UK Police Plan To Deploy 'Staggeringly Inaccurate' Facial Recognition in London (independent.co.uk) 104
An anonymous reader quotes the Independent:
Millions of people face the prospect of being scanned by police facial recognition technology that has sparked human rights concerns. The controversial software, which officers use to identify suspects, has been found to be "staggeringly inaccurate", while campaigners have branded its use a violation of privacy. But Britain's largest police force is set to expand a trial across six locations in London over the coming months.
Police leaders claimed officers make the decision to act on potential matches with police records and images that do not spark an alert are immediately deleted. But last month The Independent revealed the Metropolitan Police's software was returning "false positives" -- images of people who were not on a police database -- in 98 percent of alerts... Detective Superintendent Bernie Galopin, the lead on facial recognition for London's Metropolitan Police, said the operation was targeting wanted suspects to help reduce violent crime and make the area safer. "It allows us to deal with persons that are wanted by police where traditional methods may have failed," he told The Independent, after statistics showed police were failing to solve 63 per cent of knife crimes committed against under-25s....
Det Supt Galopin said the Met was assessing how effective facial recognition was at tackling different challenges in British policing, which is currently being stretched by budget cuts, falling officer numbers, rising demand and the terror threat.
A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
But a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
Police leaders claimed officers make the decision to act on potential matches with police records and images that do not spark an alert are immediately deleted. But last month The Independent revealed the Metropolitan Police's software was returning "false positives" -- images of people who were not on a police database -- in 98 percent of alerts... Detective Superintendent Bernie Galopin, the lead on facial recognition for London's Metropolitan Police, said the operation was targeting wanted suspects to help reduce violent crime and make the area safer. "It allows us to deal with persons that are wanted by police where traditional methods may have failed," he told The Independent, after statistics showed police were failing to solve 63 per cent of knife crimes committed against under-25s....
Det Supt Galopin said the Met was assessing how effective facial recognition was at tackling different challenges in British policing, which is currently being stretched by budget cuts, falling officer numbers, rising demand and the terror threat.
A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
But a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
How they can find people who post on Twitter! (Score:1)
Now they can go after more efficiently anyone who says something unapproved on Twitter!
(e.g. someone reporting on pedophile gangs)
yay technology. UK is screwed.
False positives (Score:1)
Even antivirus testers deduce marks for false positives.
For example in the latest AV Comparatives test Symantec got dropped a grade for having 90 false positives out of 20,000.
That's 0.45%
Whatever happened Blackstone's "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
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I thought Blackstone was more like "Shoot everyone and worry about it later - if we get caught."
Re: False positives (Score:1)
You're thinking of Blackwater.
Re:False positives (Score:5, Informative)
Whatever happened Blackstone's "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
That is theory. In practice, we have always been willing to tolerate false positives in our justice system. When the Innocence Project first started using DNA evidence to reinvestigate old cases, they found about 10% of convicts couldn't possibly have committed the crimes. Many of them were convicted solely on the basis of coerced confessions. 10% is the floor on the false positive rate. The real percentage of innocents in prison is likely even higher.
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A false positive in BOLO is tolerable a false positive in arrest is not. At the time of arrest some human needs to have verified the match.
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His phraseology was incorrect, but his explicit intended meaning was probably " In practice, our governments have always been willing to tolerate false positives in our justice system, and most people were willing to accept this."
It's an unfortunate fact of human nature that most people are usually willing to accept accusation by an authority as the equivalent of guilt...unless they feel personally involved.
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In the US it's profitable to place people in prison - they're defacto indentured servants and need not be treated with basic dignity. Prisons also get a cut of the profit for providing a service to the government, and many prisons are private businesses. Due to that conflict of interest the standard for placing someone in prison will naturally decay to maximize profits.
The standard will move from "Innocent until proven guilty" to "Guilty until proven innocent" to simply "Guilty". The only way anyone will be
National look-alike day (Score:2)
Seems like it could become a thing for there to be contests to trigger a false positive.
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There's two problems with that:
1) Police all over the world have a record of making their job easier by taking the most convenient suspect and getting them convicted. They seem to generally prefer to have honest evidence, but they sure don't require it.
2) The system as reported isn't even good enough for your idealized use case. I'm assuming that it's the same system that was reported a couple of days ago where a representative of the company that sells it was saying it wasn't good enough for this use cas
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There's two problems with that:
1) Police all over the world have a record of making their job easier by taking the most convenient suspect and getting them convicted. They seem to generally prefer to have honest evidence, but they sure don't require it.
