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posted by mrpg on Saturday May 12 2018, @10:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the no-more-safety-in-numbers dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4408

Thousands of attendees of the 2017 Champions League final in Cardiff, Wales were mistakenly identified as potential criminals by facial recognition technology used by local law enforcement.

According to the Guardian, the South Wales police scanned the crowd of more than 170,000 people who traveled to the nation’s capital for the soccer match between Real Madrid and Juventus. The cameras identified 2,470 people as criminals.

Having that many potential lawbreakers in attendance might make sense if the event was, say, a convict convention, but seems pretty high for a soccer match. As it turned out, the cameras were a little overly-aggressive in trying to spot some bad guys. Of the potential criminals identified, 2,297 were wrongly labeled by the facial recognition software. That’s a 92 percent false positive rate.

Source: Facial Recognition Used by Wales Police Has 90 Percent False Positive Rate


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 12 2018, @07:49PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday May 12 2018, @07:49PM (#678920)

    I'm not in favor of the technology, but I don't think anyone will be stopping it except the judges who might give a rather biased view of collars that started from mass surveillance - to an extent this has been happening in the US with traffic cams, in many jurisdictions all you have to do to have a traffic cam ticket nullified is take it to court (in others, not so much, YMMV.)

    This tech is like giving police a huge boost in their budget for a fraction of the price. Newsflash: if we the people really wanted more police, we'd already be electing politicians who would be paying for more police. A huge shift in police budget is a huge shift in personal liberty. Perhaps, if police can deploy this tech effectively, without trampling the rights of the individuals any more than they already do, we can use it to shrink police budgets while keeping the same level of effectiveness. Now, all those would-have-been-cops can be out of work alongside the rest of the robot displaced workforce. UBI anyone?

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday May 12 2018, @10:30PM (1 child)

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday May 12 2018, @10:30PM (#678960) Journal

    Perhaps, if police can deploy this tech effectively, without trampling the rights of the individuals any more than they already do, we can use it to shrink police budgets while keeping the same level of effectiveness.

    But you really can't employ it effectively without more police. Somebody has to follow up all the "hits", and they have to do it very quickly, or the hit will be gone from the scene.

    So more cops.
    (And that assumes the perfect case, with NO false positives).

    With false positives it amounts to just another reason cops with lots of guns can show up at anyone's door with the lame excuse that their "finely tuned" RECO system spotted a person walking down the street.

    Is it worth it?

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 12 2018, @11:53PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday May 12 2018, @11:53PM (#678980)

      But you really can't employ it effectively without more police. Somebody has to follow up all the "hits", and they have to do it very quickly, or the hit will be gone from the scene.

      Um.... versus the scenario where police just don't look for bad guys, ever... sure.

      I'm comparing this to a scenario where 100 cops are assigned to patrol the stadium for a big game and they've all seen the wanted posters, etc. So, instead of 200 eyes scanning 100,000 faces for known bad guys, you've got cameras, and maybe 20 eyes doing followup as directed from the computer dispatch, while the other 80 can be more effective doing non-scanning for bad guys stuff than the whole 100 would have been if they're all trying to get a look at 1000 faces each (or whatever the more realistic ratios are for your stadium, do you have a president or congresscritter in attendance? If so, definitely amp up the blue ratio.)

      As for NO false positives, where did that come from? In my younger days I got profiled and detained more than once, and what they usually did was ask for ID and radio me in to check my DL # against wanted lists and bench warrants. So, if this system can push some of that work up front to not bother every white male early 20s approx 6' tall with dark hair and only temporarily detain 10 for every 1 actual bad guy, from my perspective, that's a huge improvement over the status quo.

      Anything can be abused. Cops around here don't need no steenking computerized facial recog system to detain your ass for 30 minutes or more just because you sort of fit a profile they are looking for, and I even had one give me a false "ran red light" ticket to justify holding me for over 30 minutes while they sorted out if I was who they were looking for or not - he knew it was bogus, but this being the days before everybody had a video recorder running 24-7, he was comfortable telling me "you can take it to court, but when we get there it'll be your word against mine, and I'm a cop..."

      So... can it be abused? Sure. Do I think that some cops will abuse it horribly? Absolutely. Do I think that ALL cops will abuse it? No, and overall it might actually be a net positive for most people. If the cop using the system has any training or experience and knows that there's a 93% false positive rate, he/she should be pretty damned considerate and polite with people until some additional confirmation can be had, and after I got out of my 20s my experience has been that most cops really aren't assholes drunk on power, most of them are actually trying to help most people - by arresting the people that need arresting, and honestly trying not to screw up anybody's life who doesn't deserve it. However, for a small minority of cops, punk-ass kids with long hair apparently deserve it even when they're not doing (and haven't done) anything wrong.

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