The Met prefers to measure accuracy by comparing successful and unsuccessful matches with the total number of faces processed by the facial recognition system. According to this metric, the error rate was just 0.1%.
Turn the machines off and the error rate will be 0%.
Bayes' theorem strikes again. Even if the odds of a false positive are only 1 in 1000, if 1 in a million are criminals then out of 1000 flagged people only 1 might be a criminal.
Seriously though, for anyone interested in understanding this interesting statistical principle, check out the "Intuitive Explanation of Bayes Theorem" [1]
Indeed. And considering the hundreds of millions[1] of people who pass through london’s stations each year, that would means hundreds of thousands of false positives.
I have written on this exact subject beginning around 2000. Nobody freaking listened! You would think that "best minds" at the NSA and places would understand the basic statistical reality of what they are doing and why it can't work, but no, statism clouds the mind and profits cloud good judgement.
Basically, if the natural error rate of a database is 5%, you aren't going to data mine a terrorist out of it if terrorists are < 1% (try .001%) of the population. Not. Gonna. Happen.
What is happening is our rights are being stripped and we have a rogue FBI that manufactures criminals when it wants to grab headlines and what's more, we have PROOF that they done exactly that.
For each individual crime there probably is only one or a small number of perpetrators. You can't just say... hey we found 1000 (or even 5) of you face matched for a single crime (assault) which you almost certainly (or even probably) didn't commit, but after a search or warrant some of you appear to have committed a different other crime (drug possession,
tax evasion, public urination, evading arrest, immigration status) so go to jail and wait for court.
Once police have the right to search, enter, confiscate. and arrest probable cause is out the window.
They match faces out of a crowd for criminals, but to be a criminal you have to have committed a specific crime... usually that means a single person. For any one crime, they are looking for a single person and that's worst case for false positive recognition. For a large sample set 50k-1000k, they are lucky they don't match any one person to multiple criminals (birthday paradox) ... that would be obviously disqualifying.
I suppose it could be worse and they just take an aggregate face of all (accused?) criminals or for particular crimes (white collar?) and match against that... hey your skin was brown, or hey you didn't shave... you appear Male.
...which makes an 81% false positive rate remarkably good. You've massively whittled down your list of potential subjects and made the job of humans immeasurably easier. An 81% false positive rate would be nightmarishly awful if this system served as judge, jury and executioner, but it's incredibly useful as a means of improving the signal-to-noise ratio of surveillance data.
That would be true if wiggling out of the net of justice when you are innocent were not so expensive. There are a lot of poor people who can't afford the system you speak of.
I'm sure that's comforting to believe, but it just isn't true. America's criminal justice system is uniquely dysfunctional in a multitude of ways, best exemplified by your extraordinarily high incarceration rate. There is no law of nature that dictates that all criminal justice systems inexorably deteriorate into tyranny, it's just a specific and fixable set of policy failures.
The iniquities of pre-trial detention and cash bail are fixable. Racially biased arrest, conviction and sentencing rates are fixable. Needlessly punitive sentences and an over-reliance on incarceration are fixable. Miscarriages of justice due to pseudoscientific forensic evidence and under-funded public defenders are fixable.
Both the USA and UK provide legal aid for poor people even if the procedures are different. If you cannot afford a solicitor, the government will help you pay for one, but they probably won't be the best. In both countries rich people get better legal representation than poor people.
Don't make the UK out to be some paradise (legal or otherwise), it struggles with plenty of its own problems.
The UK doesn't have cash bail, so nobody is stuck in pre-trial detention simply because they can't afford to buy their freedom. It doesn't have elected prosecutors, judges or sheriffs. It incarcerates less than a quarter as many people per capita. It doesn't have three-strike laws and uses mandatory minimum sentences only for an extremely limited number of serious offences.
The UK is far from perfect, but most of the criticisms of the American criminal justice system simply don't apply.
It's very difficult to compare like-for-like, because we have different laws and compile crime statistics differently.
The intentional homicide rate is substantially lower in the UK (1.2 vs 5.35 per 100,000), as is our rate of killings by law enforcement (0.2 vs 30.4 per 10,000,000). The UK may have slightly more property crime (12.2% vs 10% of population victimised), but it's not clear if that comparison is statistically valid.
From petty crime, I suspect, yes. Why, because even when criminals are convicted they spend very short periods of time in prison (if at all). And, on release, they have much less chance of integrating into normal society than previously and fall into a pattern of reoffending, going to prison, reoffending, and so on.
In the UK, it seems, almost everyone has a tale about when they were burgled, when they were mugged or when their car was broken into.
I have never been burgled, mugged or had my car broken into. The only crime that I worry about on a regular basis is pickpocketing but this is similar to other European countries.
We have at least recently ended the appalling practice of non-time-limited police bail.
It still takes 2-3 years to get to trial for serious offences during which time your name and face are plastered all over the papers (at least locally).
Mounting a successful defence can cost 10s to 100s of thousands of pounds.
Fighting off charges of which you are innocent is not fun. If we assume that the UK's system is good enough to just increase the arrest rate and it will all come out in the wash this would destroy many people's lives.
Let's agree on that just for the sake of argument. Systems change, but once settled facial recognition will not go away. You might find yourself engulfed in hell before you know it.
I'm well aware of the cuts to legal aid and have lobbied against them. It is worth noting that the changes to legal aid have primarily affected civil law, with the effects on criminal law being primarily limited to means-testing for high earners and an 8.25% reduction in overall fees paid to legal practitioners.
Although it is clear that the cuts have significantly impacted family, immigration and welfare benefits cases, it is not clear that they have affected the fairness of the criminal legal system.
Why should an innocent richer person have to use their life savings defending a charge of which they are innocent? (Of course the poorer person would be found guilty and sent to prison so the system is even more unfair for them.)
Hard to guess. This would have to be people who still look like a dead-ringer for a criminal even to a human who compares their face to a database photo, and who are not able to supply ID to prove that it's just coincidental resemblance.
Police have always relied on facial recognition, just not facial recognition carried out by machines. We accept imperfect facial recognition from machines if it is faster, and leaves less work for humans to deal with.
Thank you. This is the principle that always gets overlooked anytime I or my company sees these articles. No one should ever be suggesting that these be a sole means of identification. There should always be a human in the loop.
I've yet to meet a customer who's looking at this technology as a way to make decisions. In every case it's there to help make their analysts' jobs easier, by sifting through the chaff and presenting them with the data that makes the best use of their skills.
Except for the people who are falsely accused and may be hassled in the process.
Around 15 years ago I would often schedule last minute flights while traveling for work. When I did, I almost certainly would receive an enhanced screening from TSA. I was the false positive, and when traveling on tight schedules, I was not amused at the frequency in which I was considered suspect (in contrast to the treatment from the airlines, who treated me like royalty). Of course, TSAs true positive rate is 0%.
Sorta. Mathematically yes. Socially, I dunno. When you have a test determines you to be 21% likely to be guilty but the people judging you see "99.99% accurate test" statistical innumeracy is dangerous. The best fix is to use the useful info in the smart way, but "the smart way" means fixing education problems we're already trying and failing to fix.
It doesn't really work that way. Or, at least, you need some more information.
There are two big assumptions you haven't made explicit. One, that the FN rate is low. If it isn't you haven't necessarily improved your SNR at all, you're just spent resources looking in the wrong place. Two, that the cost of a FP is 0. The latter obviously isn't true, so you have to weight the positive and negative impacts across all scenarios before you can tell if this is a net win.