Britain is a civilised western democracy, and its police come under intense scrutiny given its abysmal historical record in Northern Ireland. They don't want to fuck things up
2) The system as reported isn't even good enough for your idealized use case. I'm assuming that it's the same system that was reported a couple of days ago where a representative of the company that sells it was saying it wasn't good enough for this use case.
The reporting is rubbish. It equates the percentage of false positives out of of all reported positives with the false positive rate, which is absolute nonsense. All the reports I've seen say it has a false positive rate of 98%, whereas the true fale posititive rate, from what numbers I have been able to find, is under 1.5%
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Britain is a civilised western democracy, and its police come under intense scrutiny given its abysmal historical record in Northern Ireland. They don't want to fuck things up
They sure are. They have nothing to learn from US law enforcement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
So, pollute the data (Score:2)
If enough people start wearing anti-surveillance clothing:
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
it just might reduce the success rate below "justifiable cost"
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Voice prints, tax records, permits, photo ID all fill in the normal faces.
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Yes, but this is talking specifically about *facial recognition*.
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Re: So, pollute the data (Score:2)
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I bought a large kitchen knive recently (Canada), it was wrapped up pretty good in a clamshell and needed another knive to open the package.
The UK has had years of results (Score:3)
All driver and passenger face in and out of a city in real time. Every license plate. Thats was with early 1990's tech.
Talking collected on every generation of "encrypted" cell phone. Voice prints, wifi. It all got collected on. Faces linked to all passports, all photo ID in use in real time.
Smile for every flight into/out of the UK, all the ferry routes. Truck stops. Ports. Rail. Webcam use. All internet use. That decade of international VoIP calls
Voice print to face, face to voice print.
The part that is so difficult is the need for parallel construction.
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Who edited "Brave New World" for you? He must have been very good - and extremely tired.
Minority Report was right... (Score:5, Insightful)
... one again.
How come that we in the West, who for half a century fought dictatorships with population surveillance and control, now willingly and without resistance walk into an unprecedented surveillance society?
The reasons cited ("budget cuts, falling officer numbers, rising demand and the terror threat") are not exactly new. Why is public face recognition, fingerprint recording and opening and reading mail acceptable nowadays?
Was the Ted Kazinsky correct in his prediction of the control society, that our modern society requires ultimate control of its citizens to function in an (post-)industrial setting and that our freedoms therefore must be taken away from us?
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It's because they had got very good at keeping it quiet. Most people are not even aware of it. It's not making major headlines.
Most people are shocked to learn that the police regularly photograph their faces as they drive around. It's been happening for years and almost no-one has noticed.
They are sneaky buggers, and privacy doesn't seem to sell newspapers so shit like this happens.
Because the children are in the control (Score:4, Insightful)
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willingly and without resistance walk into an unprecedented surveillance society?
Because in the UK you get a visit from the coppers if you criticise them or publicly talk about topics they'd prefer you not. If they feel like it they can issue a decree that prohibits news outlets from reporting on your arrest. And to top it off they cherry-pick a prison where the inmates are likely going to kill you.
It's a mixture of keeping things under wraps and intimidation.
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... one again.
How come that we in the West, who for half a century fought dictatorships with population surveillance and control, now willingly and without resistance walk into an unprecedented surveillance society?
Because the west you know never existed... No nation or culture were ever heros, they were just the ones who won the wars. AKA if the nazi's had won WW2 and how would world history look? AKA the victors write history.
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Was the Ted Kazinsky correct in his prediction of the control society, that our modern society requires ultimate control of its citizens to function in an (post-)industrial setting and that our freedoms therefore must be taken away from us?
All rich capitalist from all capitalist states fear the political awakening of the masses, aka access to real information regarding how badly they are getting screwed.
Zbigniew Brezinksi former national security advisor of the United states, just called all the citizens who are not in the upper 1-5% of their societies "A menace".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Which is really impressive considering he died over a year ago
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Which is really impressive considering he died over a year ago
It was from before he died but you can still see they are aware of the impacts of technology and how that's stimulating the free flow of information - aka the rulers now don't control what you get to see and here anymore and that has them worried.
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... one again.
How come that we in the West, who for half a century fought dictatorships with population surveillance and control, now willingly and without resistance walk into an unprecedented surveillance society?
We do?
The reasons cited ("budget cuts, falling officer numbers, rising demand and the terror threat") are not exactly new. Why is public face recognition, fingerprint recording and opening and reading mail acceptable nowadays?
Face recognition: the technology exist now. There exist good reasons for using it. It can be argued to reduce the privacy violation in general while improving tracking of known criminals and associates of criminals.
