How is this not slander? Falsely telling someone that you're a thief with real worldly consequences like getting kicked out of a store should have real legal consequences.
Only if you have the money to sue. Things being the way they are, rather than fixing the issue, they would more likely simply increase the confidence threshold based on whether you look wealthy enough to sue
Slander requires a third person. The person from the store telling you you're a thief might be wrong, but it's not slander.
I'm not sure about the computer program though. It telling a third person (i.e. the person from the store) would be libel, but since it is the result of a calculation, I'm not sure if it's considered libel.
If its said in public the general public is the audience that hears the slander. If the store had even the slightest amount of brains they would have simply asked the person to leave without saying anything about the cause.
"Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'."
Knowing that one in 40 people so flagged aren't guilty of a crime means they are deliberately imposing upon those so flagged. The choice to use a faulty tech isn't itself a mistake its a choice. EG if you exposed a million people to this tech daily you would falsely arrest 11,000 people.
In the UK, only police ('sworn constables') have legal protection when conducting an arrest. Ordinary people conducting a 'citizens arrest' are committing a crime if they make a mistake (false imprisonment). Store workers are not usually sworn constables.
In any case, the article is not about an arrest. Making someone leave is not an arrest, it's the opposite (an arrest is detaining someone).
Remember that doco on Netflix where black people were complaining and trying to solve for not being correctly detected by facial recognition tech? They had a genetic advantage against FRT.
That is the sort of thing Mx Throwaway was getting at: the fact that you were on trial was often seen as a sign of guilt, because why would an innocent person be on trial? Almost everybody else on trial was found guilty, so why should this trial be any different?
1. If any one ensnare another, putting a ban upon him, but he can not prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death.
2. If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.
3. If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death.
Up until the last couple of centuries most countries didn’t have any sort of pro-active policing, beyond posting a bounty or a wanted notice. Unless you were caught red handed it was up to private citizens - thief takers, bounty hunters, or the aggrieved victims and family - to attempt to apprehend wanted criminals.
> The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified. But the error count is much higher once an someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive.
A 97.5% accuracy rate seems… really really high!
Obviously facial recognition shouldn’t be the only bit of evidence. But that’s remarkably accurate.
It should also get worse as more people are added: In a large enough population almost every person has some look alike who happens to be a thief.
Another way to look at it is for the worst case person what is their false positive rate? It's going to be 100%: Joe Blow, who did nothing wrong to no one, will go from place to place getting kicked out for the rest of his (/the system's) life. The failures aren't random (or at least not entirely)-- some people will get a heap of error in their lap.
So while getting punted 1:10000 times you go somewhere unfairly isn't too bad, getting always punted is awful. The unequal distribution of errors creates bad incentives: the system is almost risk-less for those of us who aren't the victims of false hits, so why should we demand improving or banning it?
So high in fact that either the numbers are cooked or the threshold required for a positive match is set really really high, so they get a lot of false negatives, which opens the possibility that the threshold can be lowered in the future.
I would like to put our officials under cameras 24/7 with the footage publicly available complete with the means to put them on trial and lock them up. When we've accomplished that im fine with monitoring everything always forever. But no sooner.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, no? Besides, stealing a random item from a super market shelf is much less damage than what a corrupt politician could do. Perhaps we should prioritize them instead..
Maybe the people who run for office are so bad because only someone who can accept constant abuse from the public can stand it. Maybe this attitude is the problem.
No, the problem is that those who don't play ball with their political machine's interests are shut out from opportunities to advance. Tammany Hall is a famous historical example that goes back much farther than the public has had as strong a voice as it does today, and though the faces have changed this is still how things get done.
The game is rigged at the level of who gets to stand for election, particularly in safe-seat districts that get decided in the primary. Very few people are able to get elected without help from their local political machine getting out the vote - enough to provide plausible deniability, but not enough to create an effective opposition.
Remember the monopsony of Sheldon Silver? He used his position to control which politicians would receive contributions for their campaigns, creating a network of people dependent on him for political survival. It's that kind of power broking that's the problem. The clear and present danger of entrenched power is why politicians must not be allowed a shred of privacy.
We are making it impossible for anyone but sociopaths to run for office by believing that abusing them is the key to getting them to behave well. This attitude is as responsible for our state of affairs as everything else.
It is not abuse, it is protection. You can pressure, bribe or blackmail people and force them to do things for you. If it is not possible to do what is asked there is also no need to ask. There is no need to take the job if there is not enough room to enrich yourself.
Like there is no need to rob a store if the clerk cant open the vault.
When you can give half your waking life to a billion dollar corporation and not even have the privilege of being able to pay for a roof over your head; yes.
I would rather like to put people prone to stealing from all (tax fraudsters) under cameras 24/7 with the footage publicly available complete with the means to put them on trial and lock them up.
we can limit it to those where the amount of individual stealing is relevant. not the long tail but the fat creamers.
How did they know she shoplifted in the first place?