Think of this in a different context; say I have a new cancer screening protocol, with a low FN but also a high FP rate. So everyone we mark as positive gets a follow up biopsy. You say "great, we catch x% more cancers now than the old way, good win". Until someone points out that biopsies have a y% rate of catastrophic infection resulting in death. Depending how these rates balance out, we may be killing more people that we are saving....
We should be careful before we unnecessarily increase the number of interactions between police and the general public.
For example, roadside drug test accuracy rate is abysmal but innocent people are being put in jail because uninformed LEO either don't know or don't care baout the rate. If you can't afford to fight the false charge, your life/record/job/etc is screwed.
Also, these false positives tend to have a conveniently racist default twist in our country.
"59% of the Houston defendants in drug arrests involving false positives were black.", I expect the number that didn't fight the charge and were wrongfully convicted is quite high as well.
> which makes an 81% false positive rate remarkably good.
Friendly reminder that our _entire_ legal system was arranged by the Founders so that innocent people wouldn’t be incarcerated even if that means some guilty people walk free.
Your reasoning flips the most important feature of our criminal justice system on its head.
I know most people on HN haven’t dealt with the criminal justice system but being wrongly charged and, if you’re lucky, beating the charges is an incredibly awful experience. Just being charged will follow you for the rest of your life.
Remember this is used by police to find suspects, not to replace the judge.
It means that just looking at a picture, 2 suspects every ten are successfully recognized
Compared to the system we have now, were to find who's guilty police have to go trough a list of suspects were all of them except one (or a few) is innocent, 2 every 10 is very good.
We're not talking about considering people guilty until proven innocent, but helping police to investigate in the right direction.
In UK almost a quarter of murder cases are still unsolved.
May I suggest that you up whatever success metrics you have because a 19% success rate is abysmal. I swear we have no quality standards in our industry, let alone strong ethics.
The purpose of the system is to aid police in finding people on a wanted list. On average someone using this system only needs to look at 5 photos to spot someone, whereas without it they would need to look at thousands. The police are probably quite satisfied with the system's 19% hit rate.
>>The police are probably quite satisfied with the system's 19% hit rate.
lol, I am sure the police are, we as a society however should not be allowing the police to dictate what is and is not a "success". They have a MASSIVE conflict of interest here
The police would be happy with a 1% or even less hit rate
That depends on what the purpose is. Assuming very few suspects in a large crowd, it sounds like it's acting as a pretty strong filter, especially if it has few false negatives. "5x the number of actual suspects" seems like probably a practical number to sort through manually.
That's not to say that I have particular confidence that the system is being deployed effectively, much less ethically, but your dismissal is unsound.
> That's not to say that I have particular confidence that the system is being deployed effectively, much less ethically, but your dismissal is unsound."
If it cannot be deployed ethically (which you seem prepared to concede), then it's not fit for purpose and is therefore not a real accomplishment.
My dismissal is that the error rates make it unsuitable for real use by real police officers. So no, my dismissal is not unsound. If it hasn't already, the purpose in practice of this machine will devolve into confirming the unfounded biases of police officers harassing the innocent (e.g. ADE 651, as mentioned by another user.) In the real world, devices like this are not fit for police work. Full stop.
I am willing to concede that it perhaps cannot be deployed ethically, but for reasons unrelated to its accuracy. It may be that being able to find anyone put on a list is too big a concentration of power, even in light of the benefits. That's every bit as much a problem if the system is 100% accurate.
If "find the people on this list, with near 100% accuracy" is something we're willing to accept, I think it's possible to build a system around this technology that doesn't deserve additional objection (outside detailed analysis of cost effectiveness or whatnot).
That outputting "there's a 20% chance they're on the list" might be used to deliberately harass those who aren't on the list is an argument that you didn't make in your first comment. Certainly safeguards against such behavior would be a necessary component of appropriate use of the technology - but it doesn't seem technically or socially implausible. There's a wide margin between a system that outputs "we think this person is sketchy" and a system that outputs "we think this person might be that specific person."
Ideally, procedures are not designed by "your average police officer."
All of this said, I agree that there's reason to be skeptical and keep close watch to ensure rights aren't being trampled. That's the case without this tech as well.
I'm not an expert, but doesn't this mean that they actually captured wanted people? Even with an abysmal rate, it's a more-targeted snatching of people walking by, resulting in arrests of known criminals?
We could also install cameras in every home and require people to wear a forever listening microphone at all times that the government can access at any time. This would stop a lot of crime. But I wouldn't call it successful. I guess my point is we need to have higher standards then this tech is preaching and since it is nothing like it seems, this is nothing more then a magic black box that the police would love to be able to use to pick people out of a crowd.
We could also install cameras in every home and require people to wear a forever listening microphone at all times that the government can access at any time.
Between cell phones, Amazon Ring, and Nest Cam, we're there.
All of those are voluntary, cell phones being the "least" voluntary but there are not laws requring one to have one, network effect makes it semi-required but...
Voice Assistants and Cloud Connected Camera however are no where near a requirement for participation in society
You see, that would inconvenience everyone equally and this be quickly turned down by the populace...but image recognition places the burden on colored folks so people don’t care as much.
I have yet to work with a commercial facial recognition product that produced a reasonable number of false positives or negatives when dealing with 'live' data like that of a security feed of a crowd. Is there a facial recognition model or tool out there that actually works in that use case? It seems like the Met's police got sold some technological snake oil that wasn't close to ready.
It really depends on if their goal with this was actually a tangible result or just security theater. Snake oil's not a bad purchase if you're planning to resell it.
The point is that it will never be "close to ready." Not unless every fourth person is a crook. Anyways, these kinds of systems exist for the same reason drug dogs exist--to generate a probable cause that appears scientific even when it is anything but.
How does this compare to humans? If you have a human police officer watching a crowd and singling out "suspects", what percentage of those are innocent?
No human police offer could process these many faces or remember suspect databases, of course our current tech is going to be faster here.
More inaccurate, sure, but I'm thinking that with the amount of government money involved it'll slowly improve. Or at least society will reach a stage where we don't care about the incorrectly flagged anymore.
The met used to claim they had "super recognizers" doing exactly that. I'm not sure if it was true or just a lie to cover for the face recognition tech.
This isn't the right question. Cars help the police to move much more quickly than they could on foot, for example, and properly used can be part of a system that values justice and human rights.
A better question might be: "given how accurate this facial recognition system is, what if anything in addition to a match should be required for an officer to detain someone matched by it?".
I don't have an answer for this one. This tech is new, and complex, and hard. We'll likely abuse it before we figure out how to properly balance human rights and protecting the public.
if it correctly finds anyone on the watch list, but they comprise only 19% of the results returned, and the police force knows it, that strikes me as a great screening tool. just need some people to sift through it.
i doubt it finds the folks on the watch list that reliably though.
The problem is that innocent people could go to jail because they fall into that 81% of incorrect matches. The justice system, at least in the USA, has a presumption of innocence. The idea being that when there isn't enough evidence, it would be better to let a criminal go free than send an innocent person to jail.
I wouldn't be surprised if these systems are used specifically in cases with weak evidence. If you had phone records or other hard evidence, you wouldn't need to rely on face matching. So the faulty system ends up used in the exact cases where it can do the most damage to innocent people.
"Mr Scott, from Truro in Cornwall, spend nearly three months on remand in Strangeways after being charged with a single count of rape.
He strongly protested his innocence - and told detectives in interviews that he had never been to Manchester.
The Crown Prosecution Service formerly dropped the case during a hearing at Manchester Crown Court after the private firm confirmed the DNA blunder.
"
Despite warnings of DNA contamination at the laboratory less than two week earlier, Adam Scott was arrested and held in custody – even though he had been hundreds of miles from the scene of the crime.
