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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: 3, Informative) by dondusa on Friday December 16 2016, @04:23PM

    by dondusa (6432) on Friday December 16 2016, @04:23PM (#442078)

    Well, considering that the FBI has a facial database going already*, millions of faces strong, how unreasonable is it for datasets like this to be shared with other law enforcement agencies? Particularly as surveillance and data-gathering powers continue to expand. Centralized surveillance networks are obviously plausible given places like London. There just hasn't been the necessary political impetus to accomplish such a network in American cities yet. I can't imagine that will be the case forever, though. I agree that this reads like a disinformational puff piece made to put people at ease.

    *http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/smile-youre-in-the-fbi-face-recognition-database/ [arstechnica.com]

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