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If the best face recognition software has an error rate of 0.08% [1] and Rite Aid serves 1.6M customers a day [2] what moron thought that was a good idea? [1]

If the best face recognition software has an error rate of 0.08% [1] and Rite Aid serves 1.6M customers a day [2] what moron thought that was a good idea? [1] https://github.com/usnistgov/frvt/blob/nist-pages/reports/1N/frvt_1N_report_2020_03_27.pdf https://github.com/usnistgov/frvt/blob/nist-pages/reports/1N... [2] https://careers.riteaid.com/pages/company-info https://careers.riteaid.com/pages/company-info

crazygringo 3y ago
I'm not defending Rite-Aid at all, but that's not the problem here. It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person. Facial recognition software should always be implemented under the assumption that it makes plenty of false positives, and human review is always necessary. (What you're talking about is 1,280 false positives a day, or less than 1 per store per day.) Again -- not defending Rite-Aid here. Just saying that there's nothing wrong with the statistics of it.
- brookst 3y ago
  Wouldn’t it depend on how many accurate positives there were? If it’s one false positive against nine real positives, great. If it’s one false positive a day for a month before a real match occurs, nobody will pay any attention at all.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Drugstores like Rite-Aid often encounter multiple shoplifters a day. Assuming most of them are repeat, then there are going to be more true positives than false positives. (Again, not defending Rite-Aid here, just pointing out that the statistics aren't the issue.)
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago
  > .. then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person Yes - but the "approach and identify" of false positives/innocent people was the actual embarrassment and harassment that the system got banned for, it was the human review (asking for ID etc) that was the issue.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    But it seems like they went straight to approaching and asking for ID. What about the step where it shows a human photos from original footage and current footage and they get to say, nope I'm not confident? Again, not defending Rite-Aid here, just pointing out that facial recognition needs a human verification layer before taking any action at all. The fact they weren't doing that is just one part of why their actions were wrong.
    - BigGreenTurtle 3y ago
      What incentive is there to say "I'm not confident"? If someone is particularly bad at comparing faces in pictures and they let multiple shoplifters through they're likely going to lose their jobs.
- twisteriffic 3y ago
  Just a reminder that the "1 per store per day" is an innocent human being who probably would have been put through hell on earth by what you considered an acceptable rate of error.
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    You're missing the parts where I said twice that I wasn't defending the practice.
    - gosub100 3y ago
      I've found that adding that disclaimer is entirely useless. Like holding beef jerky in front of a dog and saying "I'm not offering this to you, just holding it here".
      - crazygringo 3y ago
        So it's useless to say that A is wrong, but not because of B as claimed -- A is wrong for other reasons? That sure does limit discussion, and human reason generally. I mean, what do you suggest instead?
        gosub100 3y ago
        I'm just saying I've tried to proffer a position while disclaiming any support for it, and maybe some people listen, but there will always be someone who is too tempted to attack the position instead of treating it as a specimen.
      - twisteriffic 3y ago
        You really couldn't have picked a better example to illustrate why the OPs argument was so ignorant. Pretending that reality doesn't exist doesn't make it stop existing. No one is disagreeing that 1 per store per day is a small number. We're disagreeing with the OPs statement that there's nothing wrong with one false positive accusation of shoplifting per store per day given the obvious consequences of such an accusation in the context of the US system of policing and global blame shifting to the machine, and that given such a context essentially any false positive rate is too high.
- jerf 3y ago
  "It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person." I would contest that. Determining if someone is the same person as a low-quality photo is not necessarily something a human can do, and that's especially true if the human in question A: basically doesn't care and is likely to screw it up every way it is possible to screw it up and B: is influenced by whether or not they're willing to directly confront someone who is nominally a criminal while they're being paid the de facto local minimum wage. This plan is all sorts of infeasible and frankly stupid, and the purely human concerns are sufficient for that determination even before we add the tech in.
  - jrochkind1 3y ago
    You are correct. In fact there is research that humans are not particularly good at matching people to photos... this 2014 study showed a 15% error rate (with photos from identification documents, high-quality standardized photos, not low-quality random angle ones!), and the real kicker is passport officers (who do this as part of their job all day and presumably care about doing it well) surprisingly performed no better than random undergrads... https://qz.com/251791/passport-officers-are-no-better-at-performing-photo-id-checks-than-you-are https://qz.com/251791/passport-officers-are-no-better-at-per... (Someone is now going to suggest, right, that's why we should have computers do it instead, bringing the circle back around again... but just no).
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      Which is precisely why you combine the two systems. If humans get it wrong 15% of the time, that means they're reducing false positives by 85%. That's the whole point of combining facial recognition with human review. You still have to decide what to do with that final information considering that it's still not perfect. But you should never be relying on facial recognition by itself. Even if humans are imperfect, they still improve the accuracy, and can make the final call "nope I'm just not sure, I'm not going to take action".
      - 3y ago
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person. Yeah, that's not going to happen in any meaningful sense with ordinary employees. Asking them to make a judgement call like that will just result in employees erring on the side of "it could be them, so I confirm" rather than "I'm not sure it's them, so I don't confirm"
  - aendruk 3y ago
    When “I confirm” isn’t just a button but a face-to-face accusation I’d expect people would choose to err in the other direction.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      I'd expect employees to act in a way they perceive would be least harmful to themselves and their job. If they incorrectly say someone wasn't the person matched, and that person then proceeds to steal from the store, the employee may (probably correctly) perceive that they'll suffer consequences for the error. The safest direction for them to err in would be "yeah, it's probably them".
- unbalancedevh 3y ago
  > Just saying that there's nothing wrong with the statistics of it. I think that an understanding of basic statistics still eludes a lot of people. Teaching it should be prioritized as much as teaching algebra. There are a lot of interesting real-life examples of how we get confused or tricked with statistics, enough to even keep the attention in class of the average high-schooler.
- georgedegennaro 3y ago
  >human review is always necessary Then why have AI?
eastof 3y ago
Does this mean I can log into 8/10,000 iphones?
georgedegennaro 3y ago
As opposed to the alternative?