OF COURSE there will be erroneous convictions. There would be erroneous convictions even if a crime was performed right inside the courtroom, in front of a judge and jury and CCV camera.
I suppose using colloquial language by using universal phrases for the sake of clarity is a 'no-no' because some pedant will call you out on it. How about this: "Convictions due to facial recognition false positives are low probability outliers to the extent that they will not impact the civil rights of citizenry".. Is that better? Does that improve conversation? Should we not provide a modicum of charity in interpreting the arguments of others?
BTW, you realize you undermined your point as well?
DNA is an incredible forensic tool, that outweighs any outliers. If you're claiming facial recognition is or is going to be like DNA identification, you lost your argument.
From the beginning, Sutton and Adams denied any involvement. They both had alibis, and neither of them matched the profile from the victim’s original account: She’d described her assailants as short and skinny. Adams was 5 foot 11 and 180 pounds. Sutton was three inches taller and 25 pounds heavier, the captain of his high-school football team.
The DNA evidence was harder to refute. Having seen enough prime-time TV to believe that a DNA test would vindicate them, Sutton and Adams had agreed, while in custody, to provide the police with blood samples
Reality is that DNA evidence overrides actual evidence time and time again, and people are wrongfully sent to jail, have their lives ruined, and even die, because of it.
The same thing will happen with facial recognition, gait, etc.
The system performs much better than the existing tool of closing ones eyes and randomly picking a picture with your finger too that police have been using since the dawn of their existence. Doesn't mean it performs well because it outperforms a system that never worked to begin with like that or like drug dogs. I'm sure soon it'll be treated like it's 100% accurate just like the dogs despite its abysmal success rate. But I'm sure that's fine. So what if 81% of the suspects it points out are innocent and get harassed by police? If you live in the US, that's just as likely to be a feature, not a bug.
At least in countries with a functioning criminal justice system, the verdict of a facial recognition algorithm is never going to stand up in court - the defence will demand the raw footage and put it to the jury.
This technology is primarily intended for identifying suspects; an 81% false positive rate is remarkably good and extremely useful if you're scanning a train station for a terrorism suspect or a public street for a wanted fugitive. In this application, a relatively high false-positive rate is entirely tolerable (from the perspective of the justice system, at least) because checking the identity of five people to apprehend one serious criminal is a complete no-brainer.
> The problem is that innocent people could go to jail because they fall into that 81% of incorrect matches.
No. This is a fully-general counterargument. You could say this of everything: 'innocent people could go to jail because of X!' This is true and irrelevant, because it is true of both good things and bad things, and not even wrong. It is sheer concern-trolling. The question is whether X works well enough. Nothing in OP or your comment remotely establishes whether it does or does not. Citing '81%' is merely throwing out scientific-sounding rhetoric. (It has numbers and it looks big, therefore it must be bad. It would be the same if it was 98.1% or 81% or 8.1%.)
That's impossible; no system -- machine or human -- is going to be 100% accurate. People looking at photos and at a lineup aren't even 100% accurate, if the people are similar-enough looking.
I assume - I don't know, but my guess is the 81% are simply quickly stopped asked to prove their identification. Once they show their drivers license or any other basic form of ID that proves they are not the suspect they are free to go. I highly highly doubt they are detained, frisked, or even slight questioned beyond being asked to proof who they are. To me, that seems reasonable. In fact I've been randomly asked to show my ID in various countries - cop simply stopped me and asked me to show my identification.
There's no ID requirement in the UK[1]. Driving licence forms a de facto ID for those who have one, but you don't even need to carry it when driving, let alone when walking! So potentially gets far more involved, and yet another small chip is taken from those Peelian principles (Policing by consent by citizens in uniform).
[1] There's several voluntary ID schemes for younger folks to prove they're old enough to be in a bar, buy alcohol or cigarettes etc.
To that point, I routinely travel to London without ID (nearest ID would be at home two hours away). Last time I went there, I just had cash, Oyster card probably not in my name (I borrow one from family if I can't find me mine), and my phone. Getting stopped and asked for ID could be a problem, and I don't feel like I should have to carry any.
I was no aware the UK does not require that you carry ID. I'm not sure how I feel about that law, in my experience most of the world requires you to carry ID. I don't see it at all unreasonable that an adult be required to carry ID at all times. I am Canadian by birth and Canada has the same policy but in practice it is best to carry your ID. I've live around the world and everywhere that I know of outside of europe and the english speaking world requires you to carry some form of government issued ID.
Ireland and Australia don't, or didn't, not sure about others.
The UK had them through the war and got rid in the 50s because they were thought an infringement of civil liberties - because police were asking to see them as habit, not for reasons of suspicion - funny how attitudes change. Not having ID makes something like facial recognition stations set up in the street seem an even larger overreach. We're supposed to be able to go about our business without interference unless suspected of something. OK, it doesn't always work quite that way in practice, but the principle used to be much clearer, and far better respected... I rather resent losing that.
It made for a bit of an oddity back where there were the troubles in Northern Ireland and the heavily policed border between north and south. You could get on to a ferry to Dublin from the UK with nothing. No ID, no passport, nowt. I did that several times, I don't remember anything other than a ticket check. Change some pounds into Irish pounds when you get there.
Black friend had a common first and last name. Every interaction with the police involved being held at gunpoint. He changed his last name when he got married to something unique. And now the cops don't pull guns on him anymore.
What happens to a poor sap who the facial detection system thinks looks like a known violent criminal? In the UK it means constant harassment. In the US it means eventually getting shot.
Put another way: they are saying that 81% of positive flags are actually false positives. Yikes. That might be better than random chance, but in the court of law that should hardly be considered evidence.
There aren’t enough details here to tell whether or not this system is truly useful. If its false negative rate is good and other methods successfully detect the false positives, like traditional detective work, using it as a screening tool reduces the number of people that need to be investigated by a factor of 200 or so^.
However, those are a lot of assumptions— there’s lots of ways this could actually be as bad as it looks on the surface:
- Is the output of this system being used as evidence in a courtroom instead of a lead generator?
- Is there some systematic bias in the false positives that result in a particular class of innocent people being harassed by the police during their investigations?
- Does the system reliably include the actual suspect in its set of potential suspects?
I’ll refrain from commenting on the social acceptability of this system, as I have never been a part of UK society and thus lack a baseline against which to compare it.
^My brain is refusing to do the arithmetic tonight for some reason.
The panopticon is coming and its accuracy will improve. Facial recognition by itself may not improve much, but when paired with other information it's going to skyrocket in accuracy, and I suspect it'll happen in China first if it hasn't already. That other information will include things like the possible identities of other people in the same vicinity that have known associations, locations pulled from recognized devices, other fuzzy identifications along travel routes, gait analysis, matching facial recognitions with clothing identification to improve tracking, etc. None of the individual parts are that difficult, they just result in a massive amount of fuzzy data to be mined and computers can be very good at that mining.
Another factor is that this may be challenging when starting from a facial recognition point in a crowd and trying to identify a person, but what if you're starting from a list of "the usual suspects" who've been thoroughly photographed, had gait analysis done and had their social networks mapped? What if you start from "do we see any sign that any of these 50k individuals are in the crowd?"
But I did before. Now you’re just inventing new ways of policing... - yet policing what, exactly? The crime levels are at the lowest points in the civilised countries.
Uniquely identifying wifi MAC addresses and Bluetooth IDs can usually be passively picked up from phones. Correlate those with the other fuzzy identifiers you mentioned for even better and more versatile tracking.