Does the tech also identify shop lifting, or do they just search a database of people convicted of shoplifting (in which case they could have just checked this person's ID and realized it was mistaken identity).
Is being caught shoplifting a credible reason to deny someone access to basic goods indefinitely? What if all supermarkets in a town use the same facial rec service?
It uses facial recognition ergo a computer flagged her face as similar to the face of someone known to be banned from the store. This tech is known not to be good enough for this use case. If you match a large population of users you are going to get an unacceptable level of false positives.
Even putting a human being in the loop is trouble prone because people aren't on average good enough at this.
It would be more useful to require a free membership to shop there and validate allowed users via bluetooth and ban users devices and phone numbers.
But note that this is the UK. Different issues from the States (where this wouldn't ever pass. We have weak social security specifically becsuse citizens rejected a national ID).
The Chinese solved this by adding more cameras. If you can lookup where the potential suspect came from and pull their full details from the fuzzy query false positives become unlikely. More data is the answer! lol
It's essentislly impossible to eliminate false positives. With billions of people on the planet, the odds of someone looking extremely similar is high. Plenty of actual twins around as well.
I'm sure there are other things that could be captured and analyzed aside from images. Gait, perhaps? It's similar to web tracking - each individual method might be very unreliable, but the intersection of them can be extremely specific.
Or just implant RFID into every citizen at birth. It's for your safety, after all - if you get lost or abducted, that's how they'll find you.
Not sure why this comment's gray; it's a good point (and a sobering one). In the very near feature, Western countries likely won't be relying on individual surveillance cameras; we'll have end-to-end chains of cameras that will confirm, with confidence, which house a person walked out of 2 hours ago, right down to their interior flat entrance inside an apartment block. (As the PRC is currently trialing). We'll have near-perfect panopticon identity systems, associating facial recognition with place of residence, and dozens of other factors.
It's very important to ponder what the PRC is pioneering today because we're about three years behind doing exactly the same things, and for the same reasons. It's only going to be a brief time before things we're horrified about, and vitriolically condemn totalitarian states for, are things we're going to fully normalize within our own culture.
HN yesterday: EU is so silly trying to regulate AI usage, "The Banned and High-Risk lists read like a call for startups (outside the EU)." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40473533
just this particular post on hn. I'm not from the UK so I can't fully comment, but based on the stories I read here, I'd agree with your general sentiment.
As the article points out, given the rampant levels of shoplifting in the UK (and the associated abuse of staff), all of the major retailers and a lot of their staff are going to be on board with this.
For the government and police, it's a cheap option to deal with the problem.
The staff don't really care about lifting: they really aren't paid enough for it to be their problem, or cared for enough by the employers such that they care if the employer looses a bit through shoplifting. The few that do care see the heavy end of the abuse you mention, and those that don't see abuse anyway, and if it isn't on CCTV the employers don't seem to care (it is far too much hassle to prosecute) despite the higher-ups pretending otherwise: that is why the staff support CCTV and related monitoring, not the lifting.
The abuse is a very real problem, I know a few who work in shops, all of whom have been verbally abused and physically threatened at various times. One of them was not long ago punched in the face in front of witnesses. Tesco, ever caring, had her working the next day, just a few hours later (incident happened on late shift, next shift was early morning, "are you sure you can't come in?, it'll be hard to find someone to cover") and seemed to put as more effort into investigating what she might have done wrong as they put into helping the police gather evidence to investigate the abusive individual, so she was glad of the CCTV. She got out off Tesco as quick as she could. She has had notification from the police that the individual involved is being prosecuted, but for a number of other offences also so it is unlikely she'll need to testify or otherwise be involved further.
The staff want the CCTV because they don't trust the managers and higher to look after their interests otherwise.
The Chinese government is evil and authoritarian. As a result, they do like surveillance. That does not exclude you can use the same technology or same measures for other purposes.
I don’t know. Whenever I see those amber alerts to be on the lookout for a grey Nissan with license plate number something, I think isn’t that a great opportunity to use at least OCR or something. Or be on the look out for some kidnap victim kid who looks like other kids, asking people to do what technology can already do much better sounds dumb.
Machines are going to come up with false positives, but so will human beings who are asked to be on the lookout for some kid of some redacted race in a hoody.
The amber alert stuff seems useless. Maybe I’m a bad person but I just have that disabled. The emergency weather warnings are also pretty high false positive with respect to things like flash flooding but at least worth being aware of.
Oh it is quite useless where I am. Before I disabled it, I would routinely get ear-shriekingly loud alerts at 4:30 in the morning for events happening hundreds of miles away. Worst waste of resources that are mandatory on phones, ever, except for the presidential alert.
The difference here is that people are asked to be on the lookout at some specific moments when a crime is known to be occurring, while cameras can - and are, per TFA - being used for straight up fishing expeditions.
That said, yes, it would be nice if there was a way for my car to automatically scan car plates around, linked to my phone so that when an amber alert comes in and I explicitly choose to enable the scanner at that point, it would report matches for that particular number automatically.
