of allowing a system to reduce the possible candidates, if any.
- abeppu 5y ago
  If when you take people's mug shots, you also record their age, gender and race (should you?), then you can filter by those characteristics without the automated process being "based on the physical characteristics of an individual's face" -- you'd just be filtering on a DB column like any other. But if you didn't record or have access to those fields, and you tried to infer age, gender and race from the photo, and then filter -- well, what if your system is much more accurate guessing ages for some racial groups than others, or more accurate in distinguishing between white and latinx than between latinx and asian? Suddenly your "filtering" process can also have a bias problem, where some people are more likely than others to be included in the results for a query which shouldn't actually include them.

FridayoLeary 5y ago

At least ban speed cameras! I think we can all agree on that. Also, all those cameras that detect when you make illegal turns and send you nasty fines through the post.

_fullpint 5y ago

The lack of understanding of the downfalls and conflicts with facial recognition with justice system and this post is every reason why it shouldn’t be near the justice system.

kderbyma 5y ago

it's about security and convenience.....it's a tradeoff so it's impossible to achieve both perfectly. typically you find the balance....right now you are suggesting that the improvement is a convenient way of increasing security but the reality is, that security in one sense can lead to loss of it in another. example. Assuming all things are Good and no possibility for corruption then it would be purely beneficial....but since those aren't controls, and not realistic either, we cannot sacrifice security for convenience in this case.....if that makes sense.

kenjackson 5y ago

I agree. It's hard to understand how this is different than using a computer to detect, for example, credit card fraud. Both pour through tons of private data (typically using algorithms that don't make sense to a layperson -- or maybe even to experts since they likely use some DNNs) to determine is something problematic may have occurred. Both technologies can be used for nefarious purposes, but both can have safeguards that minimize the likelihood and impact of these purposes. I'm way more scared of guns than I am of facial recognition and as a country we will never ban guns.

_jal 5y ago
You won't have to choose. We'll see guns attached to facial recognition systems soon enough, both "authorized" and not.

throwawaysea 5y ago

I agree with you - this is just forcing policing to be more expensive and inefficient. It would be absurd to ban a police department from using Microsoft Office for example, and instead forcing them to track data in physical spreadsheets. Banning facial recognition is equivalent to forcing a police department to hire enough staff to monitor county-wide feeds and match feeds against a long list of criminals they're looking out for. With humans in the loop and requirements for when facial recognition can be used, I feel like there isn't a "real problem" here. But when we look at quotes from this article, for example the person quoted from Latino Advocacy who is concerned about ICE enforcing the law against illegal immigrants, it's clear that the motivation to ban facial recognition is really more political in nature - it's about letting some people get away with breaking the law more so than fundamental concerns with facial recognition.

starkd 5y ago

I was thinking much the same thing. Facial recognition is just a tool that makes it easier. If there are problems with false detections, you should be able to insert a human check in the process. But banning something makes it look like they are doing something. Meanwhile, it makes the job harder for police.

alach11 5y ago

There are many things the law permits at a small/manual scale but forbids at a larger/automated scale. This makes sense because in the latter case, the cost to the person doing the act is smaller. For example, there's no law against making one phone call to a random number in the phone book. But if you use an autodialer to call everyone in the city, you're breaking the law.

yarg 5y ago

Watch Netflix' Coded Bias if you want a deeper understanding of the political motivations here - and they really are almost purely political. I'm not for an instant saying that there aren't any implications in terms of how the technology can and should be deployed - but some people just want to be angry and offended despite a lack of understanding of what they're actually on about. Facial recognition struggles to accurately identify black people and women. The difficulties around both are probably around edge and contour detection: Black people have darker skin and less angular features - the shadows on their faces are not only harder to see (due to blending with skin-tone), but softer to begin with. Women routinely leave the home wearing enough makeup to not only look less like themselves, but often look more like other women. There are ways to mitigate these issues to some extent: cameras that work better in low light and codecs that do a better job of encoding relative rather than absolute light levels will do a better job of preserving the information in the faces of people with darker complexions. As far as makeup is concerned, it can misrepresent the shape of a face - if you only have one angle. Treating the face shape as invariant as Δt -> 0 and running on video (even better with multiple synchronised cameras) will allow for topography extraction despite dealing with someone deliberately misrepresenting what they look like.

Smarjerry 5y ago
That's all very true but any person using their own eyesight would have the same issues. This should be used as a narrowing of a search, same as Google's algorithm. Google doesn't give you the answers to your questions, they hopefully point you in the right direction, but sometimes don't give you a clear answer at all, but in clear and obvious cases it does match. Google also has programmed biases, but we all accept Google is one of the best tools.
- yarg 5y ago
  Not to the same extent - we've got good enough binocular vision and pretty good handling of dynamic lighting. Compare that with the usable colours and bad blacks of standard absolute colour encoded video.

newscracker 5y ago

Your (poorly informed view, IMO) of the world does not consider immoral and illegal activities carried out by law enforcement and those with authority. Stalking, and harassment and abuse based on stalking, is a problem. Making it easier and simpler with facial recognition causes bigger problems. And this is just one example.