I'm curious, are any MAC-like IDs broadcast plain-text as part of normal cell phone connections that could be passively sniffed? I must have the wrong keywords, but don't seem to be able to find anything on this.
Also if this technology works perfectly I don't want to be checked everywhere. It should be a human right to be excluded from facial recognition checks.
We need is a "you only get hassled once" system and policy. If you're stopped by the cops for looking suspicious, but not arrested and convicted, you should get a goodguy tag that prevents you from being stopped for a few years.
That seems open to abuse - wander around London until you get pinged with a false positive (vary your appearance - hat/glasses/beard - to make it more likely), then go and commit your crime, knowing one of the major tools is neutralised. Either it's good enough for general use, and we don't need this (_maybe_ have an exception for people who have been hassled multiple times), or it shouldn't be used.
Yet another article framing dystopian levels of surveillance as only bad if they malfunction. As if the only reason we wouldn't want to give complete control over our lives to authority, is because the authority might make mistakes.
> Yet another article framing dystopian levels of surveillance as only bad if they malfunction
Seriously, it's amazing how well framing a conversation works to divert it.
Where are all the comments about the stasi, securing databases, corrupt law enforcement, and not collecting information in the first place? Instead we're arguing over what percentage of "innocent" people can be hassled by the total surveillance state for it to be acceptable.
It's only dystopian if we end up in an actual dystopia. Right now this is inconveniencing people.
There is a totally valid question of whether we want surveillance at this level, and whether it is giving too much power to the government, which may not always use it for valid or good reasons. I don't support at all the use of mass surveillance because it's too easy to abuse, but in a world where we carry a location beacon with us everywhere we go, I don't know if we lose much if there are cameras in public places?
Reducing the search space from everyone in a crowd to 5 people seems...pretty great technology wise. I'm not sure what the problem is here.
I mean, I get that people don't like facial recognition for privacy reasons. But that seems totally orthogonal to this report, which is criticizing its efficacy, on very odd grounds.
I totally agree, if the users treat it accordingly. The trouble is when the police assume there’s a 99.9% chance that each flagged person is guilty because the system has a 0.1% false positive rate.
When you are on of a crowd, you don't get treated like a suspect.
When you are 1 of five you get treated like a suspect. A criminal. That direct implications on your well being. 4 people out of 5 will be Innocents that get treated like criminals. I don't want to live in that world.
Ok...but that happens all the time. If you look like someone that just robbed a liquor store and you're in the area, cops will stop you until they can clear you as a suspect. This is how policing has always worked.
Is a dragnet where everyone in a given area is checked even all that common?
Seems unlikely.
But with technology we can suddenly do it 24/7, numerous places, and for all sorts of crimes at the push of a button...the implications of that many people as suspects, that volume of innocent people accused seems pretty bad.
I've only calculated it for the US, but the gender disparity was roughly 3 times the racial disparity. I'm not saying there isn't a racial disparity, I'm asking what are the numbers compared to gender disparity.
Personally, I'm wary of policemen and politicians trying to grasp probability. The general public's perception of the subject is not mature enough, and all these high tech sci-fi stuff is being introduced to a society were phishing is lucractive. I fear facial recognition as proof becoming validating in the public discourse, paving the way to the whole biomechanics crew, like gait analysis.
The criminal justice system always had lots of false positives that go silent and unnoticed, simply because of exposure bias (you never hear about the guy they sent to prison for life again).
Imagine what the nazis could've done with a technology like this. Now realize that 30% of the people who control this technology today are nazis and the remaining 70% don't care what the nazis do or they would've already been fired for speaking out against the abuse.
Berlin did experiment with facial recognition. They had 300 test subjects that regularly used a particular train station. They claimed to have achieved a 65.8% detection rate, or up to 200 properly identified persons per day (so 1/3 were false negatives). However they also identified 0.67% wrongly, so given 90,000 people using that station a day, that means about 600 people were wrongly accused by the system each day (false positives).
They declared the system, which wrongly suspected up to 600 people a day at a single train station of being wanted criminals, but missed a lot of actually wanted criminals too, a major success.
Mind you, they used high resolution photographs as the training input for the system, something police does not necessarily have available of criminals and suspects they try to track down.
Recently, I've thought of the German government more the champion of individual rights than the US, but this just shows how far down the path of zero-fucks given about the damage these systems can do to people.
Are we talking about the German government that was pushing mandatory communication meta data retention for all?
That classifies people as "dangerous" without a trial and allows for the temporary imprisonment of those people without any court involvement whatsoever?
The government that was a driving force behind the copyright directive (aka article 13)?
The government that made unconstitutional laws to allow police to install trojans on people's devices?
That tried to push an EU-wide censorship infrastructure with secret filter lists under the guise of "fighting child porn", while lying about child porn (e.g. they claimed child porn is not illegal in India, which is not true) and where then-family minister von der Leyen (now about to become EU commission president) screened actual child porn to journalists at a press conference to influence their reporting?
The government that changed the law so that now you have to talk to the police most of the time (as a "witness")
That helped the NSA to spy on communication of other EU leaders and German politicians as well? And then tried to hide it when caught, using every dirty (legal) trick imaginable?
That regularly does mass surveillance on peaceful protesters? Or let the police lose to bash up a few of them?
That made a law that essentially turned social media companies into law enforcement agencies with no supervision?
That currently tries to create laws to force service providers to turn over communication "even if it is encrypted", aka defacto crypto backdoors?
It couldn't be further from the truth. People in power here are super corrupt and trying to erode the freedom just the same as anywhere else.
Whenever you think of a foreign government as good you just have to assume you don't know enough about that country to know about all the shit they do.
Yeah, we get a suspiciously high number of former politicians going into industries after their political career, usually industries that they previously were in charge of regulating (but Germany certainly isn't special in this regard).
But we do it with "style": e.g. our former chancellor (head of government) Schröder is a lobbyist for Russian gas and oil these days and is best buddies with Putin, to the extent that last time Putin was sworn in as president Schröder was the second person to shake Putin's hand, right after the head of the Russian-orhtodox church, but before the Prime Minister of Russia.
His vice chancellor at the time, Fischer, lobbied for a competing gas pipeline after leaving government... did I mention that Fischer belonged to the Green party?
Germany also managed to delay the ratification of the UN Convention against Corruption for about 10 years, citing "privacy issues" that could arise if you made politicians to disclose their income e.g., and finally passed a law that is essentially completely useless. Yes, really, the same politicians who were pushing for data retention of communication meta data of literally everybody in Germany cited privacy concerns...
But what if you want to donate large sums to a political party or candidate before an election or before a vote for some law you want? No, that would be bribery and corruption! So instead, just donate your large sums of not-bribes-I-swear AFTER you got what you want, and problem solved. Throw in a lobby/board of directors job or two for some politicians who needs an income supplement or hobby when retired, and you're done. No corruption to see here, please move along.
I don't understand the pessimism about this. In any real-world scenario this type of system would be followed by human review of the photographs, followed by actual investigation. Nobody is proposing arresting all 600 people straight away.
Whittling 90,000 photos down to a set of 600 is a major accomplishment. Even if 599 of those are false positives, that 600th person would probably never have been caught, because it wouldn't have been feasible to review all 90,000 photos manually.
>Even if 599 of those are false positives, that 600th person would probably never have been caught.
Society needs to accept that some percentage of crimes will invariably occur. Our question is "what maximum level of crime can we accept?" which then determines the time and resources required to achieve that level. I have no patience for this "zero-tolerance" rhetoric.
Said that way seems that you are given up. I think that it can be better to say "do you prefer to catch 0.5% more criminals or to reduce 0.4% deaths by cancer". Or something like that.