But we all know that's never going to happen. Well, the automatic plate scanners
in every car will probably happen eventually - it's too easy technologically for someone to not come up with a bright idea to mandate them "for safety". But they will be enabled and effectively controlled by law enforcement 24/7.
Haven't UK learnt anything after unjustly accusing and imprisoning all those people that the Postmaster thoughts had stolen money when it turned out eventually to have been a software bug?
I don't think it was a "bug", but it is probably described as such to minimise what happened. My understanding is that people with admin access were manipulating Postmaster transactions which resulted in creating artificial losses and Post Office was denying it was possible, despite having knowledge it was happening.
We have many studies that show vulnerabilities of these image classification models to noise (adversarial or otherwise). The confidence levels are just not enough to fit into our "innocent until proven guilty (beyond reasonable doubt)" justice system.
The danger is that big tech/AI can pump enough money into politics that justice system parameters will be rewritten.
When I was 18 years old, a security guard kicked me and a friend out of a grocery store, much to our confusion.
After talking to them and requesting the store manager, it turns out they had a photo of a shoplifter that looked very similar to me. Eventually we were let back in the store and it was all OK.
So, it’s not an entirely new problem? Although with facial recognition I guess there is less recourse; a manager is not as likely to believe they got it wrong if their computer tells them otherwise.
There isn't much recourse anyway, you were entirely lucky that they were willing to be reasonable. At least if you live in the US, not sure what laws are like around this in Europe
I don't think this status quo should be empowered further by error prone tech
Even without the facial recognition system, security guys can ask customers out, since those are private property. And you are lucky that store manager helped you with the issue. Most cases I heard around me are that the security guy and the manager just gives no explanation.
Let's say this technology was basically infallible: only known shoplifters were flagged. What then?
Should shoplifting once mean that a person is banned from all stores that use this service for life?
Also: I assume that this service wouldn't just impact shoplifters, but anyone that a store saw fit to ban for any reason. What about people who experience mental health crises? I had a friend who had psychotic breaks while her issues were still undiagnosed and untreated
I know that this ultimately depends on the store's own policies, the facial recognition tech just provides information. but frankly I don't want to live in a world where making such a minor mistake in your youth could basically ruin your life
> Should shoplifting once mean that a person is banned from all stores that use this service for life?
I mean, it depends, right? Barred from buying any groceries for stealing a candy bar is obviously wrong… but if you walk out the door with a five-figure watch you didn’t pay for, I’m happy for you to be banned from Rolex shops for life, yeah.
If a decision needs to be made, I think "access to public businesses" should be something that is decided in a court, and not by shady AI surveillance corporations.
I have deliberately not clicked on the link yet. My thought process just based on the title:
1. Okay well maybe the technology was wrong.
2. Or maybe the shoplifter is lying?
3. Surely "my word against yours" in the case of "human vs. computer" is solved by believing the human?
4. Isn't the whole point of this technology to catch humans who lie?
5. Then surely, if it's a shoplifter, there is video footage and that will clear up the issue.
6. But what if there isn't footage. What if it's just an AI that's detected someone as a shoplifter based on their face?
7. The technology for this is really mature, now I'm inclined to believe the computer.
8. But what about the guy? (Yay, gender assumption based on the word "shoplifter")
9. Well, in order to believe him I would want to understand why the AI was wrong.
10. Oh, the whole thing with AI in many contexts is that YOU CAN'T KNOW THIS.
11. This is why people care about understanding how AI makes decisions and have serious reactions to technology that just "magics" a decision out of thin air, even when it's the right one this time.
12. But what about the guy?
Well, I've just newly understood some things about the social impacts of pervasive AI. Time to read the article.
There seems to be a misunderstanding of the place of technology in the criminal justice system. There is nothing wrong with using technology to sift through a mass of data points to narrow down suspects or point the investigation in a particular direction. However, this does not obviate the need for investigation to actually verify that the initial identification is correct. There should never be a case where people are arrested or prosecuted solely on the word of a database query.
Agree. A better response to '80% chance that this is a known shoplifter' is for security to keep an eye on them. It should very quickly become apparent that it's a false positive (or not).
The problem is that this technology is not sold that way, it's sold as a way to detect shoplifters. It's also extremely important how the result is phrased and presented: even "80% chance that is is a known shoplifter" simply means "this is a known shoplifter" to a layperson. But even a 99.9% or 100% confidence might be wrong so this isn't even an 80% chance - at best it's 80% times the statistical likelihood of this not being a false positive at 100% confidence, and that can never be a 100% chance.
The (psychologically) correct way to think of this is as a colleague making a claim and telling you how certain they are. But this tech is not sold as a colleague, it's sold as a machine that is better than humans. It's not a perfect super cop but that's how it is marketed and why people buy it.
I am afraid the Appeal to Authority fallacy is one we as a society are about to be exposed to on a massive level and recognize as a side effect of integrating AI into our daily lives.
