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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Unless EssilorLuxottica or Macy's developed all the "AI", "facial recognition", "biometric information", etc. tech in-house, are there missing company names here?

There's also this, which I'm not sure how to interpret:

> “So, when EssilorLuxottica and Macy’s compared unclear security footage to (the man’s) mugshots from the 1980s, these companies knew that there was an error rate of almost 90%. Yet these companies told (Houston Police) with absolute certainty that they identified the person who robbed the Sunglass Hut,” the lawsuit said.

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Yup, I'd love to know the name of that wonderful software and the company that made it.

Also I'd love to know the names of the judge, prosecutor, and investigator who put a man in jail simply because a man from the store told them to.

Can we learn that with an FOIA request?

Journalists might look into exactly what happened on that side of things, but this particular article doesn't seem to have done that, and some assertion in there might be incorrect or misleading.

Best not to feed Internet pitchfork villagers, who have shown countless times that they're collectively dumb as snot, with no sense of process, critical thinking, nor decency.

I'd think the identities of public servants isn't really relevant at this point, but rather, what was the evidence and chronology.

As techies, we're best suited to tackle some of the evidence around tech, like what was the tech, how does it work, how was it represented, how was it used, what did it do, etc.

> As techies, we're best suited to tackle some of the evidence around tech, like what was the tech, how does it work, how was it represented, how was it used, what did it do, etc.

Go ahead then...

There's not really any need.

The judge did it because the prosecution said he did.

The prosecution brought charges because the police said it was him.

The police arrested him because the corporation said it was him.

The corporation said it was him because the software said it was him.

The software said it was him because it was SHIT.

How do you know all these things, about this specific case?

The whole point of those peoples' jobs is to do due diligence. If they're blindly trusting the next person/machine down the line then they're abdicating their responsibility.

I feel like the software did its job.

It reported a 90% chance that this was not the suspect when asked to compare photos. Yet the company decided 10% possibility of being correct was good enough for them to report to the police that it’s definitely this guy.

>There's not really any need.

No, there is a need.

We know what happened and why.

We also need to know who all these people were, because all of them failed at their jobs.

The last person in the chain using a shitty tool doesn't excuse anyone else. The store employee could've consulted astrological charts FFS, the use astrology wouldn't be the problem in this scenario.

People must be seeing different reporting than I am.

Because otherwise it looks like some people are reacting to a headline and a vague statement (possibly morphed through the telephone game of reporting) claiming how one piece of how the outcome happened, and are ready to extrapolate from that, and be judge, jury, and executioner.

Which would seem ironic: making much the same error themselves that they believe they're correcting in someone else.

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