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posted by martyb on Friday December 16 2016, @12:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the false-positives-are-a-bad-thing-said-one-of-the-twins dept.

If you've watched any sort of spy thriller or action film over the last few years – think Jason Bourne or Mission: Impossible – the chances are you've seen facial recognition software in action. These movie scenes often involve an artist's sketch compared to mug shots, or sometimes even a live CCTV stream, and with the clock ticking, a match is usually found for the culprit in the nick of time.

It seems natural then to assume that what happens in the film world is similar to what happens (most of the time) in the real world. We might think that our faces are constantly being tracked and recognised as we walk past security cameras in city centres – but this is not actually the case.

Not only would such a system require millions of cameras capable of producing high-quality footage, but it would also require the integration of photo-ID databases such as mugshots from every police force, previous passport images, and driving license images for everyone in the country.

And yet even if this high level of integration was possible, a far more basic problem still exists – facial recognition systems are still not 100% accurate.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Friday December 16 2016, @02:00PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday December 16 2016, @02:00PM (#442044) Homepage
    I agree that millions of cameras would be useful. Given that the UK has ~5 million security cameras, that target seems like a very easy one to achieve.

    The article seems to overlook that you don't need to be highly accurate with each particular face analysed in order to draw a correct conclusion, as it seems to think each analysis is an independent event. If you've got a positive ID of Senor Speedy Gonzales outside a chipshop in Edinburgh at midnight, then the 50/50 conclusion of either Senor Gonzales or Muhammed Albomhed parking a car at the west end of Richmond Terrace in London at 2am is in fact a more-or-less 100% certainty. You get closer to 100% by analysing the number plate of the car too, and cross referencing. In particular if that car was also seen parked in Dollis Hill earlier, where Mr Albomhed's older brother lives, and his brother's cellphone tethered to the local cell of that part of london twice in the last week, but has never been there before.

    We're not just living in the world of *collection* of big data, we're living in a world of the *cross-referencing* of big data too. There are no standalone probabilities any more, they are all conditional probabilities given all of the other data that we know to be likely true, and those probabilities are way higher, as people hang around with the same people repeatedly, visit the same places repeatedly, use the same mobile devices repeatedly, and are unable to teleport.

    Article seems like it's written by a spook trying to spread around soft fuzzy feelings.
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  • (Score: 2) by Snospar on Friday December 16 2016, @03:11PM

    by Snospar (5366) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 16 2016, @03:11PM (#442060)

    Totally agree with these comments and would add that when you factor in the forced 10-year photo renewal on all UK Driving Licences and Passports with very strict rules about how visible (and recognisable) the face is, I think they could successfully spot most people almost everywhere. Cameras on all public transport (for safety of course). Private cameras - with little or no security - in every business premise/shop/etc.
     
    Here in the UK Big Brother is already watching - and trawling your internet history too - all in the name of "safety".

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Friday December 16 2016, @05:03PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday December 16 2016, @05:03PM (#442102) Journal

    We're not just living in the world of *collection* of big data, we're living in a world of the *cross-referencing* of big data too

    This is the thing that so many privacy articles miss. Most people are completely unaware of how much information you get by cross-referencing seemingly innocuous bits of information. They don't care what they give to Facebook, because it's mostly public information. They don't realise exactly what the combination of that information, the information gleaned from their friends, and the information from from Facebook beacons on a load of web pages that they commonly visit adds up to.

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