London cops urged to scrap use of 'biased' facial recognition at Notting Hill Carnival

London's Metropolitan Police have been urged to back down on plans to once again use facial recognition software at next weekend's Notting Hill Carnival. Privacy groups including Big Brother Watch, Liberty and Privacy International have written to police commissioner Cressida Dick (PDF) calling for a U-turn on the use of the …

[Anonymous Coward]

They could always test it at the proms?

[TheVogon]

"say that there is an "unacceptable" risk that the use of the tech could lead to discriminatory policing at the event."

So "discriminating" against people because they are not supposed to be there or are wanted by the police is now a problem?!

"matching accuracies are lower on certain cohorts of people: women, black people, and those aged 18-30."

Ah, so presumably they are worried about "discrimination" against older white men?!

[phuzz]

I was thinking the Conservative Party conference would be a good place for a trial, especially if they wanted to see if they were getting any false-negatives.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it succeeds in picking out Theresa May and Amber Rudd as criminals then e can call the trial a success.

As an aside I don't think you can really group "African Caribbean" together. With family coming from the Caribbean and African friends I can't say that it's all the same culture even if there are common roots from hundreds of years ago. In fact you can't really lump the Caribbean together either, a Haitian is quite different to a Cuban and so on.... Of course the same applies to Africa, Morocco has quite a different culture to the Congo....

In the same vain a white middle class person from Glasgow is culturally different to a white middle class person from Sofia.....

Sorry to go on.

[TheVogon]

"As an aside I don't think you can really group "African Caribbean" together."

I think it's not unreasonable for image recognition purposes....

[Juillen 1]

Absolutely.. And nobody would bat an eyelid. There again, I suspect there aren't many people banned from The Proms.

[Captain DaFt]

The letter also points to reports of inherent biases in the system – research has previously shown that matching accuracies are lower on certain cohorts of people: women, black people, and those aged 18-30.

The response?

"What? Those are the types that must be guilty of something!"

[Anonymous Coward]

So it only works on old white men then?

[Captain DaFt]

So it only works on old white men then?

It works better on white males above 30. Why? Look who taught it... Unintentional bias at play.

Therefore it means more false positives against women, black people, and those aged 18-30, as well as false negatives.

Lower accuracy means perps missed, innocent people targeted.

(That's a bad thing)

[SundogUK]

So now they're trying to improve it's 'teaching' against non-white/non-males and you think this is a bad thing?

[A Nonny Moose]

"So now they're trying to improve it's 'teaching' against non-white/non-males and you think this is a bad thing?"

Yes, when they're "teaching" it against a non-consenting public with the consequence of the removal of liberty, I would say that that is a Bad Thing™. If they really want to teach it, get some volunteers, don't use the general public as your guinea pigs.

[Haku]

"These images will be retained for the purposes of analysis of this project only and will not be speculatively searched or disseminated for any purpose."

*sniff* *sniff*

Eww, something smells.

*checks under shoes*

Nope, not there, the smell must be coming from that statement.

[albaleo]

*sniff* *sniff*

Sorry, but your comment reminded me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM8vOcxatsI

[smudge]

Give the system a real test

Start practising your dazzle camouflage face painting!

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

It's all fun and games . . .

. . . until they hook it up to the SCORPION STARE network and set it for automated activation.

[Martin-73]

Re: It's all fun and games . . .

Right, that's it.... the wards have broken down again and the tentacled horror from bey....oh, that's the prime minister

[Winkypop]

Crack out the gimp masks!

Ready -->

[Anonymous Coward]

Theresa May / Amber Rudd used Homeless Charity data to locate and deport.

"These images will be retained for the purposes of analysis of this project only and will not be speculatively searched or disseminated for any purpose."

Except this isn't what happens in reality:

Full article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/19/home-office-secret-emails-data-homeless-eu-nationals

An interesting 'side article' in the Guardian/Observer sheds more light on this. The Home Office secretly acquired sensitive data, showing the nationality of people sleeping rough on the streets, in order to remove them from Britain, the Observer can reveal. Also, "purposes of analysis of this project only", can mean pretty much anything and everything.

A chain of emails sent by senior Home Office immigration officials show how they used information that was designed to protect rough sleepers to target vulnerable individuals for deportation. The internal correspondence shows the Home Office repeatedly requesting and finally gaining access to a map created by the Greater London Authority (GLA) that identified and categorised rough sleepers by nationality.

The secret arrangement meant frontline outreach workers tasked with helping the homeless by collating data for the GLA were inadvertently helping the Home Office to remove people who were from the EU or central eastern Europe. In May 2016, the Home Office introduced guidance enabling immigration enforcement teams to deport EU nationals, purely on the grounds that they were sleeping rough.