King County, WA bans facial recognition software
komonews.com
komonews.com
This is such an annoying trend in media coverage of this issue: every city in the world is happy to restrict THEIR USE of facial recognition. That's a symbolic and small victory. It will always be a symbolic and small victory. Every headline leaves the "government use" part out. Every single time. That's because people who write headlines know what everyone knows: that "government use" is a small slice of the overall problem. The key is that anyone who raises this issue with these headlines will hear from some annoying person chiming in to list out why government use of facial recognition is bad (as though that's the basis for my rub here. It's isn't.) But individual localities making internal rules to stop their own use of facial recognition software isn't solving the big problem. This has been going on for years, and cities banning their own use of facial recognition has had zero effect on any other political entities but other cities seeking easy headlines. It's not solving the societal problems that facial recognition poses. It's not earning the click. Cities should stop distracting from that bigger set of problems with this stuff.
> Another Arrest, and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match
> A New Jersey man was accused of shoplifting and trying to hit an officer with a car. He is the third known Black man to be wrongfully arrested based on face recognition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/facial-recogni...
The amount of people going to jail because of shoddy, unauditable code with no due process should be zero, so these announcements matter.
It's clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at all. Don't replace the jury or public defenders with robots. But facial recognition could just be a way to look through a large amount of footage to find relevant clips that would then be reviewed in more detail by humans. Without facial recognition, you just pay cops overtime to look through footage themselves. It doesn't necessarily affect the outcome of the process at all.
I think facial recognition just needs some help with its image, it's just a tool that would save tax dollars. Or a means to Defund The Police, if that's your thing.
Facial recognition is the enabling technology for automated real-world repression. Maybe it is true that we can find a way to tame it to gain efficiency gains without destroying open society. But right now it looks like a dangerous one-way ratchet.
I generally don’t want my government to “move fast and break things”
No, nothing is "just a tool". Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks. Automation makes things feasible. Cheap storage that allows weeks or months of security footage to be preserved changes what's possible. License plate scanners are "just" a technology that could be done with a bunch of cops on corners with notepads, but in aggregate they're a tracking of where everyone is and has been that could never be done without the technology. Facial recognition is very similar.
Sure, but like any other tools it also enable all sorts of new benefit.
The preferable action would be to take advantage of the benefit while also try to fix whatever it is that cause problem with the tools instead of simply banning it.
The problem is automated identification of faces. The solution is banning that.
Whats the problem with this ?
The problem is when they use it to harm me.
What need to be fixed is The government record, observe and judge every single thing a person does to harm people.
>to subject everyone in a society to that kind of scrutiny would just be laying the foundations for abuse
It can be used for abuse but not always, It can also be used for good, what need to be prevented is the use for abuse.
According to this, 405, which is 405 too many.
I also just looked at a few unarmed shootings at random to get an idea of what they were like. Of the three I looked up I saw one guy who was shot while fighting with a police officer after being discovered at the scene of a burglary. One guy who was shot after a car chase when, after they had caught him, he got behind the wheel of a police car and the police shot him to prevent another chase. One guy, after stabbing someone to death and being approached by multiple police officers, faked a draw to "suicide by cop". My point is, I don't think it's even clear that all (or even most) of the 50 unarmed shootings are unjustified.
You can't build a system of robots without some fault-tolerance. How are humans supposed to keep up to that?
Based on this data - how can you make the assumption that a police interaction is an inherent risk to life that is always unjustified?
We mostly pay police to show up and be generally aggravating to people who might be doing bad stuff - in some sense "being sketchy in the vicinity" is a valid reason for police action, which doesn't even always turn into an arrest, let alone a life-or-death situation. Those cases are the vast minority of police interactions total.
If it's illegal to be armed, you should change the constitution, rather than asking police to shoot evry armed person they see
government monitoring people by itself is not a problem, government monitoring people to harm people is the problem.
What need to be fixed is the usage of tools to harm people, not the tool itself.