I’m worried that opponents of facial recognition are shooting themselves in the foot with the inaccuracy argument. Sure, maybe face rec ends up like Siri or self-driving cars. Even if it ends up like DallE or ChatGPT they probably still have a point. But I’m a little bit afraid that it might have an AlphaGo moment and just become extraordinarily superhuman at facial recognition, becoming much more dangerous while simultaneously dismantling the case they’d been building against it.
From the same article, meanwhile, out on the street in public space:
On a humid day in Bethnal Green, in east London, we joined the police as they positioned a modified white van on the high street.
Cameras attached to its roof captured thousands of images of people's faces.
If they matched people on a police watchlist, officers would speak to them and potentially arrest them.
Sure, it may be reasonable, it's still worth pointing out that the article is not just about people entering a specific chain of shops, it's also mentioning police vans sitting in the middle of pedestrian concourses outside such shops doing the same face scanning.
It places a burden on someone to somehow prove their innocence, if they can. What if a person refused to speak to the police?
Or what about this? A man covered his face when walking past one of these vans in a public street. He protested and was then fined £90 for swearing (swearing is not illegal but The Pubic Order Act is another law that is often abused by police but that's tangential)
This is the same burden a person would be under if a police officer simply noticed someone on the street who looked like a wanted suspect (without computer assistance). I agree that the automated system makes this situation more likely to occur, but it has always been the case that you can potentially be arrested because you look a bit like someone else. And in that situation you would have to do your best to convince the police officer that you were in fact someone else.
That's generally why you're only required to provide ID to police in the US (at least in a car. Don't think you can force anyone off the street to show ID). The right to remain silent, or to deny entry into your home cannot put you on a Arrest list.
Of course, all this assume US police have consequences for breaking the rules. So this is unfortunately moot.
No difference at all from the US here. If a police officer in the US recognizes you as being someone for whom there is an outstanding arrest warrant then they can arrest you. And of course, they could be mistaken.
It's perfectly reasonable to harvest thousands of photos of unknowing people and then accost them based on faulty software that can produce an erroneous match? How so?
Nothing in OPs post said anything about accosting people or using faulty software to drive that interaction.
Simply going out looking for people of interest in east London is perfectly fine, we call it "police work" and have done it for bloody ages.
Maybe instead we could issue officers with a deck of cards with 52 faces on them and they can use that as a comparison point? Seems pretty inefficient to me but im only a tax paying pleb what would i know.
Police surveillance should be inefficient. People do not exist to be arbitrarily inspected at scale; it should be an expensive, manual process and you should be forced to choose carefully whom you target, by necessity keeping that list small and limited to those for whom you can articulate cause.
The most efficient way to survey is to not survey. Nothing more efficient than 0 runtime overhead.
Snark aside, surveys are quite literally the least efficient means of gathering a sample. Scanning random people on the street when a known criminal is likely to lay low and stay inside. I can't imagine expensive surveillance cameras is cheaper than paying an investigator to track down a suspect.
It sounds like they had weren't looking for any specific person (just anyone on "the watchlist") and they were simply mass processing faces to find potential matches.
Let's ignore the privacy implications as not all countries have an expectation of privacy outside windowless closed private spaces. How is this meaningfully different from a general stop and frisk policy? Sure, this adds a non-physical filter before the physical police interaction but it's still a widespread warrantless search. How does this work with the presumption of innocence?
The counterpoint would be to ask how this is meaningfully different from a group of police officers standing on the street comparing the faces they see to a set of photos of known suspects. The efficiency of the automated system obviously makes it feel very different. However, fundamentally, being arrested for looking like someone else is not a new phenomenon. I do not like what is going on here, but I’m not sure that your particular line of argument against it is very strong.
Same deal as LLMs. Police don't get to automatically input facial data into a database when on the streets.
If there was some guarantee all that data wasn't going into some government sanctioned back end, we can start to compare it to police out on the street.
>However, fundamentally, being arrested for looking like someone else is not a new phenomenon.
Was always wrong and still is wrong.
But if you want a modern difference: companies these days (even minimum wage) are really strict about arrests. Even a false arrest can cause complications in a background check, so there is more potential (albeit indirect) slanderous effects from mistaking people nowadays.
I don’t understand this comment. The police sometimes have to arrest people based on descriptions and other fallible data points. It’s unfortunate when the wrong person is arrested (and false arrests should obviously be minimized), but it’s not reasonable to expect police to get this right absolutely 100% of the time. If someone is a fugitive then they are very unlikely to reveal any information that identifies them with certainty.
It's not reasonable to be 100% correct, no. But given current police conduct in the US I trust them less than ever to try and resolve wrongdoings when it comes up. It's not even "oops" level anymore.
It's always been wrong and still is wrong, but the reasons changed over the years. Americans have traditionally been adverse to mass surveillance and I don't think that changes much today. The government just does it in sneaker ways nowadays.
The large Asda near me does this, too.
Not happy about it but not sure what can be done to stop it.