People usually want 100% safety, that is not possible to achieve, and to try to get it they will give away thousands of lives that could have been saved with the time and effort invested in that impossible goal.
Are they tho? Are they doing a better job than say police randomly checking people?
Let's actually do some crude math to try to estimate how many new cops we'd need to hire in Germany just to check out those false positive hits. I mean, what's the point of such a system if you do not check out the hits and make sure, right?
Let's assume it takes police 15 mins to check out a potential hit in person (finding the person, checking their identify and asking some questions), and they work in teams of 2 to be able to secure each other.
The Deutsche Bahn alone says in 2018 they had 5.7 million passenger in Germany per day traveling by rail[1]. Let's assume all the train stations get equipped with with this tech and let's assume their 0.67% false positive rate holds. That's 38,190 checks you need to do on innocent people, per day, or 1591.25 checks per hour.
A two person team can do 60 / 15 = 4 checks per hour. So you need to have 400 such teams at any given time. A shift is only 8h not 24h and people only work 5/7 days per week, so 400 * 2 * (24/8) * 7 / 5, so you need to hire at least 3,360 police officers (well, probably more like 5000, because we completely disregarded a lot of variables, such as vacation days, etc) just to harass DB rail passengers who were incorrectly classified as threats, nationwide. Remember, those are all false positives, not one of those people is actually a criminal the system is meant to be looking for.
IIRC an average police officer costs the state about 90K per year on average in Germany. So you'll be spending 300+ million EUR per year on harassing innocent people just because your tech is kinda shitty.
Now if those 3,360 police offers would do actual useful work instead and prevented or solved some crimes...
Also, I don't want to be that person who happens to have a similar enough face to some criminal so the face detection triggers on me all the time.
Admittedly I don't have any data for this, but I think it's fair to assume that this number of 600 would go down to 10-20 or so after a quick human review of the data. So I think your estimate of 15 min per "hit" is wildly overstating things.
And again I don't think you're asking the right question to begin with. There is a whole separate argument to be had about whether we as a society actually want these kinds of systems and whether we think they are worth the cost (whether they require 300 or 3000 additional officers). But this system is being developed under the assumption that people do think it's worth it, and it does a pretty good job of making it a lot cheaper than it would otherwise be. I wouldn't call that a failure.
As a side-note, I would imagine this would not actually be used routinely in every single station, at least not in the beginning. You could only activate it when needed to catch very high-profile criminal. For example after the attack on the Berlin Christmas market the terrorist managed to travel all the way to Italy (?) before being stopped. If the German police could have fed his photo to this system that would have been extremely helpful, even if it would have meant a couple hundred officers having to review photos for a day.
>Admittedly I don't have any data for this, but I think it's fair to assume that this number of 600 would go down to 10-20 or so after a quick human review of the data.
Yes, you have no data for this. Sieving out 95% of hits just because a human glanced at the results is a ridiculously optimistic estimate, even if you manage to staff the screens with humans who are actually good with strange faces; and most humans are not. Humans on average not being good with faces (of strangers) is why witness statements are so unreliable and put so many innocent people in prison (and we have data for that). And you want to sieve out faces that the computer already thought were similar enough to warrant a match, which won't make it any easier.
They're trying to sell a horrible system that does not work correctly to the public. It doesn't matter if the public thinks it is worth it after they massively misrepresented what it actually can do. (Oh, and the German public isn't exactly known for been keen on surveillance either).
>I wouldn't call that a failure.
I would and I do.
>If the German police could have fed his photo to this system that would have been extremely helpful, even if it would have meant a couple hundred officers having to review photos for a day.
This is not backed by any data either. He could have easily been one of the 1/3 of people the system fails to detect. Or he could have further disguised himself for the system not to trigger. Oh wait, he did[1], with a beanie and a scarf and later with hood. And nobody took notice, because a lot of people looked like that as it was cold outside. In the summer, you'd just get some big ass sunglasses to cover enough of your face that the already poor system would not have triggered.
And by the time the police actually had a preliminary ID and a preliminary picture of a sufficient quality that would have allowed facial recognition, he already had left Germany. And by the time they actually had fingerprint evidence he even was in the truck, he had traveled 3 or 4 countries.
The likelihood that such a system would have helped finding Amri, even tho he actually took trains and didn't just go into hiding close by or took a car, is minuscule. Those "couple hundred officers" would most probably had more success if they spent their time actually investigating Amri and his acquaintances[2]. Also, let's not forget that by the time we would have used the facial recognition system, he had already murdered the truck driver and carried out his attack murdering another 11 people, injuring another 55.
So in the end, even your terrorist-strawman here is pretty bad at justifying such a system.
[2]
Well, maybe... Given the massive failure by law enforcement before the attack, I am actually not too sure. Amri had been under surveillance for months before the attack, and they even had a snitch close to him, who even drove him from NRW to Berlin. He had previously been convicted in Tunesia (in his absence because he had already fled to Italy) of robbery, and was further investigated for theft and drugs, and in Italy he was convicted of arson and battery, and spent more than three years in jail, where he started a lot of fights and was already being tracked by Italian counter-terrorism because he showed lots of signs of radicalization. He was under surveillance in Germany by counter-terrorism as well, but they further found out that besides violating the movement restrictions of his asylum, and using multiple identities (they knew about 3 or 4 before the attack, but in the aftermath they found ...
> Nobody is proposing arresting all 600 people straight away.
Even though no one is proposing such a thing, it's basically guaranteed multiple police forces will do just that.
I know that sounds ridiculous, because it is, but essentially every technology handed off to police forces gets misused in the worst way you can imagine. Not all the time, of course, but some of the time.
I really like the idea of tasers, but unfortunately the claims that they're used as torture devices have a lot of validity.
China now has vending machines where you can pay with your face. (In a your-face-as-your-credit-card sense) If facial recognition is deemed sufficient to be used in payment systems, I wonder if it is just that the systems these police use are just implemented poorly?
The payment system at KFC kiosks and some other places just confirm you with your face. You first have to enter a phone number or other identifying information. Do the vending machines eliminate that first step?
1% error would arguably be scarier for that 1%, just pointing it out. I hope this tech evolves along some strong regulations on how they are used as evidence.
Right, I made this point kinda of in another comment. It really depends on how you want to frame the conversation. I agree with the general argument that randomly stopping and questioning people because a computer hit sucks, but knowing UK law enforcement they likely politely stopped the suspects and asked to see ID. Once they provided ID they were free to go on about their business. This technology is catching a ton of people that would otherwise not be caught.
Suppose your face is identified by a machine as looking like someone in a criminal database who is wanted. Suppose that you in fact are a dead ringer for that person in the database; even to a humans who double check this match, you look exactly the same. You have no ID. What are they to do?
This is a temporary state of things and people need to be less caught up with the technical shortcomings. It’s the world where machine vision is fully accurate that is the real problem, not only the one where the machines are buggy
On the surface this sounds bad, real bad. However on the flip side it means they found a number of criminals they would have never found otherwise. Hopefully they can tighten the false positive ratio dramatically but this technology for all its faults is finding real criminals that would otherwise not have been found.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadTurn the machines off and the error rate will be 0%.
Seriously though, for anyone interested in understanding this interesting statistical principle, check out the "Intuitive Explanation of Bayes Theorem" [1]
[1]: https://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-and-short-...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_London_Under...
Basically, if the natural error rate of a database is 5%, you aren't going to data mine a terrorist out of it if terrorists are < 1% (try .001%) of the population. Not. Gonna. Happen.
What is happening is our rights are being stripped and we have a rogue FBI that manufactures criminals when it wants to grab headlines and what's more, we have PROOF that they done exactly that.