I thought the election of Trump would disabuse people of this idea that it’s smart to hand more and more power to central authorities. But at this point I think it’s hopeless. People just want the state to be Daddy, and assume or hope that its power will always be wielded by people they like against people they don’t.
Moreover, yes, other deeply awful weapons are also banned. Biological weapons and Chemical weapons are both widely banned by all decent countries in the world. Nuclear weapons should join this list. They almost did, during the Reagan era: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/ronald-...
Lots of new technology has some downsides, the laws should more specifically target the downsides instead of require that everyone pretend the technology doesn't exist. If nothing else, it's just far too impractical for a technology that is easily available and in everyone's pocket to be illegal to use. It will just incentivize obscuring and lying about using it, rather than truly prevent it from ever being used. It reminds me of the history of banning encryption, you're basically just making math illegal.
They are making their own bed in many cases. Here's one of several interesting moves by Clear View AI, for example: https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1220876741515702272
You could argue that humans make similar mistakes and bias, but the scale is always smaller when humans are involved, just because of how slow they are.
Say a model is wrong 37% of the time, and so are humans, but the model runs 1000 times a minute, where as humans perform the task 10 times a minute. That means the model makes 370 false accusations a minute, where a human makes only 3 a minute.
In effect, the number of people you bothered falsely accusing is still less when done manually, simply because it can't scale.
Lastly, there's an argument that the police shouldn't be too efficient, because some crimes might be better off existing in a grey area.
People do fear police supremacy and police states, the idea that they can find you for j-walking or jumping a fence as a dare, etc. Or that the state could become authoritarian, but you'd have no way to fight back as rebels due to advance tech of surveillance the police would have, etc. I'm not saying those are justified, but I think it plays into it, people are fine saying that only the highest risk cases are worth pursuing, but if a tech comes along that lets police pursue all cases, it might start to feel abusive to people.
P.S.: I'm neither against nor in support of a ban here, I'm still making up my mind, just answering some of the reasons I know off for being for the ban.
It seems like we should then ban eyewitness testimony. That has tons of accuracy issues and bias.
A great example is the Capitol Riots. They are narrowing the list down to manageable numbers. They aren’t suddenly arresting thousands of people for a crime committed by three.
It’s one of the things swept under the umbrella of the “CSI effect.”
Or they spend 100x as many man-hours and achieve the same number of false accusations, but at a much higher cost to the taxpayers.
When it comes to facial recolonization or AI in general, could anyone really tell you why the computer decided to flag your face and why another similar one was rejected? Would you accept a search warrant when the judgement wasn't based on any human's perception but something which came out a black box? Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias?
If that's not enough, make a human sign off that they have confirmed or at least agree with the black box's conclusion, and put the department on the hook if it was obviously wrong.
> Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias?
The box is comparing a source image to an image with a name attached to it. Like you said, no different than a human would do, with all of their own biases in play. We aren't talking minority report here, so there's no reason to think this is a hurdle that would be difficult to overcome.
Utah’s e-warrant program has a 98% approval rate. Some warrants are approved in less than 30 seconds.
Warrants across the US are frequently approved on evidence as shaky as a single anonymous tip.
The problem (at least in my opinion) isn’t that facial recognition itself is inherently evil, it’s that:
a) There are no standards around the algorithms themselves in terms of reliability. Worse still, this can inadvertently lead to serious racial bias.
b) It can launder lousy evidence (this person looks vaguely like this grainy photo) into solid scientific evidence (the algorithm says it’s a 99.5% match!) providing justification for all sorts of warrants and raids on even flimsier ground.
c) It creates lousy incentives in favour of creating a surveillance state. The police already have out-of-control hardware budgets, and many don’t like the idea of that budget being used to monitor and record people at all times they’re in public.
If we had better police and court systems and better privacy law this might not have been necessary - but we live in the world we live in so I can see why this county would do this.
