Police accused of deploying facial recognition 'by stealth' in London
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Self-driving car tech can simply refuse to take you there
But police can impose an order - for a defined area for a limited amount of time - under Section 60AA of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 allowing officers to demand that one removes "any item which the constable reasonably believes that person is wearing wholly or mainly for the purpose of concealing his identity".
A group that attempts to defeat fascist-detection technology by the most laughably transparent means
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/09/27/how-to...
For example, if you take the bus or train everyday to work at specific time. And if you aren't on the bus or train, then the system can alert authorities or your boss.
And if facial recognition somehow gets into your home, you could get the 1984 or black mirror dystopian society.
We already have that, let's stop pretending we're not already living in a dystopian society.
1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/londons-super-...
You can't ignore scale when it is the game-changer of automated facial recognition.
The tech compares very poorly to super-recognizers, with an absurdly high number of false positives, putting the wrong innocent people under an aggressive suspicion that they won't be able to know about and dispute.
> The tech compares very poorly to super-recognizers, with an absurdly high number of false positives, putting the wrong innocent people under aggressive suspicion.
well that's not good!
The whole concept is a nightmare for our civil freedoms even if the tech was perfect -- precisely because of realistically being able to scale -- and must be protested until the whole idea is let go of.
>infinite super-recognizers vs. infinitely available facial recognition is what I'm wondering about here.
You keep editing your comments to remove contentious remarks. I can only reply to the one I've read.
> The whole concept isn't good even if the tech was perfect -- precisely because of scale -- and must be protested until the whole idea is let go of.
I don't disagree with this. my questions are not political in nature, I was simply curious if the tech had approached or surpassed the accuracy of super-recognizers.
That being said, I don't agree with your premise. Facial search/recognition is just the first step of the investigation, identifying a pool of "possible leads". This is very similar to creating a list of people who were in the neighbourhood. Lots of false positives initially, but still a good place to start looking.
In an ideal world, someone wrongly identified would just be questioned, they'd identify that there was an error and there's no physical impact just a brief disruption. That is the approach which genuinely could be beneficial to society.
However, I am somewhat concerned that many police officers won't keep the fact that it's fairly likely to be wrong in the forefront of their minds. Combine that with an eagerness amongst some police to start applying "justice" immediately (rough use of handcuffing, pushing to the ground etc), at best treating people like hospital trolleys and at worst inflicting injury, and it's a recipe for escalation and injustice in scenarios involving completely innocent people (and you could argue it shouldn't happen with those who turn out to be guilty too, but that's a distraction!)
E.g. "Here are the 200 people the system thinks kinda look like that picture you gave me. The one you're looking for might be in here. Then again, they might not. You take it from here. Happy detectiving. "
Intrusive CCTV is intrusive. Facial recognition is more intrusive.
It wouldn't be different from an impossibly high number of law enforcement officers keeping watch on everyone at all time like in a high-tech big brother nightmare -- except the tech doesn't work properly, and there are high numbers of false positives that will lead to the wrong innocent people being put under suspicion and potentially having their life ruined by a police investigation that presumes you're guilty until you've been illibated by a court.
They shouldn't be watching or tracking us in the first place.
If you look like someone the system is looking for, there's nothing you can do to whitelist yourself other than wear something on your face, you will be flagged, every single time until a human looks at it, and if they're stopping people, that means being stopped, every time.
If the system has the wrong face in the database, bad luck.
If someone finds a way of preventing detection, say, make up, or big glasses, the system doesn't work any more, as far as I know, even the best facial recognition that only relies on cameras and not depth cameras significantly lose accuracy with either of those.
There are a lot of people in London, the false positive and negative rates aren't usually published and anything above zero means those technical problems happen an undisclosed amount too much.
Did you ever hear the story of the guy with a very common name ending up on the no fly list? The no fly list was for a long time, and I think still now, literally only a list of names, meaning if someone with a common name goes on the list, everyone with that name gets stopped at the airport as the database gets checked to see if they're the same person. Now think what happens if someone with a generic looking face ends up in the police database.