NYC population is 8.6 million in 2017, so there are only 8~9 criminals in NYC? Wow.
Come on, you should give a much better estimate.
Once police have the right to search, enter, confiscate. and arrest probable cause is out the window.
I suppose it could be worse and they just take an aggregate face of all (accused?) criminals or for particular crimes (white collar?) and match against that... hey your skin was brown, or hey you didn't shave... you appear Male.
If yours isn't already as bad as ours, then just wait.
The iniquities of pre-trial detention and cash bail are fixable. Racially biased arrest, conviction and sentencing rates are fixable. Needlessly punitive sentences and an over-reliance on incarceration are fixable. Miscarriages of justice due to pseudoscientific forensic evidence and under-funded public defenders are fixable.
Don't make the UK out to be some paradise (legal or otherwise), it struggles with plenty of its own problems.
The UK is far from perfect, but most of the criticisms of the American criminal justice system simply don't apply.
The intentional homicide rate is substantially lower in the UK (1.2 vs 5.35 per 100,000), as is our rate of killings by law enforcement (0.2 vs 30.4 per 10,000,000). The UK may have slightly more property crime (12.2% vs 10% of population victimised), but it's not clear if that comparison is statistically valid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Proper...
In the UK, it seems, almost everyone has a tale about when they were burgled, when they were mugged or when their car was broken into.
Is this so in other countries, I think not?
Are you a WASP? I guess you're safe in US.
Are you black, latin american, native american, foreigner? I'm quite sure you are safer outside of the US.
It still takes 2-3 years to get to trial for serious offences during which time your name and face are plastered all over the papers (at least locally).
Mounting a successful defence can cost 10s to 100s of thousands of pounds.
Fighting off charges of which you are innocent is not fun. If we assume that the UK's system is good enough to just increase the arrest rate and it will all come out in the wash this would destroy many people's lives.
Although it is clear that the cuts have significantly impacted family, immigration and welfare benefits cases, it is not clear that they have affected the fairness of the criminal legal system.
Police have always relied on facial recognition, just not facial recognition carried out by machines. We accept imperfect facial recognition from machines if it is faster, and leaves less work for humans to deal with.
I've yet to meet a customer who's looking at this technology as a way to make decisions. In every case it's there to help make their analysts' jobs easier, by sifting through the chaff and presenting them with the data that makes the best use of their skills.
Note: I work for AWS.
Around 15 years ago I would often schedule last minute flights while traveling for work. When I did, I almost certainly would receive an enhanced screening from TSA. I was the false positive, and when traveling on tight schedules, I was not amused at the frequency in which I was considered suspect (in contrast to the treatment from the airlines, who treated me like royalty). Of course, TSAs true positive rate is 0%.
There are two big assumptions you haven't made explicit. One, that the FN rate is low. If it isn't you haven't necessarily improved your SNR at all, you're just spent resources looking in the wrong place. Two, that the cost of a FP is 0. The latter obviously isn't true, so you have to weight the positive and negative impacts across all scenarios before you can tell if this is a net win.
Think of this in a different context; say I have a new cancer screening protocol, with a low FN but also a high FP rate. So everyone we mark as positive gets a follow up biopsy. You say "great, we catch x% more cancers now than the old way, good win". Until someone points out that biopsies have a y% rate of catastrophic infection resulting in death. Depending how these rates balance out, we may be killing more people that we are saving....
This is a highly black-and-white way of thinking about the implications. "Heck, it's only a problem if they get executed."
For example, roadside drug test accuracy rate is abysmal but innocent people are being put in jail because uninformed LEO either don't know or don't care baout the rate. If you can't afford to fight the false charge, your life/record/job/etc is screwed.
Also, these false positives tend to have a conveniently racist default twist in our country.
"59% of the Houston defendants in drug arrests involving false positives were black.", I expect the number that didn't fight the charge and were wrongfully convicted is quite high as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside...
I'd say a society is more successful the more they strive to minimize law enforcement contact.
Friendly reminder that our _entire_ legal system was arranged by the Founders so that innocent people wouldn’t be incarcerated even if that means some guilty people walk free.
Your reasoning flips the most important feature of our criminal justice system on its head.
I know most people on HN haven’t dealt with the criminal justice system but being wrongly charged and, if you’re lucky, beating the charges is an incredibly awful experience. Just being charged will follow you for the rest of your life.
Remember this is used by police to find suspects, not to replace the judge.
It means that just looking at a picture, 2 suspects every ten are successfully recognized
Compared to the system we have now, were to find who's guilty police have to go trough a list of suspects were all of them except one (or a few) is innocent, 2 every 10 is very good.
We're not talking about considering people guilty until proven innocent, but helping police to investigate in the right direction.
In UK almost a quarter of murder cases are still unsolved.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/almost-quarter-all-murders-are-sti...
It means you have to explain the arrest on any enhanced DBS you need.
It means you probably longer qualify for visa free travel to the US and will need to ask the US embassy if you have to get a visa or not.
He presents useful tools for everyday people to understand this, mostly by converting percentages to real numbers and drawing probability trees.
lol, I am sure the police are, we as a society however should not be allowing the police to dictate what is and is not a "success". They have a MASSIVE conflict of interest here
The police would be happy with a 1% or even less hit rate
My point is, in some cases false positives are ok, in other cases they are not.
If they wanted to spend money on something that doesn't work, they should have purchased darkpuma™ brand divination rods.
That's not to say that I have particular confidence that the system is being deployed effectively, much less ethically, but your dismissal is unsound.
If it cannot be deployed ethically (which you seem prepared to concede), then it's not fit for purpose and is therefore not a real accomplishment.
My dismissal is that the error rates make it unsuitable for real use by real police officers. So no, my dismissal is not unsound. If it hasn't already, the purpose in practice of this machine will devolve into confirming the unfounded biases of police officers harassing the innocent (e.g. ADE 651, as mentioned by another user.) In the real world, devices like this are not fit for police work. Full stop.
If "find the people on this list, with near 100% accuracy" is something we're willing to accept, I think it's possible to build a system around this technology that doesn't deserve additional objection (outside detailed analysis of cost effectiveness or whatnot).
That outputting "there's a 20% chance they're on the list" might be used to deliberately harass those who aren't on the list is an argument that you didn't make in your first comment. Certainly safeguards against such behavior would be a necessary component of appropriate use of the technology - but it doesn't seem technically or socially implausible. There's a wide margin between a system that outputs "we think this person is sketchy" and a system that outputs "we think this person might be that specific person."
All of this said, I agree that there's reason to be skeptical and keep close watch to ensure rights aren't being trampled. That's the case without this tech as well.
Between cell phones, Amazon Ring, and Nest Cam, we're there.
Voice Assistants and Cloud Connected Camera however are no where near a requirement for participation in society
That this would be allowed in a modern civil society is atrocious yet the public went along with it despite incident after incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_C...
More inaccurate, sure, but I'm thinking that with the amount of government money involved it'll slowly improve. Or at least society will reach a stage where we don't care about the incorrectly flagged anymore.
A better question might be: "given how accurate this facial recognition system is, what if anything in addition to a match should be required for an officer to detain someone matched by it?".
I don't have an answer for this one. This tech is new, and complex, and hard. We'll likely abuse it before we figure out how to properly balance human rights and protecting the public.
if it correctly finds anyone on the watch list, but they comprise only 19% of the results returned, and the police force knows it, that strikes me as a great screening tool. just need some people to sift through it.
i doubt it finds the folks on the watch list that reliably though.
How large does it have to be to be useful?
Bueller?
Bueller?
