Yeah, seems to me like the real problem is that people actually have a lot of doppelgangers, and applying facial recognition to the entire population, even if just as accurate as a real person is just not a useful thing to do.
Take DNA testing. We all know that given two samples the odds of a false positive are incredibly low. So DNA testing is a great too for eliminating people who might otherwise be suspects or further evidence against the guilty.
The problem is that given this DNA database, someone decided "let's find our suspect by looking for a match". With 1 in a billion chance of a random match and 100M samples, your chances of getting a false positive are really high.
The problem is that there are instances where a DNA match alone is used to prosecute or even convict people.
In recent years this problem has gotten worse due to the rise of familial DNA matching. Given two samples, we used to only have the ability to say if they were a match or not. Now we can say how much of a match they are. How much of a partial match is enough? What's more, you may be implicated by the stored DNA is relatives.
Facial recognition is far more imprecise than DNA. So yeah I fully expect this to get abused by prosecutors and law enforcement.
If I increase the population I test to include any warm body, eventually I'll end up with more false positives than real positives.
If you are looking for one male suspect and comparing them to all the male faces (let's assume it gets gender correct) in the us, with a 99.9999% (six 9s) accurate algorithm you would get something like:
1 true positive 182,499,818 true negatives 182 false positives
Broad scale facial recognition is just an outright stupid thing to do as a sole measure of identification without the use of other information.
The hardest thing for them with probability is false positives. conceptually it does not seem to align well with how the human brain works. I've had students literally get so frustrated the cry because they know what the math says but can't accept that you can test positive for a disease and not have it. They know they are wrong but it's just this weird sticky misconception.
This seems like a clear example for why facial recognition is a technology that is just not 'solved' yet. The appearance of people's faces, especially from similar ethnic backgrounds, is just too similar for a ML model to parse out with any confidence.
I have noticed this in real life. As I get older, I notice it more and more. I'm sure many of you all have too. There are very distinct patterns, or 'buckets', that human faces tend to fall in. I think our brains tend to naturally categorize them accordingly.
It is probably subconscious. I might not be able to articulate it, or put a definite 'name' on a group. But I know I am constantly seeing patterns of faces in public. People I don't know, and have never met, but they remind me of other random people I have seen in public. Or maybe they remind me of a popular celebrity that everyone knows.
Either way, something goes off in my head. I can't help but think to myself, they must have some sort of similar lineage, or genetic background. I subconsciously categorize them into a bucket with others I've seen.
I imagine this is similar to how Rekognition, and other models work. I thought the blog post from the parent commment @bko, is a fantastic example of this. It is actually amazing, when you think about it, that the ML model can match these faces up as well as it does.
To the naked eye, it is clearly not the same person. Rightly so, considering all the images were in the range of 70-80% confidence. But many are remarkably close. I think this illustrates, the concept I am trying to describe. You can notice it, even with the naked eye.
All of this rambling is to say, I agree with Amazon's moratorium on Rekognition.
As impressive as the technology is, it should probably not be used to try pin-point specific individuals yet, or whatever else folks might be erroneously trying to use it for. If we are to trust facial recognition to identify specific individuals, it should probaly be approaching near 100% confidence, and I imagine that level of confidence is a long ways off.
Now ask if my neighbor looks like any random person on the street, sure, it's small. But that chance we find two people somewhere that look very similar is incredibly high.
"Sally Clark was a practising solicitor before the conviction. After her three-year imprisonment she developed a number of serious psychiatric problems including serious alcohol dependency and died in 2007 from acute alcohol poisoning"
There is already a whole slew of dubious methods[1] (bite mark analysis, blood splatter analysis, fibre comparison) being used to put people in prison/to death, these things are known to be bullshit, but they are still being used. I really think we as technology-literate people should fight as hard as we can against the introduction of facial recognition in the justice system because once it becomes common place it will be really hard to undo it.
[0]: https://www.innocenceproject.org [1]: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-humes-forensic-e...
This of course means that there are doppelgangers or near doppelgangers all over the place. Even funnier, when i first moved back here from the U.S I was staying at a place in which there was this guy who looked exactly like one of my friends from the U.S, even down to facial expressions and mannerisms (maybe that was because he was always extremely stoned).
Presumably you'd also use the same techniques as used by humans today to narrow down further, like taking into account location, time, etc of match
Move fast and break lives.