Here is the crux of the problem. If facial recognition were good, then it would actually make things better. If it were bad, then it isn't making things substantially worse- if anything, it creates a track record which makes things like racial bias more obvious and auditable.
The real issue is that there isn't sufficient judicial oversight, nor recourse for when it fails.
At least in the United States, any encounter with law enforcement can potentially end in violence, so anything that makes it easier to get a questionable warrant will make things worse.
If you are stuck living somewhere where music is illegal, and you happen to listen to some music on the sly and get caught by a perfect system, and punished, how is that better?
Better would be if people can live freely without having to worry about a perfect system tracking their every action.
There is no person alive on earth today who does not do things that would get them punished under the law of some government somewhere.
And you want the law enforcement systems to be perfect?
Facial recognition isn't going to care that you procured illegally distributed copies of protected works (your ISP already does that anyway), so lets stop moving the goal posts. It is a reactive, not proactive system, and while I am not fully convinced that it is actually ready, I am also not buying the slippery slope nonsense.
Sorry, I wasn't clear maybe, but somehow you misunderstood me.
I wasn't talking about pirated music.
I was pointing out that some regimes have laws that forbid listening to music, period.
Fixing bias doesn't help when all it does is help accurately catch innocent people who in fact were accurately detected to be doing innocent things, and punishes them for doing those innocent things because those innocent things are illegal in that country for no good reason.
>Since when do search warrants get automatically approved by a black box? It is on the judge to approve, not a machine.
The USA PATRIOT ACT removed judicial oversight and allows for warrants to be issued that notify the judiciary and simultaneously issue gag orders on those notified. For federal cases warrants no longer require judicial approval in an undisclosed number of cases. Try and find a list of current Guantanamo Bay detainees or the judges who approved the warrants used to detain them. Until that’s dealt with I see why King County would ban this use as a defense against automated enforcement.
Isn't every PD that uses facial recognition keeping a human in the loop to confirm algorithmic matches first? And if so why would the overall process be any less accurate than a human match?
Class Activation Mapping [0] and Salience Maps are some of the most used and intuitive approaches. Lime and Shap [1] are tools to visually represent feature activation in an understandable way.
The idea that we have no idea what is going on with machine learning models is just flat out wrong.
Are there many sincere researchers studying flaws in facial recognition advocating its unequivocal ban forever? Joy Boulamwini:
> At a minimum, Congress should require all Federal agencies and organizations using Federal funding to disclose current use of face-based technologies. We cannot afford to operate in the dark. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-116hhrg36663/pdf/CH...
Timnit Gebru in the NYTimes:
> Do you see a way to use facial recognition for law enforcement and security responsibly?
> It should be banned at the moment. I don’t know about the future. https://archive.is/JqiqP
Are the flaws Algorithmic Justice League finding real? Someone has definitely been wrongly accused by a facial recognition error (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...).
Is there certainly an impression that activists want a forever ban? Yes, Joy Buolomwini and Timnit Gebru are frequently represented as advocating against even "perfect" facial recognition.
It's true, lawyers tend to advocate for a forever ban. I don't think these researchers advocate for a forever ban. If you read their raw words, they are much more intellectually honest than the press allows.
Is your line of thinking co-opted by people acting in bad faith? Certainly. You would feel very differently about the deployment of the system if you were so much more likely to be falsely accused by it due to the color of your skin.
Every intellectually honest person's opinion of the justice system eventually matures. You'll come around to delegating authority to researchers over lawyers and police.
"The satnav directions say to turn onto this pier."
"The model says this house is worth 200k less than the ones in the whiter neighborhood a quarter mile away."
"The system recommends the patient have 40% allocated home health care hours per week going forward."
"The algorithm says this grainy footage of someone far away from the camera in the dark and the rain is X."
If you put humans in the loop informed by an algorithm making judgements, the human will often defer to the algorithm. Does the algorithm give an output that indicates its uncertainty? Based on what model? How equipped is the human to consider that?