Fingerprinting and reading mail... Are you serious? If anything there are more protections in place now that for instance in the 70's. The difference is that technology can help catch people already searched for.
Was the Ted Kazinsky correct in his prediction of the control society, that our modern society requires ultimate control of its citizens to function in an (post-)industrial setting and that our freedoms therefore must be taken away from us?
No. He is a highly intelligent person with personality and behavior disorders.
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It's funny how we have popular movies, TV shows, books, etc. and many people still care not.
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We just watched a show on AI that claimed Israeli Defense Forces and Homeland Security were using a product that predicts the likelihood of someone being suspicious. This isn't really face recognition, from say a database, but more of a recognition of how people appear when they're likely to be up to something. Think of it as, um, profiling.
They also mentioned a study that could predict if someone was gay with ~80% reliability for males, and ~75% for females, saying that the AI learned from using photos o
The Astrology Squad (Score:2)
Several members of the astrology squad died in mysterious circumstances and the rest quit.
You know how it is in big bureaucracies - they had to use the budget for something.
Liberalism is a mental disorder. (Score:1)
RIP GB
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That whole rant reads like it came from some Mid-Western US basement somewhere, but he is correct about the CCTV quality.
He is drawing the wrong conclusion of course. If he had ever been to London he would know that no-one worries about CCTV because they all know how shit it is.
It could work if we let it. (Score:2)
I have not worked on face recognition, but I have worked on text recognition, which has some of the same problems. You have several recognition algorithms that work. You can make some super-algorithm by polling all of the better ones. Oddly, the performance of the super-algorithm is measurably worse if you take away the worst one out of ten. It turns out that diversity is an important part of recognition. Sometimes the errors are trivial - I heard from someone who's lab had a face location system that had
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The real work was done to get detail from a side on image, a face from above, below. Moving from a 2d image in good light in a lab setting to what a modern CCTV can get.
Gov and mil funded that and more side on, poor lighting is not the problem it used to be.
Need a database? Use the entire image collection in police records.
Buy the right software from the best contractors and all the difficult face math has been
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There was a guy in our MSc class who did facial recognition. It works on a roughly trapezoidal shape around the eyes nose and mouth. Simplest systems just create a number based on the ratio of the eye pupil distance to the mouth/nose length. Other systems use more measurements. like corners of eyebrows, eyes, mouth and other things. But whatever system they have, it's usually 95% accuracy, which is good for 95 out of 100 people, but totally sucks for the other 5 who are detained for no reason.
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Highly doubtful that 5% of the folks are being detained.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I believe your evaluation is spot on.
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Good old UK (Score:2)
The technology was vital (Score:2)
Just like dope sniffing dogs and broken tail lights.
False positives are irrelevant (Score:2)
The system isn't judge jury and executioner. The system is just trying to reduce the search space for good old fashioned policing. False positives don't mean that it will only identify 2% of cases, it means from the cases its identified 2% are correct.
If you're looking at a million people, and you're looking for 1 person, having a search space of 49 to go through is an incredible win for policing. Now tracking implications on the other hand are quite severe, but then that is actually helped for privacy advo
"False positive" means ... (Score:2)
... an officer looks at the match and dismisses it.
Where exactly is the harm in that?
Sure one might discuss if CCTVs everywhere and facial recognition are desirable, but the fraction of "false positives" is no valid argument in that discussion, since all positives are checked a second time by a human. The automated system serves as a first filter, meaning less comparisons by humans are necessary so the whole system becomes more efficient. A more interesting number are false negatives, but about those we kno
Different ways to spin it (Score:2)
Have you noticed how easy it is to bias the reader just by the order you say things in? Take this quote from the summary.
A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
But a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
Now let's reverse the two paragraphs and move the word "but", which tells us the second quote rebuts the first one.
A Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards.
But a policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
Funny how that leaves you thinking something totally different. Now let's try to write it in a more evenhanded way that doesn't tell the reader who is right.
Commenters disagreed on the legality and privacy implications of the technology. A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
On the other hand, a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
Just one problem ... (Score:2)
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Especially violent crimes like murder and armed robbery have been going down since the mid 90s.
Just checked that assertion. It is not true. What actually happened is it skyrocketed after 1995, peaked, then began to fall. Reaching levels similar to 1995 levels around the 2010 time frame.
You could easily find that out by using Google and taking a look at the statistics
Easy for you to say, but per my brief, which denotes easy, search a vast majority of the crime statistics data seemingly does not exist after 2010ish time frame.
Overall I'm not implying the poster you are replying to is correct and you are incorrect, I just don't see any solid evidence your assertions are correct.
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