Face recognition in European police forces | Hacker News Reader

Face recognition in European police forces

algorithmwatch.org

109 pointsn_kb52 comments

Austria is one of the countries listed in the article, and it refers to an Austrian newspaper which reports that police plans to use facial recognition starting late December 2019 (https://futurezone.at/netzpolitik/das-kann-die-gesichtserken...).

On a tangent, the Austrian constitutional court of justice just today ruled that security forces are not allowed to use traffic camera data beyond using it to enforce traffic laws. They also forbid police to install hidden malware on people's phones ("Bundestrojaner"): https://www.vfgh.gv.at/medien/Kfz-Kennzeichenerfassung_und__...

While the use of facial recognition might not be a good thing in any case, it looks to me as if currently police is limited only to use it to retrospectively investigate serious crimes ("schwere Straftat").

"using" facial recognition is some form or another is so vague, that it's effectively a useless classification.

Relevant:

What facial recognition steals from us: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/10/21003466/facial-recogn...

How to avoid a dystopian future of facial recognition in law enforcement: https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/10/20996085/ai-facial-rec...

Relevant for an exaggerated,fear based perspective. Both is these articles condition the reader to believing in inevitable failure. These are completely black and white views and as we know, everything is grey.

Of course they do. Western technology corporations provide the tools, the Chinese regime proves it works and then everybody else wants it as well. This is the process. It is not democracy though. The police should not dictate the policy.

I referred to the headline "At least 10 police forces use face recognition in the EU, AlgorithmWatch reveals". Now it has been changed on HN.

Was in Korla, Xinjiang. So many cameras. You get a picture of your face taken and then a gate lifts when going into a lot of public areas or communities.

Is this like those TV screens near the entrance of a shop showing that you are being videotaped?

It's only the low-end stores which do that around these parts.

No. In the US we only do that to scare people. In China the system actually works and people know that so they don't shoplift in these places. I imagine you would be arrested before you made it out of the mall.

Also, stores are REQUIRED to have cameras bought from the government's contractors just like how the government regulates the installation of fire extinguishers and other safety equipment in the US.

It's more like a toll booth going into large parking areas and there is a camera there. It takes a picture of your license plate and you and then the gate goes up.

In areas like schools, or anywhere where there are children, officers will stop you and take your picture and verify your identity to help keep the kids safe.

Damn, did you take any pictures? That's a place many of us in the West just hear about, but not really see. I'd say blog post about it, if you can.

I have a lot of pictures. I'll blog about it. If anything, you feel really safe once you get past the dystopian aspect.

We always left our bags in the car since a lot of parking areas had an officer walking around. Beat that San Francisco. :)

When the author writes:

"Even if face recognition can match a face with 99% accuracy, the sheer amount of faces available in police databases makes false positives inevitable. (The 1% error rate means that, if 10,000 people who are not wanted by the police undergo face recognition, 100 will be flagged as wanted)."

The author is not being fair.

Usually with technologies like these, developers will not aim for an accuracy of 99%, but a precision of 99% (that is what we do with Congestion Charging in London, where the ramifications of FPs are much lower [I work in Transport for London]). That means that for 10,000,000 people undergoing facial recognition, only 100 may be flagged as wanted, and only 1 will be a false positive. If we were talking about 99% accuracy, that doesn't necessarily mean what the author claims either. Accuracy is (TP + TN)/(P + N), meaning that the decrease in 1% from 100% can be in any of:- a lowering of TP or TN; or an increase of FP or FN. There is no reason to think that the 1% will all mean false positives.

This is expected, yet still scary.

What are some easy / cheap / unobtrusive ways of thwarting face recognition software? I've read about masks, umbrellas and even makeup, but these are all obvious and difficult to use. Is there an inconspicuous solution that would only prevent face recognition without alerting human authorities? Would using these methods even be legal?

What about wearing a hat that blasts infrared

A rapidly blinking LED on your hat causes cameras to compensate for the bright flash, but they can't compensate fast enough due to the blinking. This causes the camera's video stream compression to focus on the brightness, resulting in degraded information in the relatively dark face. Basically, the face becomes pixel garbage and it often is not recognized as a face at all.

I wonder if infrared LEDs (not seen by human eyes - but which desense camera sensisivity etc etc) flashed on/off at a high and rotatingly variable rate mich redcuce how effective these cams work? Of course, IR filters on cameras would occur soon enough?

Most cameras have a software IR filter, even the $17 elp IP cams.

There are haircuts that prevent face recognition.

Also you can wear a special headlight that renders CCTV cameras useless.

Are you referring to those infrared headlights? Those don't work. Quite the opposite, they only highlight your face.

I think he was referring to CV Dazzle [0].

[0] https://cvdazzle.com

interesting!

Yeah, CV Dazzle shows possible haircuts.

Here's a LED setup that works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=2y3HWR3NMDQ&...

https://xkcd.com/1105/

Thinking that haircuts will defeat facial recognition is cute but wrong. This is a political/legal problem and has to be solved by political means. Haircuts and LEDs just won't cut it. If anything, they will draw more attention to people.

I refer to LED lamps - similar to those joggers wear all the time.

Hiding your face is illegal in Belgium at least. This includes masks, helmets etc. I don't know the exact wording, but I would suspect that it's broad enough to include umbrellas and makeup and anything else that effectively makes it impossible to recognize a person.

Officially surveillance is illegal too. But that probably doesn't mean much anyway.

Sure, but the people doing the surveilling are also the people who will fine or arrest you for covering your face. Not sure I understand what you're trying to say?

The only way to thwart face recognition is the Hong Kong method: put a mask on and tear the cameras down.

Any clever technical solution you can think of will be swiftly declared illegal. Technology won't save you from government abuse.