>"Facial recognition" means an automated or semiautomated process that assists in identifying, or verifying the identity of, an individual based on the physical characteristics of an individual's face.
So I have a still from security camera footage. And I have 50,000 mug shots stored in the mug shot data base. I can see that it's a man in the image, he's white, between the ages of 15 - 50. So I go to my computer and put in the filter for the mug shot database to include those criteria. Sounds to me like I just used a semi-automated method to attempt to identify the person in the still image.
This ordinance is dumb. The use of a computer to pattern match, to automate what a person can do, is a lever that makes everyone more efficient. What's the logic in making someone thumb, or click through, every photo in the state's mug shot collection instead of allowing a system to reduce the possible candidates, if any.
But if you didn't record or have access to those fields, and you tried to infer age, gender and race from the photo, and then filter -- well, what if your system is much more accurate guessing ages for some racial groups than others, or more accurate in distinguishing between white and latinx than between latinx and asian? Suddenly your "filtering" process can also have a bias problem, where some people are more likely than others to be included in the results for a query which shouldn't actually include them.
A case agent looks at the still photo from security footage, concludes the person is male and white. They put that information into the mug shot database and it returns the subset of all mugshots that are male and white. They have just used a semi automated system to assist to ascertain the identity of the person in the security footage based on the physical characteristics of their face. This is forbidden by the ordinance.
>what if your system is much more accurate guessing ages for some racial groups than others, or more accurate in distinguishing between white and latinx than between latinx and asian? Suddenly your "filtering" process can also have a bias problem, where some people are more likely than others to be included in the results for a query which shouldn't actually include them.
What if it isn't? Doesn't matter. It's a tool to attempt to match two photos. If a tool is not as effective due to the way light and different skin tones interact, it just limits the leverage factor of the tool. It doesn't make it wrong and it isn't an infringement on people's rights. We use DNA matching even though it can't distinguish twins and sometimes it comes back and says it's a close match for Bob which leads them to suspect Bob's brothers family, e.g. Golden State Killer. I fail to see why tools have to be perfect or not be useful.
typically you find the balance....right now you are suggesting that the improvement is a convenient way of increasing security but the reality is, that security in one sense can lead to loss of it in another.
example. Assuming all things are Good and no possibility for corruption then it would be purely beneficial....but since those aren't controls, and not realistic either, we cannot sacrifice security for convenience in this case.....if that makes sense.
I'm way more scared of guns than I am of facial recognition and as a country we will never ban guns.
For example, there's no law against making one phone call to a random number in the phone book. But if you use an autodialer to call everyone in the city, you're breaking the law.
I'm not for an instant saying that there aren't any implications in terms of how the technology can and should be deployed - but some people just want to be angry and offended despite a lack of understanding of what they're actually on about.
Facial recognition struggles to accurately identify black people and women.
The difficulties around both are probably around edge and contour detection:
Black people have darker skin and less angular features - the shadows on their faces are not only harder to see (due to blending with skin-tone), but softer to begin with.
Women routinely leave the home wearing enough makeup to not only look less like themselves, but often look more like other women.
There are ways to mitigate these issues to some extent: cameras that work better in low light and codecs that do a better job of encoding relative rather than absolute light levels will do a better job of preserving the information in the faces of people with darker complexions.
As far as makeup is concerned, it can misrepresent the shape of a face - if you only have one angle.
Treating the face shape as invariant as Δt -> 0 and running on video (even better with multiple synchronised cameras) will allow for topography extraction despite dealing with someone deliberately misrepresenting what they look like.
Compare that with the usable colours and bad blacks of standard absolute colour encoded video.
P.S. who cares if KC is first or not. What matters is it got done.
I just learned about this "traffic light labelling" going on in the EU and was blown away that this was implemented 4 YEARS ago. [1] I'm hoping the US catches to Europe for everything else, we're far behind.
[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/traff...
Homelessness is a profound and society-wide problem, with no easy answers unless you consider "spend way more money, build way more housing" an easy answer (which I do).
