Facial recognition false positives lead to license revocations in Massachusetts
boston.com
boston.com
The real problem, in fact the only problem in my opinion, is the "guilty until proven innocent" approach of the state. They are sending letters which state that the license has already been revoked! If they sent a letter saying "we strongly suspect fraud, you must verify your identity in 30 days", I would not have a problem with that, as long as they have a decent match.
Instead, we get talk about how "driving is a privilege". Guess what - working for the state is also a privilege, and people who abuse the citizens who pay their salaries should lose it.
But the problem is that public transport goes near where lots of people want to go but doesn't go where any person actually wants to go. This means further traveling time after the public transport bit is finished. And probably connections as well. This means, for me, that public transport takes about twice as long to get anywhere.
In my opinion the future is robot controlled cars. All the benefit of public transport with none of the inefficiencies, etc. Public transport is just an intermediate step.
That said, many offices have reserved parking, which fixes this - though that real estate is valuable.
Whatever percentage of Americans who could find housing within walking distance of work.
Okay, yeah, if the answer is that short, it sounds like a flippant response to a serious question. But what I mean to illustrate here is that we always have to deal with policy trade-offs. There are a whole set of policies all over the United States that zone neighborhoods of houses to be separate from places where factories or stores or other workplaces are found, and those POLICIES then make cars seem indispensable. But if cars are indispensable, it becomes all the more urgent to make sure everyone driving a car is driving safely, so it becomes more urgent to figure out how to keep unsafe drivers from driving. This is the conundrum we get into in a society that doesn't plan actively to decouple employability from owning and operating a car.
Basis for knowledge for my comment: I have lived for six years of my life, in two separate three-year stays, in a country where I never drove (even though I had a driver license there). Even during much of the time I have lived in the United States, I have commuted from home to work on foot, or by bus, or by bicycle. It can be done. What trade-offs society accepts in making it more or less easy to obtain paying work without investing in a driver license and car first depends on the political process, of course.
That being said, it is ridiculous for the state to revoke a drivers license with no warning. This situation could have been avoided if the state merely gave the alleged fraudsters a few weeks to present the required documentation before revoking the license.
Overall, I found this to be the most concerning quote in the article:
“A driver’s license is not a matter of civil rights. It’s not a right. It’s a privilege," she said. “Yes, it is an inconvenience [to have to clear your name], but lots of people have their identities stolen, and that’s an inconvenience, too."
With this mentality, who knows what future "inconveniences" await Pennsylvania residents in the name of security...
In the absence of a better, more rational process, it would be nice to know that an injured party can walk away with some hundreds of thousands of dollars from such contemptuous companies (and I wouldn't mind seeing the State dinged, as well, although that's probably even more difficult). (I fully support punitive judgment in addition to compensation, in the face of such activity as it is described.)
The State is actually probably more at fault, but I can't help imagining a certain amount of collusion with firms seeking to sell them this business.
"Guilty until proven innocent" really seems to be taking hold in the U.S. Shoving the work off onto private contractors further aids in this regard, I can imagine. I'm also put in mind of states' use of private, commercial databases to make an end run around their own statutory limitations on data collection and use.
You probably right that 10 days is "quick" for a government, but ten days is a long time to be without a license if your work requires a valid license.
Similarly, the eleven day notice (well less considering mail travel time) is BS. I travel a lot for business and two+ week trips are not out of the ordinary. There should be at least 30 day notice.
I think that's a fairly good rate if a false positive only meant that a human had to verify a person's identity, but not low enough to warrant automatically suspending a person's license.
A human did verify the false positives.
With that in their EULA, they are essentially stating: "We know that our software sucks, but to prevent others from stating that we specifically suck, we're going to forbid academic papers (which are, for the most part, impartial studies) from mentioning us by name, thereby putting doubt over whether it's us or some other facial recognition product."
I need to make a note to actually read EULAs from now on, because I want to get my money back if I ever buy software with that in the EULA.
My view might be slightly skewed since the basis of the competition was to make it hard (low light, noise, occlusion, pose, atmospheric blur) and the commercial competitors are trained on easier datasets (close range, well lit, uniform pose and expression). While L1's system would perform better on driver's license images false positives are going to occur in any system. So when it flags a person it should be regarded as something fishy might be going on instead the oracle says this person is a terrorist who buys alcohol for teens, lock him away!
Assuming a single person does not receive multiple suspension letters, and estimating the number of business days in a year to be 250, that's 375,000 drivers receiving letters per year.
Using 4,645,705 as the number of drivers in Massachusetts[1], 0.8% of drivers get suspended per year. That seems high.
[1] Source: http://www.statemaster.com/graph/trn_lic_dri_tot_num-transpo...
> Last year, the facial recognition system picked out more than 1,000 cases that resulted in State Police investigations, officials say.
That's a lotta terrorists.
Similar case from 1903: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2011/04/29/mistaken-identity-2... which "became a strong argument in favor of the new science of fingerprinting."
For driver's licenses? Not as far as I know - I've never been fingerprinted for a MA license.
“A driver’s license is not a matter of civil rights. It’s not a right. It’s a privilege,’’ she said. “Yes, it is an inconvenience [to have to clear your name], but lots of people have their identities stolen, and that’s an inconvenience, too."
This person is why I'm a libertarian.
I'm having a hard time believing that this kind of deregulation would be helpful, but maybe it would? Perhaps if private road providers were more common, there would be a wider range of options. Can't see that flying though... people seem to like to drive without paying for the road at point of use...
The simple fact of the government paving all public thoroughfares does not somehow mean that it is now a privilege to walk upon them or drive on them.
What's the right way to deal with this?
That is the only "legal" way to change laws in the US.
Or we can call that battle what it is: lost. Spend your time and effort (and money) and go invest in those security contractors so that you will have a nest egg waiting if ever you are out of work as a result of losing you license for 2weeks+.
Or to put another way: "Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" is all conditional upon what matters to people with money and power and which methods they use to ensure they continue to have money and power.