Probably needs either Scottish Parliament or Westminster to enact a privacy law and I can’t see that happening.
Perhaps it’s already covered under the European convention on human rights, but I don’t know if that still applies.
That's the one the Tories tried to tear down as a "villain's charter" isn't it? And Labour are very keen to show they're "tough on crime". So I guess, not.
I think Asda’s is so bad and intrusive that I’ve long since stopped shopping there. Also the worst of supermarkets on the quality front. Even Lidl is better.
Whoever designed the Waitrose self-checkout was a master in the art of annoying one's customers. Not only there's a camera pointed at you, the machine will urge you to bag an item "or press finish and pay" as soon as you take a few extra seconds e.g. to solve a Backpack Problem with a can of sardines and a packet of pasta etc. And they're supposed to be the up-market chain?
Is that Albert Heijn? They have nice freshly squeezed orange juice and pindakaas. I remember automated checkouts when I was in Amsterdam but I also seem to remember they were out of order. Small blessings, I guess?
That's the second reason I avoid self-checkouts whenever possible, honestly. The odds of me being hassled because of some sort of surveillance messup or because I did something wrong at the checkout are substantially lower if an employee is the one ringing up my purchases.
The Hikvision facial recognition camera in my previous condo sometimes recognized me as an Indian man, and sometimes it scrolled through tons of faces and unlocked the door. I am from northern Europe btw. Sometimes it also had difficulty recognizing me when my hair grew longer.
Can happen without technology too, of course. I was nearly thrown out of a pub before I opened my mouth and the staff realised I wasn't the person who caused trouble there the week before.
The UK has been trying for decades to become the surveillance society, hasn't it?
I remember being taken aback by the amount of street CCTV cameras back in the early '00s. Coming from Canada for a visit that feeling of being observed nearly constantly was really uncomfortable and bizarre. For Brits it looked like a norm (or they didn't show it). Also the parallels with 1984 were uncanny, especially given that Orwell was English.
It was an official campaign but it’s worth noting that the satirical element of it is there, deliberately, because we are way, way funnier as a nation.
Almost nobody worries about these transport safety cameras because we don’t fear or tolerate overpolicing in the same way.
Of course there should be safety cameras on public transport!
And if a US tourist was on a night bus in London they too would be happy there were cameras. A nation of drivers has a very different calibration, I suspect.
I gotta say that I didn't feel very safe on night buses in London, despite the cameras. Besides Brussels, London is the only other city in which I've occasionally felt like I was in danger. It's still a fun city, to be clear, and it probably helps that it isn't a 24/7 city so that you don't end up in weird situations at night too much.
In the end the CCTV doesn't actually prevent anything from happening ...
> In the end the CCTV doesn't actually prevent anything from happening ...
The question of whether it prevents things from happening is a question of statistics.
I suspect the data doesn't support your claim, and that certain categories of crime have indeed been deterred. But neither of us can know without that statistical analysis.
This is a propaganda piece by the state-funded BBC. Notice that the focus of the article is whether the technology is accurate enough, not whether they should be doing it at all in the first place. It's an Overton nudge, a softball position that's easy to take-- because of course the tech will get better.
Spot on. It's amazing how much the BBC is riding on its reputation and how many people are ignorant or just turn a blind eye to the fact it's Tory crony central at the top, and has been for years
John Varley in the science fiction novel The Golden Globe envisioned a future where there are two separate AIs: one that is solely designed to help people, that knows everything, and a separate AI designed for law enforcement that is constrained to a limited set of inputs. I don't know if that's practical, or palatable, but it was an interesting thought experiment, although he doesn't dig into it too deeply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Globe
This idea that the UK is a surveillance society that is meaningfully different to other western societies is somewhat misplaced, based on motivated misreadings of a US article about surveillance in King’s Lynn in the 90s.
The vast, vast majority of CCTV systems in the UK, that are part of this “culture”, are just store and private CCTV systems that police can get access to with a warrant, by going door to door. The same as in almost all western countries.
There’s almost no police CCTV network, and there’s no reality to the fantasy element of police being able to see you wherever you go in the UK in real time (with the exception of a few crowded high crime areas where tourists get robbed, ironically, and a few high violence and terrorism risk areas, public transport facilities and live road traffic cameras).
There are some council-owned networks in high crime areas which are pretty contentious, and then there are these police facial recognition vans which are clearly offensive bullshit overreach.
In particular a lot of visitors misunderstand the prevalence of cameras pointed at our roads, which are not live feed cameras at all but speed-triggered safety cameras.
Basically it’s important to understand that the vast majority of cameras in the UK are people and businesses legally protecting their own shit, just like in the USA.
One key cultural difference is ANPR. In America the general perception is that privacy includes where you go in your car, because you treat it as a portable living room. There’s never been that presumption here. ANPR systems probably can track cars in metropolitan areas and on some motorways, but live traffic cameras are unusual in most of the country.