Until we do those things, it should be no surprise that a region with skyrocketing rents has a housing crisis, and that will present itself in myriad unpleasant ways.
That has all sorts of knock-on effects: people close to a murder victim lose the sense that the state will do something about their loss, so they take the matter into their own hands; people who commit homicide are a tiny minority but if they're not apprehended, they can keep committing homicides, which makes a broader society feel less safe; people sense that the state, their city, their neighbors, etc don't care about them because if the homicide was of someone in a richer neighborhood, it would be more likely to be solved; etc. Been a while since I read it so I'm forgetting a lot.
I think this goes some way towards explaining why people in neighborhoods where lots of violent crime is committed have such ambivalent feelings about the police - they are at once underpoliced (police don't solve major crimes in their neighborhood) and overpoliced (police bust people for all kinds of small-time stuff, which has devastating long-term consequences).
At the same time as all of the above, it's also true that it's basically never been safer to live in a big American city (ok ok, at least since like the 1960s - before then the picture gets significantly more complicated). So it's safer than ever, but big crimes don't get prosecuted or solved, unless they happen in the "right" neighborhoods. The solution therefore isn't more of the same police; maybe it's more policing but the policing itself needs to change.
Second, and where things get a bit more "technical" is that SF is both a city and a county, yes, but it's only one city in that county. There are 881,549 people in SF county compared to 2,252,782 people in King County[0]. According to each county's Wikipedia page, SF county is 231.91 square miles to King County's 2,307. King County has 39 cities and towns[1] to SF county's 1.
So while yes, you're technically correct, I still think that the headline is accurate as-is. Most of the country's counties are similar to King County (eg, not a city-county), and it's important to distinguish the fact that this ban covers a tremendously wide area and numerous municipalities.
[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/kingcountywashi...
> We applaud King County for being the first multi-city county in the nation to pass such necessary measures
TL;DR, those of us who have been working this issue for several years are gratified with the unanimous(!) vote of the county council, but realize there's still a lot of work to do both at the local and state (and national) levels.
[1] https://www.seattle.gov/tech/initiatives/privacy/surveillanc...
If this was a reasonable society, with a reasonable police force: absolutely, narrow definitions of permitted use should be reasonably fine. But the US isn't, and the US doesn't, so in the US, it can't be.
(but then you look at countries where it might be fine, and it turns out that they don't need facial recognition to have a decent enough catch rate, kind of making the whole thing moot. No police force should use it, for wildly different reasons)
Why is that hard to believe? The article very explicitly and clearly quotes a lawyer who says that is pretty much exactly what is happening.
And regardless, even if there weren't a direct quote from a lawyer on this topic in the article, it still shouldn't be that hard to believe that a computer's output is going to influence the court cases at all. That's not how humans work, for one - people will include everything they 'know' about a situation when making a decision. You can't have a computer producing output and then people ignoring the output and then calling the computer system useful. If people are ignoring the output, then why have the system? And if people aren't ignoring the output, then, the (FALSE) output is being considered in decision-making of which innocent minorities are to be jailed.
Take for examples:
How unimpeachable police testimony is.
How hard it is to overturn a conviction.
How hard it is to dislodge forensic techniques that are known to be bunk.
I could go on. Probably the best correlate we have to this is the rejection of the polygraph and boy in retrospect are we just lucky about that. If King County manages to be the first in such an action against facial recognition they may be worthy of a great deal of praise.
Do you want to receive a citation every time you exceed the speed limit by 1 mph? Ever pull off into a parking lot to check your phone or look for something in your car? Trespassing. Ever lose your temper and yell at someone, even briefly? That's assault in most jurisdictions.
It's to prevent some halfwit police officer talking to a halfwit judge and prosecuting some innocent fellow. #donttreadonme
So anybody else can use it anywhere, including third-party contractors performing work for any of the above parties.
Also, strangely, I see no mention of hardware or other non-software facial recognition technology.
