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Comment by 99_00 | Hacker News Reader

Is the American justice system so broken and law enforcement so incompetent that a computer flagging someone is basically an automatic conviction and the technology has to be banned?

No evidence, by its self should be enough to get a conviction. Not your finger prints all over the scene of a crime, not a video of someone who looks like you, not even your DNA matching a rape kit.

The fact that someone was arrested because of match shows a failure in basic criminal investigation more than anything else.

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It's because it can track the where abouts of everyone. It's a massive privacy issue. Do you want the gov't to know where you go, what you spend your money, and who you associate with? I sure as hell don't even if they wouldn't find problem with it.

It really doesn't matter what the legislation says - no doubt they have already been doing and been calling it something else. It's going to be one of the worst things to come out of the 21st century.

It's because it can track the whereabouts of everyone. It's a massive privacy issue. Do you want the gov't to know where you go, what you spend your money, and who you associate with?

The government already knows that, via Google, Facebook, and the telcos.

So what's the course of action? Give up and simply accept massive privacy infringement, or support laws that push back wherever (still) possible?

You can leave your phone at home, you can't do that with your face.

Therefore those data collection activities should be prohibited completely for those companies or anyone else.

>Do you want the gov't to know where you go, what you spend your money, and who you associate with?

For better or worse (and better only being in the sense that things need to get worse before they get better) there are a great many in Massachusetts do believe all-seeing government surveillance (though if you phrased it like that they'd probably take issue) is a net plus to society.

Yes draconian surveillance to keep the status quo. Your choices scrutinized by some faceless figure to keep things as they're 'suppose' to be(or worst yet to carry out an agenda).

Yes, it is that broken. First, simply being charged means you're automatically out $5k for a criminal defense attorney and missed employment. Second, the criminal justice system appears to have little respect for the fallibility of technology, especially when its results are highly correlated with other evidence (eg a police lineup).

That’s terrible, perhaps we should implement some sort of right to representation system. We could have public attorneys and everything.

You have to pay for public defendants unless you're indigent ...?

Ok learned something. Well, unless there is financial redress for wrongful arrest then that’s a serious general problem. It’s not the problem suggested by OP but a serious one.

No it’s not, and that isn’t the reason for the ban, because it’s not true.

Don't think OP is claiming that was the reason for the ban, they may be alluding to this separate incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628394

Edit: Agreed, no conviction was involved, so their statement looks exaggerated.

>During Wednesday's meeting and before the vote, Wu said that Boston shouldn't be using racially discriminatory technology. She noted the reports of the first known case of a man arrested after being misidentified by facial recognition technology in Michigan.

Are you presenting that quote in support of some particular point I made or are you just being generally helpful?

Yes, so a wrongful arrest was made, and thus the technology isn’t perfect, so we shouldn’t use it is the thinking?

Well actually no, apparently wrongful arrests aren’t sufficient cause to ban a technology but only one believed to racially discriminate lol.

Or maybe the real reason is because it’s become fashionable of late to fuck the police and the whole because reasons is an afterthought.

In any case, the larger point, the one suggested by the OP, the one met with foolish acquiescence in response, the one suggesting that our justice system convicts people on the basis of facial recognition technology is wrong..

Your tone is completely inappropriate. You're making a lot of assumptions about what people are thinking and what position they are taking in the debate. I can discuss the topic with you when you are feeling better.

There's at least one prominent case of someone being arrested solely on a face-recognition match https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23628394 and there are at least a few cases where someone was convicted due to mistaken identity, let me just pick one https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kansas-man-who-blamed-w... So I wouldn't call it "automatic" but since there is a false-positive rate in convictions, it's important to try to reduce false positives at earlier steps as well.

> Is the American justice system so broken and law enforcement so incompetent

Structurally—not necessarily individually, though often that too—malevolent, not incompetent, at least as is most relevant to the issue at hand.

Yes, if you're Black and/or poor.

Do you have a source for your claim?

Do you watch the news?

Do you read the threads you respond to?

Do you think the news is designed to provide an accurate representation of reality? I don't necessarily disagree with you, but pointing to the news isn't exactly convincing.

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