I wouldn't be surprised if these systems are used specifically in cases with weak evidence. If you had phone records or other hard evidence, you wouldn't need to rely on face matching. So the faulty system ends up used in the exact cases where it can do the most damage to innocent people.
Here's one example: https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...
"Mr Scott, from Truro in Cornwall, spend nearly three months on remand in Strangeways after being charged with a single count of rape.
He strongly protested his innocence - and told detectives in interviews that he had never been to Manchester.
The Crown Prosecution Service formerly dropped the case during a hearing at Manchester Crown Court after the private firm confirmed the DNA blunder.
" Despite warnings of DNA contamination at the laboratory less than two week earlier, Adam Scott was arrested and held in custody – even though he had been hundreds of miles from the scene of the crime.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rape-accused-ada...
I suppose using colloquial language by using universal phrases for the sake of clarity is a 'no-no' because some pedant will call you out on it. How about this: "Convictions due to facial recognition false positives are low probability outliers to the extent that they will not impact the civil rights of citizenry".. Is that better? Does that improve conversation? Should we not provide a modicum of charity in interpreting the arguments of others?
BTW, you realize you undermined your point as well?
DNA is an incredible forensic tool, that outweighs any outliers. If you're claiming facial recognition is or is going to be like DNA identification, you lost your argument.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/a-reaso...
From the beginning, Sutton and Adams denied any involvement. They both had alibis, and neither of them matched the profile from the victim’s original account: She’d described her assailants as short and skinny. Adams was 5 foot 11 and 180 pounds. Sutton was three inches taller and 25 pounds heavier, the captain of his high-school football team.
The DNA evidence was harder to refute. Having seen enough prime-time TV to believe that a DNA test would vindicate them, Sutton and Adams had agreed, while in custody, to provide the police with blood samples
Reality is that DNA evidence overrides actual evidence time and time again, and people are wrongfully sent to jail, have their lives ruined, and even die, because of it.
The same thing will happen with facial recognition, gait, etc.
This system performs much better than existing tools like drug dogs.
I guess we subject the crowd of innocent false-positives to that statistic unecessarily.
This technology is primarily intended for identifying suspects; an 81% false positive rate is remarkably good and extremely useful if you're scanning a train station for a terrorism suspect or a public street for a wanted fugitive. In this application, a relatively high false-positive rate is entirely tolerable (from the perspective of the justice system, at least) because checking the identity of five people to apprehend one serious criminal is a complete no-brainer.
No. This is a fully-general counterargument. You could say this of everything: 'innocent people could go to jail because of X!' This is true and irrelevant, because it is true of both good things and bad things, and not even wrong. It is sheer concern-trolling. The question is whether X works well enough. Nothing in OP or your comment remotely establishes whether it does or does not. Citing '81%' is merely throwing out scientific-sounding rhetoric. (It has numbers and it looks big, therefore it must be bad. It would be the same if it was 98.1% or 81% or 8.1%.)
So again: is 19% not enough? What is enough?
Bueller?
Bueller?
[1] There's several voluntary ID schemes for younger folks to prove they're old enough to be in a bar, buy alcohol or cigarettes etc.
The UK had them through the war and got rid in the 50s because they were thought an infringement of civil liberties - because police were asking to see them as habit, not for reasons of suspicion - funny how attitudes change. Not having ID makes something like facial recognition stations set up in the street seem an even larger overreach. We're supposed to be able to go about our business without interference unless suspected of something. OK, it doesn't always work quite that way in practice, but the principle used to be much clearer, and far better respected... I rather resent losing that.
It made for a bit of an oddity back where there were the troubles in Northern Ireland and the heavily policed border between north and south. You could get on to a ferry to Dublin from the UK with nothing. No ID, no passport, nowt. I did that several times, I don't remember anything other than a ticket check. Change some pounds into Irish pounds when you get there.
What happens to a poor sap who the facial detection system thinks looks like a known violent criminal? In the UK it means constant harassment. In the US it means eventually getting shot.
However, those are a lot of assumptions— there’s lots of ways this could actually be as bad as it looks on the surface:
- Is the output of this system being used as evidence in a courtroom instead of a lead generator?
- Is there some systematic bias in the false positives that result in a particular class of innocent people being harassed by the police during their investigations?
- Does the system reliably include the actual suspect in its set of potential suspects?
I’ll refrain from commenting on the social acceptability of this system, as I have never been a part of UK society and thus lack a baseline against which to compare it.
^My brain is refusing to do the arithmetic tonight for some reason.
Another factor is that this may be challenging when starting from a facial recognition point in a crowd and trying to identify a person, but what if you're starting from a list of "the usual suspects" who've been thoroughly photographed, had gait analysis done and had their social networks mapped? What if you start from "do we see any sign that any of these 50k individuals are in the crowd?"
Marijuana is illegal, so human tracking should be illegal too.
You thought you ever had privacy?
I'm not sure I really see the connection here.
Privacy must be preserved for the same reason since we still haven’t yet lived without privacy for long enough to see the consequences.
I'm curious, are any MAC-like IDs broadcast plain-text as part of normal cell phone connections that could be passively sniffed? I must have the wrong keywords, but don't seem to be able to find anything on this.
IMEI/IMSI.
His life is going to get a lot more interesting with technology like this, since we know the false positives tend to have a specific race.
Seriously, it's amazing how well framing a conversation works to divert it.
Where are all the comments about the stasi, securing databases, corrupt law enforcement, and not collecting information in the first place? Instead we're arguing over what percentage of "innocent" people can be hassled by the total surveillance state for it to be acceptable.
There is a totally valid question of whether we want surveillance at this level, and whether it is giving too much power to the government, which may not always use it for valid or good reasons. I don't support at all the use of mass surveillance because it's too easy to abuse, but in a world where we carry a location beacon with us everywhere we go, I don't know if we lose much if there are cameras in public places?
I mean, I get that people don't like facial recognition for privacy reasons. But that seems totally orthogonal to this report, which is criticizing its efficacy, on very odd grounds.
Seems unlikely.
But with technology we can suddenly do it 24/7, numerous places, and for all sorts of crimes at the push of a button...the implications of that many people as suspects, that volume of innocent people accused seems pretty bad.
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/stop-and-frisk...
The criminal justice system always had lots of false positives that go silent and unnoticed, simply because of exposure bias (you never hear about the guy they sent to prison for life again).
They declared the system, which wrongly suspected up to 600 people a day at a single train station of being wanted criminals, but missed a lot of actually wanted criminals too, a major success.
Mind you, they used high resolution photographs as the training input for the system, something police does not necessarily have available of criminals and suspects they try to track down.
https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2018/debakel-am-suedkreuz (German)
That classifies people as "dangerous" without a trial and allows for the temporary imprisonment of those people without any court involvement whatsoever?
The government that was a driving force behind the copyright directive (aka article 13)?
The government that made unconstitutional laws to allow police to install trojans on people's devices?
That tried to push an EU-wide censorship infrastructure with secret filter lists under the guise of "fighting child porn", while lying about child porn (e.g. they claimed child porn is not illegal in India, which is not true) and where then-family minister von der Leyen (now about to become EU commission president) screened actual child porn to journalists at a press conference to influence their reporting?
The government that changed the law so that now you have to talk to the police most of the time (as a "witness")
That helped the NSA to spy on communication of other EU leaders and German politicians as well? And then tried to hide it when caught, using every dirty (legal) trick imaginable?
That regularly does mass surveillance on peaceful protesters? Or let the police lose to bash up a few of them?
That made a law that essentially turned social media companies into law enforcement agencies with no supervision?