The ordinance is here if this is a permalink. https://mkcclegisearch.kingcounty.gov/View.ashx?M=F&ID=94173...
Note that other states had already limited the use of facial recognition, by law enforcement, before California or Washington, e.g., NH in 2013 and OR in 2017.4,5
1 https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-wants-rules-facial-rec...
2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/washington-state-oks-facial-rec...
3 https://housedemocrats.wa.gov/blog/2020/03/12/house-and-sena...
4 http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/rsa/html/VII/105-D/105-D-2.h...
5 https://law.justia.com/codes/oregon/2017/volume-04/chapter-1...
I would bet Microsoft is lobbying in many states regarding facial recognition and privacy laws to try to get the laws they want. The news will report that they are proponents of passing laws governing these issues, but the point is that they want to shape how the laws are written to benefit Microsoft. I can find citations if anyone doubts this is happening.
Seems like a blatant error to reason that, because there are instances of facial recognition being used incorrectly that the technology itself is fundamentally flawed. You could apply the same reasoning to the police themselves - I know of at least three instances where the police arrested the wrong person, so we should ban the police?
With the police example it seems obvious we should continue iterating and improving the police to correct errors, but that we don't want to throw out the whole institution because that would be much worse. The police may have caused some harm, but did they do more good?
I'd bet that banning facial recognition is net harmful to black and Hispanic people. Black and Hispanic people are disproportionately likely to be victims of crime, so denying effective tools to law enforcement will disproportionately hurt those communities. Of course, it's academic as King County didn't use facial recognition - but I bet it could be a useful tool if used responsibly.
I've read news articles before about cases where facial recognition was used irresponsibly. We absolutely need to put a stop to that. I think if we treat it more like an unreliable witness saying "The person I saw reminded me of X" and less like a definitive ID that may be a better position.
Interesting parts: > The Proposed Ordinance would also prohibit county administrative offices and executive departments from issuing any permit or entering into any agreement which authorizes a third party to use facial recognition technology or obtain or access facial recognition information on behalf of the county. However, evidence relating to the investigation of a specific crime that may have come from facial recognition technology may be used by a county administrative office or executive department so long as the evidence was not generated by or at the request of the county office or department.
But it’s a technology evolving. And susceptible to manipulation as well. Watch the avantgarde comedy by the creators of South Park:
With that in mind I don't have much of an issue with the use of the word "county", considering there aren't a whole ton of city-counties relative to the total number of counties in the US.
Based on my reading of the article, the 'alleged' downside (this is very clearly real, there is no need to say alleged here!) is that minorities are being swept up in the system and wrongfully accused of crimes and then jailed.
Your suggestion is, what if we didn't jail them? Just round up the innocently identified minorities and start investigating them? That is....hardly an improvement. In fact it would seem that while it might reduce falsely accused innocent people from going to jail, it could increase the number of racist incidents where police are harassing innocent minorities. And worst of all, it could further entrench racist decision making inside police departments.
A much better suggestion in my opinion would be, test the software before deploying it so that it doesn't make racist decisions. Set the bar VERY high for this, so the software has to be really, really, really good. Otherwise don't use it.
Then is it really fair to call it facial recognition if it doesn't work? Or to say "we are banning this until it is more reliable" or something like that?
We should think long and hard about these technologies and how to use them properly. Historically we haven't thought about ethics much in computer science, but the time isn't post hoc. We (Hacker News readers) are the experts, and we need to be talking about this decades ago, not decades from now. So let's not ignore the conversation.
does this seem far fetched? if you haven’t experienced this you may allegedly be privileged.
Innocent people will be charged with crimes by lazy cops who don't want to do the actual police work of thoroughly investigating suspect lists. There will be juries who don't understand prediction error and find innocent people guilty because they trust the "expert" who says the facial recognition system reported "99.99% accuracy". Some of the 40% of cops who have committed domestic violence will make unauthorized use of this system to hunt down fleeing battered spouses - and this unauthorized use will go unpunished. Innocent black people will be identified as subjects and arrested because of racial disparities in accuracy of these systems. Innocent political activists will be charged with crimes they didn't commit because a cop found video of a crime that the software says plausibly looks like the activist.
