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posted by janrinok on Saturday July 28 2018, @06:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the they're-criminals dept.

The American Civil Liberties Union, in an effort to demonstrate the dangers of face recognition technology, ran photos of members of Congress against a database of mug shots using Amazon Rekognition software. That test incorrectly identified 28 legislators as criminals (cue the jokes - yes, the Congress members were confirmed to be elsewhere at the time). They hope that demonstrating that this risk hits close to home will get Congress more interested in regulating the use of this technology.

The false matches were disproportionately of people of color, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, among them civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). These results demonstrate why Congress should join the ACLU in calling for a moratorium on law enforcement use of face surveillance.

[...] If law enforcement is using Amazon Rekognition, it’s not hard to imagine a police officer getting a “match” indicating that a person has a previous concealed-weapon arrest, biasing the officer before an encounter even begins. Or an individual getting a knock on the door from law enforcement, and being questioned or having their home searched, based on a false identification.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday July 29 2018, @09:30PM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 29 2018, @09:30PM (#714465) Journal

    You're missing the point of my post: it's a filter.

    it will be used as a pointer.
    Step into the policeman shoes, with limited (objectively or subjectively) effort capacity:
    - without the tech, he needs to search for other clues first and apply the "looks like" filter later
    - with the tech, he'll get a list of persons "identified" as possible suspects - he'll very likely started to work with this list,

    The ACLU is deliberately misleading the public about how this is used.

    Really? Is it already used?
    If not, how can you be so sure?

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday July 29 2018, @11:42PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 29 2018, @11:42PM (#714507) Journal

    FWIW, it *is* already used. (Possibly not exactly this software.) I don't know that it's used by police, but I believe that it was yesterday or the day before that there was news on Soylent that two Canadian Malls were using it, and that the owners of those malls claimed that "others were using it". It's true they also claimed that they didn't track the data that would allow individuals to be identified. Believe them if you want to, it might be true.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Shire on Monday July 30 2018, @01:27AM

    by The Shire (5824) on Monday July 30 2018, @01:27AM (#714560)

    Yes, really, it's already being used:

    https://www.npr.org/2018/05/22/613115969/orlando-police-testing-amazons-real-time-facial-recognition [npr.org]

    And further:

    'The Washington County Sheriff's Office says it does not use Rekognition in real time and doesn't intend to."

    So they're using it correctly - as an investigative tool, not something that attempts to positively ID people in realtime.