Wearing a mask was also swiftly declared illegal in Hong Kong. (Currently off the books pending appeal, but you get the idea.)

Get peal off stickers of realistic eyes and put them on your cheeks and forehead. Simple and 100% effective to defeat ALL KNOWN FR ALGORITHMS. Lead developer of the #3 global FR product.

Until 3D cameras are used for FR

At the moment, huge cost issues. That won't always be the case, but it buys us time.

And when 3D cameras are available, enterprises with dozens to tens of thousands of conventional cameras will balk at the expense of upgrading their cameras and networks to handle them. We see this already with large companies that are still running non-digital non-streaming cameras.

I do not object to facial recognition as long as a rigorous screen on use is in place. Known paroled felons who are going about their business legally in conformance with their parole might allow us to parole far more people that an excess of punitive zeal keeps locked up. Each one of these would require a warrant and be limited to end of their parole. Once done, they are out of the net. They need to improve the competence of these types of camera on various racial subtypes to make sure the error rate is the same as the whiter groups to avoid selective over reach on these groups. Like all things with sharp edges, they can be used badly - as we see in China versus the Uighers as well as Tibetans. Sadly, we lack the power to meddle except via trade restrictions - which misses the crooked rulers and harms the Chinese people - for whom I have great respect.

Whenever I hear about mass surveillance I think that the sci-fi movies with weird haircuts and make-up are starting to look more and more like a possibility.

CV Dazzle [0] (not affiliated) has an interesting set of examples.

[0] https://cvdazzle.com

"Almost all", says the title.

"10", says the article, "the majority (that answered questions)".

The EU has 28 member states.

Yes, we should be wary of allowing the police to use face recognition, but this sort of sensationalization helps no one.

Mirror, because the site is not responding well: https://ipfs.eternum.io/ipfs/QmSkQZKnY4mdNmVnya2MVM2ZgnAj5H7...

Title on the article is different now - maybe it was changed?

> "at least ten have a police force that uses face recognition. Four plans to introduce it in the coming years."

The only way to get to half of 28 is to sum those using it and those intending to do so soon. I think the majority they refer to is of the 25 they surveyed, but even then it is only a majority of respondents (not all responded). Sensationalism for sure.

> Title on the article is different now - maybe it was changed?

I meant the title of the post here, the title of the article is the same as when I saw it. "Almost all" is entirely unwarranted for sure.

Yes the poster changed it, sounded a bit clickbaity prolly.

Yes, 10 out of 28 is not most but it sets a dangerous precedent as most smaller countries follow big countries. If for example Germany, UK and France implement some draconian surveillance laws, the rest of their smaller neighbors(maybe apart from Scandinavia) will follow suit shortly.

Having the EU ban id cards and phtoes on CV's would be a start - don't forget that many EU countries have mandatory id cards.

The EU just introduced the requirement of id cards having biometric information. Fingerprint and biometric image to be precise.

The likelihood of the EU being constructive here is infinitesimally small.

Highly ironic given how the commissioners bash google on privacy

Identifying citizens correctly is a someone necessity of government. Google's identifying of who they're advertising to is far, very far, from necessity.

It's like pointing out to the police that 'chefs use knives' when you're stopped carrying a flick knife in the street.

So given the new regulation (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...), will the Irish PSC be altered to conform to it?

In the case of Ireland where they categorise the country as "facial recognition in use" it states:

It is unclear if the Gardaí use face recognition in real time, but face recognition is widely use to spot welfare fraud.

There are no documented cases of the Gardaí using real time facial recognition in Ireland. In the case of welfare fraud, a facial imaging system is used when registering or renewing your welfare status to prevent people registering under multiple or false identities.

It is also predicated on the Public Services Card, a de facto national ID card by stealth (the electorate in Ireland has resisted any attempts to implement a national ID card) which is "not compulsory but is mandatory for services" (from https://www.thejournal.ie/regina-doherty-public-services-car... ) and of which the Data Protection Commission has ruled "that the State’s retention of personal data on the 3.2m cards in existence is unlawful" (from https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/ireland/data-comm... ).

The government contest this result (and have been accused of using budgetary measures to hamper the DPC's ability to investigate and enforce their findings), but the use of facial recognition in Ireland is currently unlawful, and, personally speaking, a disgrace.

In terms of the use of facial recognition by the Gardaí, the truth is that we don't know whether it has been used - only that its fruits haven't been included in any book of evidence.

> There are no documented cases of the Gardaí using real time facial recognition in Ireland. In the case of welfare fraud, a facial imaging system is used when registering or renewing your welfare status to prevent people registering under multiple or false identities.

This will not fix the issue of poor practises for establishing welfare eligibility status for each identity.

And we gained nothing from it...

This is mainly driven by people around the age of 60 with a profound fear of death and almost no knowledge about implications of certain technologies.

It is not restricted to public safety, surveillance will also be employed against normal employees and workers, your health providers and any form of communication.

The police is trimmed to meet certain quotas and will try to get anything that might give them an advantage.

I want to get off this continent. Not that there are many alternatives left.

I still have to plan to laser any public camera I see. Luckily my region is still too boring to see mass deployment.

It is not important to not getting seen by cameras, it is important to spit on them wherever they surface.

“This is mainly driven by people around the age of 60 with a profound fear of death and almost no knowledge about implications of certain technologies.”

I thought most surveillance tech is developed by young bright people. You are making a big mistake by making this an age issue. You are sort of implying that once these old people are gone things will get better. They won’t.

Developed perhaps, but then they sold it to old paranoid people. I understand every interior minister that tries to try to amp up surveillance beyond any reasonable level, but we have increase any form of security since a few decades throughout the western world. And most of it because of irrational fears, because life didn't get exactly more dangerous, just complete madness instead.

> once these old people are gone things will get better. They won't.

No, we would have new old people.

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