Wouldn't such a system (ideally) learn the differences in [who it expected] and [who it found] and attempt to improve its accuracy to prevent false positives in the future? I don't know if this is too basic, but I'd assume training with a set of similar-but-not-an-exact-match data would be vital for accuracy at scale.
At least a couple times a month there's someone who has had repeated issues with law enforcement banging on their door, sometimes even with guns drawn, because someone with a similar name had a warrant out for their arrest, or a criminal background of some type, or someone the police wanted used to live at their address years ago. And there seems to be very little an average person can do to get "the system" to correct itself; even after multiple instances, the police keep coming back again and again and again and again because "the system said so". Massively scaled automated facial recognition will multiply that many times over, especially when officers are trained to just trust "the system" when "the system" says you're a criminal.
That poor guy was effectively fired despite the fact that every human agreed that he actually wasn't and should still be employed.
Perhaps I interpreted it wrong, but I think this speaks volumes for the amount of low-hanging fruit that exists for improvements in such a system: obviously, the above _shouldn't_ happen but does, which raises the question.. why?
I may be (and probably am) wrong, but my guess is that many PDs are still using incredibly outdated systems (at least, mine is), and would vastly benefit from modernizing and improving their systems. There's many other possible reasons (improved systems don't fix this problem, or improved systems have other problems, or administration doesn't care about this problem, etc), but when I read stories like this I think "modern technology would help/fix that" rather than "adding/scaling technology would exacerbate existing problems".
The differences are cost and scope. The cheaper it is, the easier it is move from doing it to "highly-valuable and highly-like to be guilty targets" to increasingly more innocent people (because "why not?"). That's how the governments think (unless the people strongly oppose these new changes).
It belongs to other groups as well. We've seen pretty frequently the state of computer security in governments. Can you also trust that this technology won't be hijacked? Can you tell me that this system can't be used by an invading force to quickly target important individuals?
It isn't always what a technology is being used for that makes it concerning, you also have to consider how it can be abused. This type of technology, and most surveillance technology, has a high potential for abuse. By both our own governments AND adversarial groups.
https://news.vice.com/article/vice-news-investigation-finds-...
And none of this surveillance compares to the extent of surveillance in Nothern Ireland.
I think this is why activists / journalists / spies in some areas try to study the operation and practice tradecraft / opsec / cs.
Info asymmetry is power, isnt it?
> Lots of people didn’t seem to be noticing the posters at all… from a basic data protection point of view they’re not informing people well about what data they’re collecting or what is going on.
i don't think data protection applies to state surveillance. if people knew what data the state collected about them, it would defeat the point.
What? The people the system is meant to protect shouldn't know about the system... at all?
That parts of a system must be prevented from knowing/interfering with the inner workings of each other to protect the integrity of the whole is a general pronciple in many things Itl think.
No, it wouldn't. The point of keeping data is to be able to detect unusual activity and cross reference information. Not to spy. The people are the country and they should be able to make an informed decision on what they want the government to be tracking about people.
This ideal mindset breaks down for everyone other than "the good guys". The point of keeping what is tracked a secret is to prevent the-actual-people-you're-looking-for from just occluding that particular information. They can't really "opt in" to the kind of surveillance that is necessary to find predictive patterns in their behavior, because they (obviously) won't, and knowing what is tracked just tells them what to spend the extra effort hiding.
i accept this model of reality and actually think its sensible. personally i have no issue with that.
i think it could be more like to protect the privacy of other citizens whose data it collects, and the effectiveness of its intelligence, the state must be opaque to the public and selectively transparent to itself.
Maybe one reason for the confusion /polarity on this topic, Is individuals think of privacy Through a framework of shame or something to hide, or nothing feel like sharing, But for states and organisations Privacy and secrecy is about maintaining Operational / strategic effectiveness.
but investigations and methods and intel must be secret to preserve capability. and also legal / judiciL integrity.