There is definitely a slightly less self-centred lean to the balance of individual rights compared to community safety compared to North America. But this is also part of why we don’t have to put up with anywhere near the same risk of violence or crime, even in areas that are significantly more densely populated.
We also have pretty good laws governing this stuff.
In short, Hot Fuzz ain’t real, and I think North Americans like to project this idea of a surveillance culture onto the UK without considering that they are likely under the exact same sorts of surveillance in the same sorts of places, without as many of the same legal protections.
(And with plainly discriminatory surveillance systems like Shotspotter to boot)
Do you think retailers in the USA and Canada are not using the systems described in the article? Because you would be wrong if you do.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadI'm not sure about the computer program though. It telling a third person (i.e. the person from the store) would be libel, but since it is the result of a calculation, I'm not sure if it's considered libel.
Technically, it’s probably saying “there’s an 80% chance this person matches a thief” and the store is interpreting that as “ban them.”
I don’t know UK slander laws, but in the US, it has to be incorrect to be slander. So this probably wouldn’t pass the test.
In the UK it would be for the defendant (I.e. security guard/store) to prove that the claim was actually true. So in this case they would be stuffed.
The person should definitely contact a solicitor.
"Within less than a minute, I'm approached by a store worker who comes up to me and says, 'You're a thief, you need to leave the store'."
Knowing that one in 40 people so flagged aren't guilty of a crime means they are deliberately imposing upon those so flagged. The choice to use a faulty tech isn't itself a mistake its a choice. EG if you exposed a million people to this tech daily you would falsely arrest 11,000 people.
In any case, the article is not about an arrest. Making someone leave is not an arrest, it's the opposite (an arrest is detaining someone).
But, hey: Progress.
1. If any one ensnare another, putting a ban upon him, but he can not prove it, then he that ensnared him shall be put to death.
2. If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.
3. If any one bring an accusation of any crime before the elders, and does not prove what he has charged, he shall, if it be a capital offense charged, be put to death.
A 97.5% accuracy rate seems… really really high!
Obviously facial recognition shouldn’t be the only bit of evidence. But that’s remarkably accurate.
Another way to look at it is for the worst case person what is their false positive rate? It's going to be 100%: Joe Blow, who did nothing wrong to no one, will go from place to place getting kicked out for the rest of his (/the system's) life. The failures aren't random (or at least not entirely)-- some people will get a heap of error in their lap.
So while getting punted 1:10000 times you go somewhere unfairly isn't too bad, getting always punted is awful. The unequal distribution of errors creates bad incentives: the system is almost risk-less for those of us who aren't the victims of false hits, so why should we demand improving or banning it?
eg: 33,000 people walk past cameras but only two are flagged as matching a person of interest on the watch list.
One of those is a mistake, the other was correctly identified.
From the Police PoV that's one mistake in 33,000 .. but whose to say the remaining 32,998 people were correctly identified?
Perhaps they were all criminals that weren't identified, perhaps they were all not criminals but not correctly matched.
Perhaps 2,000 were criminals and on the watch list but not identified.
The game is rigged at the level of who gets to stand for election, particularly in safe-seat districts that get decided in the primary. Very few people are able to get elected without help from their local political machine getting out the vote - enough to provide plausible deniability, but not enough to create an effective opposition.
Remember the monopsony of Sheldon Silver? He used his position to control which politicians would receive contributions for their campaigns, creating a network of people dependent on him for political survival. It's that kind of power broking that's the problem. The clear and present danger of entrenched power is why politicians must not be allowed a shred of privacy.
He is talking about the ruling class with power over all of us, so they should have more oversight than any normal person.
Like there is no need to rob a store if the clerk cant open the vault.
we can limit it to those where the amount of individual stealing is relevant. not the long tail but the fat creamers.
How did they know she shoplifted in the first place?
Does the tech also identify shop lifting, or do they just search a database of people convicted of shoplifting (in which case they could have just checked this person's ID and realized it was mistaken identity).
Is being caught shoplifting a credible reason to deny someone access to basic goods indefinitely? What if all supermarkets in a town use the same facial rec service?
She didn't.
Even putting a human being in the loop is trouble prone because people aren't on average good enough at this.
It would be more useful to require a free membership to shop there and validate allowed users via bluetooth and ban users devices and phone numbers.
If random store employees start walking up to people and asking them to show ID, is that an acceptable state for society?
But note that this is the UK. Different issues from the States (where this wouldn't ever pass. We have weak social security specifically becsuse citizens rejected a national ID).
Or just implant RFID into every citizen at birth. It's for your safety, after all - if you get lost or abducted, that's how they'll find you.
It's very important to ponder what the PRC is pioneering today because we're about three years behind doing exactly the same things, and for the same reasons. It's only going to be a brief time before things we're horrified about, and vitriolically condemn totalitarian states for, are things we're going to fully normalize within our own culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=CpLdL8ONEm4
HN today...
If we surveil people, it's because we're just keeping the public safe.
By "here" do you mean in the UK?
Somehow the UK is consistently the first non-China nation where this authoritarian surveillance crap takes hold.