crazygringo 3y ago

I'm not defending Rite-Aid at all, but that's not the problem here. It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person. Facial recognition software should always be implemented under the assumption that it makes plenty of false positives, and human review is always necessary. (What you're talking about is 1,280 false positives a day, or less than 1 per store per day.) Again -- not defending Rite-Aid here. Just saying that there's nothing wrong with the statistics of it.

brookst 3y ago
Wouldn’t it depend on how many accurate positives there were? If it’s one false positive against nine real positives, great. If it’s one false positive a day for a month before a real match occurs, nobody will pay any attention at all.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  Drugstores like Rite-Aid often encounter multiple shoplifters a day. Assuming most of them are repeat, then there are going to be more true positives than false positives. (Again, not defending Rite-Aid here, just pointing out that the statistics aren't the issue.)
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
> .. then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person Yes - but the "approach and identify" of false positives/innocent people was the actual embarrassment and harassment that the system got banned for, it was the human review (asking for ID etc) that was the issue.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  But it seems like they went straight to approaching and asking for ID. What about the step where it shows a human photos from original footage and current footage and they get to say, nope I'm not confident? Again, not defending Rite-Aid here, just pointing out that facial recognition needs a human verification layer before taking any action at all. The fact they weren't doing that is just one part of why their actions were wrong.
  - BigGreenTurtle 3y ago
    What incentive is there to say "I'm not confident"? If someone is particularly bad at comparing faces in pictures and they let multiple shoplifters through they're likely going to lose their jobs.
twisteriffic 3y ago
Just a reminder that the "1 per store per day" is an innocent human being who probably would have been put through hell on earth by what you considered an acceptable rate of error.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  You're missing the parts where I said twice that I wasn't defending the practice.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    I've found that adding that disclaimer is entirely useless. Like holding beef jerky in front of a dog and saying "I'm not offering this to you, just holding it here".
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      So it's useless to say that A is wrong, but not because of B as claimed -- A is wrong for other reasons? That sure does limit discussion, and human reason generally. I mean, what do you suggest instead?
      - gosub100 3y ago
        I'm just saying I've tried to proffer a position while disclaiming any support for it, and maybe some people listen, but there will always be someone who is too tempted to attack the position instead of treating it as a specimen.
    - twisteriffic 3y ago
      You really couldn't have picked a better example to illustrate why the OPs argument was so ignorant. Pretending that reality doesn't exist doesn't make it stop existing. No one is disagreeing that 1 per store per day is a small number. We're disagreeing with the OPs statement that there's nothing wrong with one false positive accusation of shoplifting per store per day given the obvious consequences of such an accusation in the context of the US system of policing and global blame shifting to the machine, and that given such a context essentially any false positive rate is too high.
jerf 3y ago
"It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person." I would contest that. Determining if someone is the same person as a low-quality photo is not necessarily something a human can do, and that's especially true if the human in question A: basically doesn't care and is likely to screw it up every way it is possible to screw it up and B: is influenced by whether or not they're willing to directly confront someone who is nominally a criminal while they're being paid the de facto local minimum wage. This plan is all sorts of infeasible and frankly stupid, and the purely human concerns are sufficient for that determination even before we add the tech in.
- jrochkind1 3y ago
  You are correct. In fact there is research that humans are not particularly good at matching people to photos... this 2014 study showed a 15% error rate (with photos from identification documents, high-quality standardized photos, not low-quality random angle ones!), and the real kicker is passport officers (who do this as part of their job all day and presumably care about doing it well) surprisingly performed no better than random undergrads... https://qz.com/251791/passport-officers-are-no-better-at-performing-photo-id-checks-than-you-are https://qz.com/251791/passport-officers-are-no-better-at-per... (Someone is now going to suggest, right, that's why we should have computers do it instead, bringing the circle back around again... but just no).
  - crazygringo 3y ago
    Which is precisely why you combine the two systems. If humans get it wrong 15% of the time, that means they're reducing false positives by 85%. That's the whole point of combining facial recognition with human review. You still have to decide what to do with that final information considering that it's still not perfect. But you should never be relying on facial recognition by itself. Even if humans are imperfect, they still improve the accuracy, and can make the final call "nope I'm just not sure, I'm not going to take action".
    - 3y ago
JohnFen 3y ago
> It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person. Yeah, that's not going to happen in any meaningful sense with ordinary employees. Asking them to make a judgement call like that will just result in employees erring on the side of "it could be them, so I confirm" rather than "I'm not sure it's them, so I don't confirm"
- aendruk 3y ago
  When “I confirm” isn’t just a button but a face-to-face accusation I’d expect people would choose to err in the other direction.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I'd expect employees to act in a way they perceive would be least harmful to themselves and their job. If they incorrectly say someone wasn't the person matched, and that person then proceeds to steal from the store, the employee may (probably correctly) perceive that they'll suffer consequences for the error. The safest direction for them to err in would be "yeah, it's probably them".
unbalancedevh 3y ago
> Just saying that there's nothing wrong with the statistics of it. I think that an understanding of basic statistics still eludes a lot of people. Teaching it should be prioritized as much as teaching algebra. There are a lot of interesting real-life examples of how we get confused or tricked with statistics, enough to even keep the attention in class of the average high-schooler.
georgedegennaro 3y ago
>human review is always necessary Then why have AI?

eastof 3y ago

Does this mean I can log into 8/10,000 iphones?

georgedegennaro 3y ago

As opposed to the alternative?