Flagging “America’s most wanted” in public places like train stations or airports. Looking for missing children. Having home automation react differently to different family members.
Those are all usages I am personally totally ok with.
Those are all usages I am personally totally ok with.
To illustrate lets imagine a really really good system that had a 0% false negative rate¹ , and a 0.000001%² false positive rate. If we were to sample the entire country looking the the FBI's most wanted we would end up with ~3290 matches, 3280 of which are going to be other people³.
Considering high value of the individual the chances of harassment or wrongful arrest (or worst) is pretty high.
1: In reality the false negative and false positive rate are going to be directly inversely related. The more you decrease the false positive rate the higher your false negative rate is.
2: That is 1 in 1 million
3: In this ideal situation it is assuming there is an even distribution. At this point computer vision is significantly worst for false positives for people of color.
Even with the false positive rate it's much more likely an individual identified by the system is a target than a random individual.
> It's definitely a problem if you use the face recognition as your only criteria - but if it alerted security to pay more attention to someone or to double check their documents?
Where do you imagine this is happening? If its in an environment where papers are expected as standard (e.g. an airport), sure, this is relatively benign. If it's when you're walking through a mall and now you're being stopped and searched, how is that not bordering on harassment?
> Even with the false positive rate it's much more likely an individual identified by the system is a target than a random individual.
Much more likely than without the system, sure. Chances of it being a random individual and not the target? 99.6% (using the math above of 3280 innocents to 3290 people identified).
If a system had a failure rate of 99.6% when harassing people, I don't think I'd describe that as 'much more likely' to be a target than an innocent random.
I believe there is no better way to identify wanted criminals at scale, do we want to comb the streets with policemen and "harass" 10x more people in hoes of finding them?
It's not a death penalty to be checked and bothering additional 3200 people in the whole country is a ok tradeoff to find wanted person in my opinion.
It feels like you want to cripple the way police looks for criminals because they don't act very kind towards suspects. Maybe police is the problem and not surveillance?
How would this face camera thing even work? Like, a camera identifies so-and-so and a police car rushes out immediately? That’s not really how police do stuff.
Rather than the hypothetical of 'is this ok if we have 100% accuracy', how about 'is 100% accuracy ever likely to be possible?'
If it's not, then the previous question is about as relevant as 'if unicorns existed, would you want one?' (and yes, I would!)
I think that's less realistic than developing 100% accurate algorithms, but now we're into anthropology instead of technology...
That's kind of a denying the antecedent propositional fallacy.
How big is the false positive rate with tips received by phone? Law enforcement probably has to deal with much more wrong clues on a daily basis than to double check an image that was flagged by an automated system. And if even a human inspection can't tell the difference between the missing person and an image of the missing person then it's definitely worth checking out.
Instead they should attempt to verify first and try to approach people in civilised manner, not shoot their pets...
And what happens if we descend into military rule or a dictatorship? With "America's most wanted" fliers, the general public can just refuse to participate. With facial recognition, anyone deemed an "enemy of the state" can easily be tracked and eliminated.
Always assume the worst and work your way back to the good when doing the cost-benefit analysis.
In reality laws are only as powerful as their enforcement, and if there is no will to enforce, like what happens during transitions to dictatorships, then they’ll just be ignored.
There are other, better, arguments in favor of personal liberty to use against facial recognition by law enforcement. Efficient, highly automated systems crush people who just happen to get caught up in them.
A tool that could track individuals and was under the perview of Executive Branch (eg Homeland Security) sounds pretty dangerous. Any political rivals of family members who go for STI screening, abortion clinics, gay bars, oncologist, or couples consoling could be either leveraged or leaked for political effect. Or you it could be used to track groups of people, activist, reporters. Or any number of ways I wouldn’t be able to think of.
What I was trying to say is that if you are trying to establish a totalitarism not having any checks and balances on something like that would be handly.
Technologies take time to develop and deploy, and the fact of their development and deployment is a red flag that tells you something bad is coming and gives you time to react before it can actually be put into place.
Setting everything up for turnkey totalitarianism is not wise.
Also, in a functioning state, the bureaucracy (mostly) follows the law and the judicary's interpretation of the law. Then again, functioning states don't tend to turn into dictatorships.
(Fun fact: Article 20 (4) of the German constitution explicitly authorizes every German to resist when someone abolishes freedom and democracy. Considering the mentality of the average German, this is probably necessary.)
The general public will be misled by the media. Already politicians are claiming that the media isn't truly independent or objective with claims of "fake news". If the media falsely claim that you are a dangerous criminal, the public will eat it up and ask for dessert.
We wear masks.
It only works if it scans _everyone_ .
Additionally what happens when the technology isn’t perfect and innocent people get mistakenly flagged as persons of interest?
The other thing is once it’s installed and in operation, what’s to stop it being used for other purposes? - being used to target people peacefully protesting against the government or whatever.
It’s a slippery path from there into a surveillance state - China is already pretty much there with their social credit system - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
I for one don’t want to wake up someday soon and discover it’s 1984...
Because of that, there’s unlikely to be universal acceptance or rejection. And without popular opinion, it will be hard to pass any laws that change the status quo.
There absolutely is an expectation of privacy in public. Being seen in public by a series of uncoordinated people is massively different from a PI tailing you and recording your actions. This form of privacy is generally termed "obscurity".
That is actually completely legal to do in all circumstances, precisely because there is no expectation of privacy in public.
> CCTV cameras monitored by humans are COMPLETELY different from a facial recognition system recording the identities and movements of all people. There is no comparison.
Which is not necessarily how facial recognition would necessarily work. More likely would be to scan for known suspects and fugitives. But then we’re back to the “how is it used” question.
Any technology which searches for fugitives will necessarily scan everyone. There is no such thing as targeted facial recognition, it can only work by mass surveillance.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html
I'm suggesting a far simpler use case: It scans your face and if you don't match any of the fugitives it's looking for, it forgets about you. I think this use case is far more likely because it's a lot simpler and cheaper to pull off. And that's a big difference.
"A general ability to stabilize a vulnerable world would require greatly amplified capacities for preventive policing and global governance."
It is a misconstrued quote now but Ben Franklin said "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."