Other countries make pushes towards it, but UK appears to be consistently leading.
For the government and police, it's a cheap option to deal with the problem.
The abuse is a very real problem, I know a few who work in shops, all of whom have been verbally abused and physically threatened at various times. One of them was not long ago punched in the face in front of witnesses. Tesco, ever caring, had her working the next day, just a few hours later (incident happened on late shift, next shift was early morning, "are you sure you can't come in?, it'll be hard to find someone to cover") and seemed to put as more effort into investigating what she might have done wrong as they put into helping the police gather evidence to investigate the abusive individual, so she was glad of the CCTV. She got out off Tesco as quick as she could. She has had notification from the police that the individual involved is being prosecuted, but for a number of other offences also so it is unlikely she'll need to testify or otherwise be involved further.
The staff want the CCTV because they don't trust the managers and higher to look after their interests otherwise.
Do we do that? Do we want to do that?
Given current controversies around Her, I'm sure some techie will see Minority Report and view it as a dream to pursue rather than a cautionary tale.
Machines are going to come up with false positives, but so will human beings who are asked to be on the lookout for some kid of some redacted race in a hoody.
That said, yes, it would be nice if there was a way for my car to automatically scan car plates around, linked to my phone so that when an amber alert comes in and I explicitly choose to enable the scanner at that point, it would report matches for that particular number automatically.
But we all know that's never going to happen. Well, the automatic plate scanners in every car will probably happen eventually - it's too easy technologically for someone to not come up with a bright idea to mandate them "for safety". But they will be enabled and effectively controlled by law enforcement 24/7.
After talking to them and requesting the store manager, it turns out they had a photo of a shoplifter that looked very similar to me. Eventually we were let back in the store and it was all OK.
So, it’s not an entirely new problem? Although with facial recognition I guess there is less recourse; a manager is not as likely to believe they got it wrong if their computer tells them otherwise.
I don't think this status quo should be empowered further by error prone tech
Should shoplifting once mean that a person is banned from all stores that use this service for life?
Also: I assume that this service wouldn't just impact shoplifters, but anyone that a store saw fit to ban for any reason. What about people who experience mental health crises? I had a friend who had psychotic breaks while her issues were still undiagnosed and untreated
I know that this ultimately depends on the store's own policies, the facial recognition tech just provides information. but frankly I don't want to live in a world where making such a minor mistake in your youth could basically ruin your life
I mean, it depends, right? Barred from buying any groceries for stealing a candy bar is obviously wrong… but if you walk out the door with a five-figure watch you didn’t pay for, I’m happy for you to be banned from Rolex shops for life, yeah.
1. Okay well maybe the technology was wrong.
2. Or maybe the shoplifter is lying?
3. Surely "my word against yours" in the case of "human vs. computer" is solved by believing the human?
4. Isn't the whole point of this technology to catch humans who lie?
5. Then surely, if it's a shoplifter, there is video footage and that will clear up the issue.
6. But what if there isn't footage. What if it's just an AI that's detected someone as a shoplifter based on their face?
7. The technology for this is really mature, now I'm inclined to believe the computer.
8. But what about the guy? (Yay, gender assumption based on the word "shoplifter")
9. Well, in order to believe him I would want to understand why the AI was wrong.
10. Oh, the whole thing with AI in many contexts is that YOU CAN'T KNOW THIS.
11. This is why people care about understanding how AI makes decisions and have serious reactions to technology that just "magics" a decision out of thin air, even when it's the right one this time.
12. But what about the guy?
Well, I've just newly understood some things about the social impacts of pervasive AI. Time to read the article.
Given the UK population of 67 million, that’s about 2000 false matches.
$100 says they've taken the numerator of 'people we detained where it turned out we dun goofed' over the denominator of total people scanned.
The (psychologically) correct way to think of this is as a colleague making a claim and telling you how certain they are. But this tech is not sold as a colleague, it's sold as a machine that is better than humans. It's not a perfect super cop but that's how it is marketed and why people buy it.
Or what about this? A man covered his face when walking past one of these vans in a public street. He protested and was then fined £90 for swearing (swearing is not illegal but The Pubic Order Act is another law that is often abused by police but that's tangential)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/facial-recogniti...
Of course, all this assume US police have consequences for breaking the rules. So this is unfortunately moot.
Simply going out looking for people of interest in east London is perfectly fine, we call it "police work" and have done it for bloody ages.
Maybe instead we could issue officers with a deck of cards with 52 faces on them and they can use that as a comparison point? Seems pretty inefficient to me but im only a tax paying pleb what would i know.
Police surveillance should be inefficient. People do not exist to be arbitrarily inspected at scale; it should be an expensive, manual process and you should be forced to choose carefully whom you target, by necessity keeping that list small and limited to those for whom you can articulate cause.
If you're taking money from the public and spending it you should be legally bound to use it in the most efficient and effective way possible.
