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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Friday December 16 2016, @05:03PM
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.
sudo mod me up