That currently tries to create laws to force service providers to turn over communication "even if it is encrypted", aka defacto crypto backdoors?
and so on ...
Whenever you think of a foreign government as good you just have to assume you don't know enough about that country to know about all the shit they do.
But we do it with "style": e.g. our former chancellor (head of government) Schröder is a lobbyist for Russian gas and oil these days and is best buddies with Putin, to the extent that last time Putin was sworn in as president Schröder was the second person to shake Putin's hand, right after the head of the Russian-orhtodox church, but before the Prime Minister of Russia.
His vice chancellor at the time, Fischer, lobbied for a competing gas pipeline after leaving government... did I mention that Fischer belonged to the Green party?
Germany also managed to delay the ratification of the UN Convention against Corruption for about 10 years, citing "privacy issues" that could arise if you made politicians to disclose their income e.g., and finally passed a law that is essentially completely useless. Yes, really, the same politicians who were pushing for data retention of communication meta data of literally everybody in Germany cited privacy concerns...
But what if you want to donate large sums to a political party or candidate before an election or before a vote for some law you want? No, that would be bribery and corruption! So instead, just donate your large sums of not-bribes-I-swear AFTER you got what you want, and problem solved. Throw in a lobby/board of directors job or two for some politicians who needs an income supplement or hobby when retired, and you're done. No corruption to see here, please move along.
I'm still not sure what it's good for though, if the plan is to stop an interogate those 600 people this is still infeasible.
Whittling 90,000 photos down to a set of 600 is a major accomplishment. Even if 599 of those are false positives, that 600th person would probably never have been caught, because it wouldn't have been feasible to review all 90,000 photos manually.
Society needs to accept that some percentage of crimes will invariably occur. Our question is "what maximum level of crime can we accept?" which then determines the time and resources required to achieve that level. I have no patience for this "zero-tolerance" rhetoric.
I agree with you.
Said that way seems that you are given up. I think that it can be better to say "do you prefer to catch 0.5% more criminals or to reduce 0.4% deaths by cancer". Or something like that.
People usually want 100% safety, that is not possible to achieve, and to try to get it they will give away thousands of lives that could have been saved with the time and effort invested in that impossible goal.
All I'm saying is that these tools are clearly doing a useful job and pretending like false positives are an insurmountable problem is a bit silly.
Let's actually do some crude math to try to estimate how many new cops we'd need to hire in Germany just to check out those false positive hits. I mean, what's the point of such a system if you do not check out the hits and make sure, right?
Let's assume it takes police 15 mins to check out a potential hit in person (finding the person, checking their identify and asking some questions), and they work in teams of 2 to be able to secure each other.
The Deutsche Bahn alone says in 2018 they had 5.7 million passenger in Germany per day traveling by rail[1]. Let's assume all the train stations get equipped with with this tech and let's assume their 0.67% false positive rate holds. That's 38,190 checks you need to do on innocent people, per day, or 1591.25 checks per hour.
A two person team can do 60 / 15 = 4 checks per hour. So you need to have 400 such teams at any given time. A shift is only 8h not 24h and people only work 5/7 days per week, so 400 * 2 * (24/8) * 7 / 5, so you need to hire at least 3,360 police officers (well, probably more like 5000, because we completely disregarded a lot of variables, such as vacation days, etc) just to harass DB rail passengers who were incorrectly classified as threats, nationwide. Remember, those are all false positives, not one of those people is actually a criminal the system is meant to be looking for.
IIRC an average police officer costs the state about 90K per year on average in Germany. So you'll be spending 300+ million EUR per year on harassing innocent people just because your tech is kinda shitty.
Now if those 3,360 police offers would do actual useful work instead and prevented or solved some crimes...
Also, I don't want to be that person who happens to have a similar enough face to some criminal so the face detection triggers on me all the time.
[1] https://www.deutschebahn.com/resource/blob/3992284/f9331633c...
And again I don't think you're asking the right question to begin with. There is a whole separate argument to be had about whether we as a society actually want these kinds of systems and whether we think they are worth the cost (whether they require 300 or 3000 additional officers). But this system is being developed under the assumption that people do think it's worth it, and it does a pretty good job of making it a lot cheaper than it would otherwise be. I wouldn't call that a failure.
As a side-note, I would imagine this would not actually be used routinely in every single station, at least not in the beginning. You could only activate it when needed to catch very high-profile criminal. For example after the attack on the Berlin Christmas market the terrorist managed to travel all the way to Italy (?) before being stopped. If the German police could have fed his photo to this system that would have been extremely helpful, even if it would have meant a couple hundred officers having to review photos for a day.
Yes, you have no data for this. Sieving out 95% of hits just because a human glanced at the results is a ridiculously optimistic estimate, even if you manage to staff the screens with humans who are actually good with strange faces; and most humans are not. Humans on average not being good with faces (of strangers) is why witness statements are so unreliable and put so many innocent people in prison (and we have data for that). And you want to sieve out faces that the computer already thought were similar enough to warrant a match, which won't make it any easier.
They're trying to sell a horrible system that does not work correctly to the public. It doesn't matter if the public thinks it is worth it after they massively misrepresented what it actually can do. (Oh, and the German public isn't exactly known for been keen on surveillance either).
>I wouldn't call that a failure.
I would and I do.
>If the German police could have fed his photo to this system that would have been extremely helpful, even if it would have meant a couple hundred officers having to review photos for a day.
This is not backed by any data either. He could have easily been one of the 1/3 of people the system fails to detect. Or he could have further disguised himself for the system not to trigger. Oh wait, he did[1], with a beanie and a scarf and later with hood. And nobody took notice, because a lot of people looked like that as it was cold outside. In the summer, you'd just get some big ass sunglasses to cover enough of your face that the already poor system would not have triggered.
And by the time the police actually had a preliminary ID and a preliminary picture of a sufficient quality that would have allowed facial recognition, he already had left Germany. And by the time they actually had fingerprint evidence he even was in the truck, he had traveled 3 or 4 countries.
The likelihood that such a system would have helped finding Amri, even tho he actually took trains and didn't just go into hiding close by or took a car, is minuscule. Those "couple hundred officers" would most probably had more success if they spent their time actually investigating Amri and his acquaintances[2]. Also, let's not forget that by the time we would have used the facial recognition system, he had already murdered the truck driver and carried out his attack murdering another 11 people, injuring another 55.
So in the end, even your terrorist-strawman here is pretty bad at justifying such a system.
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bild-1128683-1091474.... https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bild-1128683-1089847....
[2] Well, maybe... Given the massive failure by law enforcement before the attack, I am actually not too sure. Amri had been under surveillance for months before the attack, and they even had a snitch close to him, who even drove him from NRW to Berlin. He had previously been convicted in Tunesia (in his absence because he had already fled to Italy) of robbery, and was further investigated for theft and drugs, and in Italy he was convicted of arson and battery, and spent more than three years in jail, where he started a lot of fights and was already being tracked by Italian counter-terrorism because he showed lots of signs of radicalization. He was under surveillance in Germany by counter-terrorism as well, but they further found out that besides violating the movement restrictions of his asylum, and using multiple identities (they knew about 3 or 4 before the attack, but in the aftermath they found ...
Even though no one is proposing such a thing, it's basically guaranteed multiple police forces will do just that.
I know that sounds ridiculous, because it is, but essentially every technology handed off to police forces gets misused in the worst way you can imagine. Not all the time, of course, but some of the time.
I really like the idea of tasers, but unfortunately the claims that they're used as torture devices have a lot of validity.
But if 599 innocents are harrassed by the cops, then in all likelihood, the system does more harm than the crime it's seeking justice for
That's pretty darn useful!