Snark aside, surveys are quite literally the least efficient means of gathering a sample. Scanning random people on the street when a known criminal is likely to lay low and stay inside. I can't imagine expensive surveillance cameras is cheaper than paying an investigator to track down a suspect.
Let's ignore the privacy implications as not all countries have an expectation of privacy outside windowless closed private spaces. How is this meaningfully different from a general stop and frisk policy? Sure, this adds a non-physical filter before the physical police interaction but it's still a widespread warrantless search. How does this work with the presumption of innocence?
If there was some guarantee all that data wasn't going into some government sanctioned back end, we can start to compare it to police out on the street.
>However, fundamentally, being arrested for looking like someone else is not a new phenomenon.
Was always wrong and still is wrong.
But if you want a modern difference: companies these days (even minimum wage) are really strict about arrests. Even a false arrest can cause complications in a background check, so there is more potential (albeit indirect) slanderous effects from mistaking people nowadays.
I don’t understand this comment. The police sometimes have to arrest people based on descriptions and other fallible data points. It’s unfortunate when the wrong person is arrested (and false arrests should obviously be minimized), but it’s not reasonable to expect police to get this right absolutely 100% of the time. If someone is a fugitive then they are very unlikely to reveal any information that identifies them with certainty.
Also, police in the US use the same technology: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_informa...
It's always been wrong and still is wrong, but the reasons changed over the years. Americans have traditionally been adverse to mass surveillance and I don't think that changes much today. The government just does it in sneaker ways nowadays.
John Lewis,
Co-op,
Tesco,
Sainsbury's,
Waitrose,
Next,
Marks & Spencer,
Boots
Primark
John Lewis,
Co-op,
Tesco,
Sainsbury's,
Waitrose,
Next,
Marks & Spencer,
Boots
Primark
I dislike shoplifting and petty crime but I also dislike this form of cheap, petty intimidation.
I don’t want to live in this dystopia.
Perhaps it’s already covered under the European convention on human rights, but I don’t know if that still applies.
(Though people told me that was exceptional and I was just unlucky)
I remember being taken aback by the amount of street CCTV cameras back in the early '00s. Coming from Canada for a visit that feeling of being observed nearly constantly was really uncomfortable and bizarre. For Brits it looked like a norm (or they didn't show it). Also the parallels with 1984 were uncanny, especially given that Orwell was English.
http://soerenkern.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/uk-met1...
I'm really glad the EU just completely banned predictive policing.
Almost nobody worries about these transport safety cameras because we don’t fear or tolerate overpolicing in the same way.
Of course there should be safety cameras on public transport!
And if a US tourist was on a night bus in London they too would be happy there were cameras. A nation of drivers has a very different calibration, I suspect.
In the end the CCTV doesn't actually prevent anything from happening ...
The question of whether it prevents things from happening is a question of statistics.
I suspect the data doesn't support your claim, and that certain categories of crime have indeed been deterred. But neither of us can know without that statistical analysis.
Yes, the tory government have been trying to stack the governance of the BBC with their own people, but it doesn’t always go the way they expect.
The vast, vast majority of CCTV systems in the UK, that are part of this “culture”, are just store and private CCTV systems that police can get access to with a warrant, by going door to door. The same as in almost all western countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
There’s almost no police CCTV network, and there’s no reality to the fantasy element of police being able to see you wherever you go in the UK in real time (with the exception of a few crowded high crime areas where tourists get robbed, ironically, and a few high violence and terrorism risk areas, public transport facilities and live road traffic cameras).
There are some council-owned networks in high crime areas which are pretty contentious, and then there are these police facial recognition vans which are clearly offensive bullshit overreach.
In particular a lot of visitors misunderstand the prevalence of cameras pointed at our roads, which are not live feed cameras at all but speed-triggered safety cameras.
Basically it’s important to understand that the vast majority of cameras in the UK are people and businesses legally protecting their own shit, just like in the USA.
One key cultural difference is ANPR. In America the general perception is that privacy includes where you go in your car, because you treat it as a portable living room. There’s never been that presumption here. ANPR systems probably can track cars in metropolitan areas and on some motorways, but live traffic cameras are unusual in most of the country.
There is definitely a slightly less self-centred lean to the balance of individual rights compared to community safety compared to North America. But this is also part of why we don’t have to put up with anywhere near the same risk of violence or crime, even in areas that are significantly more densely populated.
We also have pretty good laws governing this stuff.
In short, Hot Fuzz ain’t real, and I think North Americans like to project this idea of a surveillance culture onto the UK without considering that they are likely under the exact same sorts of surveillance in the same sorts of places, without as many of the same legal protections.
(And with plainly discriminatory surveillance systems like Shotspotter to boot)
Do you think retailers in the USA and Canada are not using the systems described in the article? Because you would be wrong if you do.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12592563/wal...
Australia wants that title!
Bunnings here also uses (used?) facial recognition technology.
Also concert venues and sporting events.
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/bunnings-denies-reintrod...
I'd be willing to bet that supermarkets are next, if they aren't already.