Every time police get a new tool for establishing guilt, it is abused. The only way to make a facial recognition system that is just is if it is out of control of the police and it can only be used with a valid court warrant - and even then, I'm not sure that I trust the court's ability to control such a system securely.
Let companies use on our children. Let companies/government scan our kids from birth to death.
Put cameras in schools, on every street corner, government buildings, parks, doctor's offices, and of course scan every face that goes through governmental facilities (DMV, Criminal/civil courts). Put cameras in all stores. Put a Ring type camera on every residence.
Government could then predict whom will most likely succeed in our complicated, competive society.
The good kids will go to the best schools of course. The good adults will get preferential treatment in hiring, loan accusation, housing, etc.
Stores will track our every buy. Stores will know I stole an olive from Whole Foods once.
STD's will be a thing if the past. We will know who likes to booze it up. We will know what percentage of fast food they consume, and we will definitely know who uses tobacco.
We can do away with Credit Scores. We can do away with most tests. We will be able to predict a person's future success with data.
Cops can give up patrols, and just use AI programs to catch bad guys, or prostitutes.
This is Not the future I want.
I cannot believe Americans are even putting up with the surveillance we already have.
(The only thing I like about cameras/surveillance is it might make cops a bit more honest?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrowland_(film)#Plot
The movie isn't great, but it's critique of pop culture isn't wrong. We have very little hopeful science fiction these days apart from Star Trek.
>The legislation bans the use of the software by county government agencies and administrative offices...
Removing bias from facial recognition is the problem you would have to solve to appease the concerns right now, not privacy.
When innocent minorities are getting locked up because the software running it was trained with poor data, the outcomes of using the software is a racism-entrenched legal and justice system.
Which is why people are fighting against it.
It’s a shortcut for manually digging through databases to identify people. Any identification is followed up with investigation, just as it would be if a human matched it. No decision is made by the machine.
So, no, it’s not racist at all.
The article directly contradicts both of your claims:
> "Facial recognition technology is still incredibly biased and absolutely creates harm in the real world," said Jennifer Lee with ACLU Washington. "We now know of three black men who have been wrongfully arrested and jailed due to biased facial recognition technology.
You could say the same thing about the 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments. "what about the children"
I don't care if you're a Proud Boy or a John Brown Society member. More guns == more violence.
Nothing. Either they mug you and leave or you get injured (or they didn't see the cop standing behind them.) Facial recognition is not going to solve that problem.
I'm not informed on the issue, but I'd imagine that preventing them from buying the technology is easier than tightly controlling its use.
You can support some uses of facial recognition without wanting it to be used to say ticket people for jaywalking.
The potential for abuse is too high.
I also think eyewitness testimony has many failure modes. If anything, it's probably less accurate than current facial recognition tech and biased in ways that are harder to determine. Yet I wouldn't want to ban all use of eyewitness testimony.
Banning facial recognition seems like overkill. Instead, it makes more sense to restrict it so that we can get the good parts (catching violent criminals) without the bad parts (oppressive surveillance state). Instead of banning all fingerprinting and DNA analysis, we have rules for how police can use them. Why not have similar rules for facial recognition?
Ballistics comparisons in particular been found to be nearly complete bunk, yet experts continue to use them in court.[0]
Tire prints are also pretty bad.[1]
We live in an age of unprecedented HD video surveillance. We don't need automated facial recognition to bring violent criminals to justice.
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/reversing-legacy-jun... [1] https://www.apmreports.org/story/2016/09/27/questionable-sci...
also, if you are part of a minority that is frequently misidentified by this “tech” and you end up being harassed by this pos tech, do you still want it used?
Why would I want it?
