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Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

it is only a matter of time until people start asking for more facial recognition. as a whole facial recognition has a bad reputation. but if you ask people if they like walking out of an airport without waiting in line at customs they will say yes. when it helps identify criminals who would otherwise have gotten away they will support it. over time it will become normalized

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I'm always going to be against piling on significantly more invasive tools to make the state's job easier. I wonder if there's a word for this process where organizations make something intentionally difficult for us and then say "look at how hard this is, clearly you need to let me do this other thing to make it easier".

The degree of security theatre at airports aside, surely you don’t think public transit should suffer TSA-style security to warrant a solution to that self-imposed problem?

And we should fight back against that

I flew from sfo to iha the other day, id was not required. I walked up to a booth and they scanned my face and I was in.

I did not sign up for anything special. I assume it’s from the real ID stuff.

Cats out of the bag, facial recognition is here to stay. Idk if I like it or not, but I can see how it will make my life easy.

It's like this for SF giants games now too

> Idk if I like it or not,

When it works, I'm sure it's great. Now consider being a non-white person and it misidentifies you where you wind up being arrested for something you didn't do.

Until it works equally well for everyone, it should not be used for things other than processes of convenience. Even then, it should have a way to gracefully fall back to something else that does not prevent anything

Are you assuming there isn't a fallback? That's a big assumption if so

I would assume that as soon as it's introduced, the agents in charge of fallback will be lazy, as has already been proven from numerous reports of people (mostly black) being arrested from a false positive in facial recognition[1]

[1] https://apnews.com/article/mistaken-arrests-facial-recogniti...

It depends on what it is. We've already seen situations where police arrested someone based on a facial recognition system incorrectly identifying someone. So, where's the supposed fallback in your opinion?

We've seen stories out of NYC where landlords have installed facial rec to access to tenants that didn't go so well. I can't remember if traditional key access was still available or not, but you could see where that would go bad if not.

The issue isn’t “is there a fallback” it’s “there is incredible bias in who has to use those fallbacks, who has to schedule trips allowing for that fallback, and who gets erroneously subjected to false imprisonment”.

If all people regardless of race, gender, or appearance were equally subject to the need to use the fallback then there would be less of an issue. But so far every commercial facial recognition program has demonstrated bias such that false positives and false negatives are much more common for PoC.

Yah. You are probably right. As long as we have people who make assumptions about others.

It's a pilot project, did you realize you could opt out?

I opted out of this. There is insufficient transparency around the systems that process that data, who has access to it, what kinds of problems have occurred, and if it is being employed ethically (see the sibling comment about chronically poor facial detection of non-white people).

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