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Essex police pause facial recognition camera use after study finds racial bias
- gib444 8mo agoAlternative headlines: Essex police, well aware of all the issues before using it, pause use until expected bad publicity dies down Or Essex police chosen as force to take some flack for the issues while other forces steam ahead
- ap99 8mo ago> more likely to correctly identify men than women. > more likely to correctly identify black participants than participants from other ethnic groups. > AI surveillance that is experimental, untested, inaccurate or potentially biased has no place on our streets. I wonder if they're more worried about putting too many men in prison or too many black people.
- xenocratus 8mo agoNeither, they're worried about bad rep.
- graemep 8mo agoThey are concerned about a higher rate of false positives (therefore a higher rate of incorrect arrests etc.) of white people (and probably Asians etc.) and women. This is also discriminatory. People forget equality law runs both says. it is illegal to discriminate against men, whites, or heterosexuals just as it is to discriminate against women, non-whites or gays.
- pingou 8mo agoIf the suspect is Black, the software should automatically return zero matches in 30% of cases. Problem solved.
- t23414321 8mo agoantimemetics (look one more time)
- bloqs 8mo agoCorrelation does not indicate causation
- ghusto 8mo ago> the system was more likely to correctly identify men than women and it was “statistically significantly more likely to correctly identify black participants than participants from other ethnic groups”. I am genuinely unsure what's going on. My understanding of the article is that the system is problematic because it is more likely to correctly identify black people than "other ethnic groups". Is that right?
- defrost 8mo agoIt's problematic for use in Essex as it works best for a small minority of the Essex population and has a much higher error rate for a typical sample of the Essex community. Adendum: Essex Ethnicity breakdown- 85.1% White British · 5.2% Other White · 3.7% Asian · 2.5% Black · 2.4% Mixed · 1.1% Other · (2021). from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex ie: most accurate (however acccurate that is) for the men of 2.5% of the regions population Not so accurate for 98.75% of the regions population.
- OJFord 8mo agoEssentially (with made up numbers): 100 men on a high street, 4 of which are on a watch-list; 2 of which are black. Both black guys get identified, only one of the others does. Ditto men vs. women, mutatis mutandis.
- edgyquant 8mo agoSo it should be improved but sounds like it’s just catching criminals who need to be caught no?
- bondarchuk 8mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement
- ap99 8mo ago[flagged]
- OJFord 8mo agoThis is actually more (socially/ethically/philosophically) interesting than one might assume from the headline: it's not false positives, it's that it's more effective (correctly identifies someone is on a watch-list) for one group than another within a protected characteristic. So essentially they're pausing the use of it because it works too well for group A / not well enough for group B, potentially leading to disproportionate (albeit correct) arrests of group A.
- metalman 8mo agoAbsolutly impossible to condone further structural bias against a minority, and just ignore the free "white pass" built into the software, and esspecialy troubling that it passes white women, the most. The only possible action is to reject and dissable any system with a racial bias, investigate how such a thing happened, with a very pointy look for intent on the part of the vendors, who would then qualify for bieng housed in one of his majestys facilities for persons such as these.
- edgyquant 8mo agoIf it’s not falsely identifying people I don’t see a problem at all. If it’s identifying criminals every criminal should be caught
- Joker_vD 8mo agoSee, what you've said is precisely "structural bias against a minority", or "systemic injustice". Then again, the elites are, technically, also a minority as well, and we all know how well letting their crimes slide works out for the rest of the society.
- metalman 8mo agoit is FALSELY unidentifying people, which makes the harware, software, sales, implimentation of the whole system a criminal enterprise, which it is. Kudos to the police for rejecting this racist biggoted unjust criminal software implimentation.
- 8mo ago
- blitzar 8mo ago> the system was more likely to correctly identify men than women and it was “statistically significantly more likely to correctly identify black participants than participants from other ethnic groups” Technology has moved on a lot no doubt, however, studies were finding the opposite (and with order of magnitude errors) as recently as 2020 with a lazy google literature search > these algorithms were found to be between 10 and 100 times more likely to misidentify a Black or East Asian face than a white face https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/why-racial-bias-is-prevalent-in-facial-recognition-technology https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/why-racial-bias-is-preva...
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- krisoft 8mo agoGiven that these are machine learning algorithms their performance will very much depend on the training dataset. So it is probably not (just) that “technology has moved on a lot”, but that the engineers working on it curated new training sets. It is not entirely unreasonable to think that they too read the paper you are talking about and made measures in an attempt to correct for the effect.
- stuaxo 8mo agoMaybe, or there might be qualities around say contrast and the physical cameras themselves that build this in.
- griffzhowl 8mo agoBut it doesn't seem like these physical factors would have reversed the effect between 2020 and now. Unless you can think of some?
- blitzar 8mo agoCameras are much better now than they were before, all the same everytime you get a "have you seen this person" its a grainy pixelated flat image from CCTV that could easily be one of thousands of people.
- bsenftner 8mo agoFormer author of one of the top 5 facial recognition servers in the world for multiple years running, here's what's going on: the industry has solved this issue, but the potential clients are seeking the lowest bidder, and picking the newer companies, the nepostically created not really players but well connected, and those companies have terrible implementations. This is not a case of the technology not there yet, we solved all these racial bias issues 10 years ago. But new companies with new training sets and new ML engineers that do not know any of the industry's history are now landing contracts with terrible quality models, but well connected sales channels.
- graemep 8mo agoSo just like the rest of government IT then.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoHow recently? We had a home security camera and every time our (Black) son walked up to the door, the camera would classify him as an “animal”. This was as recently as 2022
- onetokeoverthe 8mo ago[dead]
- fallinghawks 8mo agoIn the other direction, my camera regularly identifies cats, crows, and shadows as people. I think recognition in security cameras has a very long way to go.
- washadjeffmad 8mo agoMy friend recently sent me a screenshot of her Arlo detecting her backside as a 'vehicle'.
- bsenftner 8mo agoYou're running toy facial recognition. The FR that comes with consumer products is a marketing claim nonsense joke.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- moi2388 8mo ago“statistically significantly more likely to correctly identify black participants than participants from other ethnic groups”. Great. Wasn’t the problem before always that it couldn’t correctly identify non-white people? It does it accurately now. That is somehow also a problem? It should make more mistakes?
- glyco 8mo agoThis seems like an easy problem to solve - when the system informs you of a black criminal, just roll dice to ignore them and let them get away.
- ndsipa_pomu 8mo agoWhat do you propose is done when the system doesn't inform you of a white criminal?