I wouldn't want to use it in such a situation because of the likelihood that the person who committed a crime is going to go free while an innocent person might take the fall for it.
Do you really want every move you make logged? It's an incredibly powerful tool to use for oppression. If someone in the government doesn't like you, all they have to do is watch you for a few days. You'll be sure to commit a crime sooner or later, such as jaywalking, or maybe you looked at someone in a suspicious manner, and then they prosecute you to the max.
Edit: just to expand on this, here's a press conference from earlier today (sorry about the poor sound): https://twitter.com/DarwinBondGraha/status/14001715920642416...
Here, Oakland, California's Chief of Police admits that police claims about molotov cocktails and crowd demographics that were used to justify the deployment of tear gas and rubber bullets against protesters a year ago actually had no basis in fact. The Chief explained that he received information to that effect via the radio, and then went out and repeated it to the public (via the media) without making any effort to vet its accuracy. (For clarity, he has only been police chief since February; at the time last year, he was a acting as a spokesperson for the department). It's arguable that the decision to deploy tear gas escalated the protest into a full-fledged riot; even if you don't think so, it certainly misled the public about the behavior and composition of the protesters, inevitably impacting policy debates and so on.
I feel this is a good example of why the police cannot be trusted with facial recognition tools; false claims can be used to to designate large numbers of people as criminal suspects, and that suspect status can then be leveraged to intrude upon their rights. Were California's interim prohibition on facial recognition not in place, chances are that it would already have been deployed to identify large numbers of legitimate protesters on the basis of initial false allegations (ie, lies) made by individual police officers. 33 officers have since been disciplined and no doubt civil litigation will delve deeper into this, but at present the police officers who were disciplined do not have to be identified, despite the fact that they were quite happy to lie in order to violate the rights of that same public.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-police-chief-apologizes-is...
That's a huge assumption that many of us (opponents to widespread surveillance tech) just don't agree to. I don't think it's possible to hand government this kind of capability, then limit it to a specific set of uses. It always expands in scope, covering more and more use cases until the folks over at Vision Zero[0] make an impassioned plea, "Suppose you could prevent 10 pedestrian deaths a year by enforcing our jaywalking laws better? Why wouldn't you want facial recognition software to protect them?"
Or maybe the bias-free policing people[1] put forward their argument that removing human cops from jaywalking enforcement will increase Equity. It would be a decent proposition! And you end up with every minor thing being automatically caught and ticketed.
That would suck.
"Slippery slope" may be a fallacy in formal logic, but it's damn useful in resisting the march into a dystopian future. Nip this shit in the bud. Make it require some effort to enforce the law.
[0] http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/...
[1] https://council.seattle.gov/2017/07/20/council-president-har...
It's not if the slope is, in fact, slippery. At least around here, one fallacy more common than slippery slope is the slippery slope fallacy fallacy - calling out real slippery slopes as fallacious.
To find the person who appears on video footage filmed in the building, you need to spy on everyone and then match the face from the footage against the face of everyone else walking about. All of those other people did not break into the building, yet for this to work, their privacy is expunged by having their movement and faces filmed, tracked and catalogued so that the FR software can cross-match them.
I think there is a privacy argument here. If I didn't commit any crime, maybe it shouldn't be that my face gets recorded in some database alongside my latest location.
I do not think this technology is intrusive or invasive as the quoted council member claimed. Recording in public spaces is completely legal to begin with. And we can always limit the use of facial recognition by police departments to cases with either a warrant or probable cause, to prevent completely uncontrolled surveillance. The allegations of racial biases are also not meaningful. In practice, false positives in machine vision algorithms are contained by maintaining a human in the loop to verify matches. It is trivial to use this technology in a way that matches human-levels of accuracy with this layer of safety in place.
Banning this kind of technology outright feels like a fear-driven decision by luddites. That's a charitable take - a more direct perspective is that the politicians and interest groups supporting this ban are looking to protect their favored groups, which very frankly seems to include criminals.