UK's Surveillance Commissioner warns of 'ethically fraught' facial recognition tech concerns Facial recognition technology (FRT) may need to be regulated in much the same way as some ethically sensitive medical techniques to ensure there are sufficient safeguards in place to protect people's privacy and freedoms. That’s according to Professor Fraser Sampson, the UK Government’s Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC), …
Given that any (very dubious) benefits are far outweighed by problems of false positives* and massive privacy infringement.
*Ignoring false negatives, but obviously this is an issue of why biometric systems are poor as not great if your alleged terrorist is not IDed.
Given what happened to a Brazilian electrician, I'm not keen on false positives given the over the top responses we often see in the UK
I'm the one not carrying a table leg, just to be on the safe side.
But you have to consider the Bayesian probabilities.
If you are in the city of london and wearing an expensive suit then P(A) the probability that you are a-priori a crook/tax-cheat/imbiber of the devil's nose candy , is 1.0
There is really no need for the police to investigate further.
tiggity: "I'm the one not carrying a table leg, just to be on the safe side."
I don't think any AI system was actually used when Harry Stanley* was wrongly identified as carrying a shotgun (wrapped in a plastic bag) in a pub. In that instance as far as I recall. the police failed to check with the pub if anyone else reckoned he was carrying a firearm, the telephone call 'tip-off' was anonymous and the armed police officers who challenged him seem to have been convinced he was armed, rather than trying to ascertain what he was carrying. In my view (and I wasn't on the jury, so didn't see all the evidence) his killing was a serious failure of police procedure (not checking the tip off) and training (not considering that he might not be carrying a firearm).
The problem was that in the inquest, all of the interest was on whether the police officers who shot him were guilty of 'unlawful killing', instead of questioning their training and the police procedures that night. Had I been on the jury I would have tried to insist that the training fo the officers and the failure to check with the pub were considered in the verdict.
If you were accosted in the dark in a street by armed men who shouted at you to "put the gun down!" what would you do?
*
https://hackneyhistory.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/film-the-strange-death-of-harry-stanley/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Harry_Stanley
Every time that situation occurs the system always chases the individuals directly involved but never investigate why the police were trained in an environment that told them that it was their job to do. It's the standard "punish the workers, never the bosses" world.
No AI involved, massive human error in threat id (bit of wood <> gun) and response, just an example of fatal over-reaction that can occur & why AI false positives are a bad thing as could result in "accidental" death.
Referenced him (and de Menezes) as horrendous end results of flawed threat assessment / id (which biometric recog AI could give). Apologies if confusion caused / lack of clarity in my wording if there was implication they were AI related.
Years ago I used to tell people that you never carried ID in the UK because you didn't need to. Then I explained that "you didn't need to" wasn't because the police never needed to know who you are, they just seemed to know anyway. Which was quite ominous, when you thought about it.
Modern Britain has a much more diverse and mobile population so you end up carrying an ID with you, either in the form of a driver's license or a fingerprint. (The cops have mobile scanners, in case you haven't noticed. They also seem to have the power to detain you until they're satisfied that they know who you are.) Facial recognition is just a logical extension to this, its been actively tested for at least a decade so it should be ready for deployment. For those of you who then cry 'foul!' I should ask "Where were you when they rolled out ANPR?" or "You don't seem to object to the cops flying around looking for excessive heat coming off houses" or even that rather neat trick called an "Unexplained Wealth Order" ("You don't look like the type to be holding all that cash, sonny, so let's relieve you of it, all nice and legal").
The thing is, your rights have been eroded bit by bit for decades now and few of us have raised even a peep. Now they're talking about facial recognition, just one of the many tools they can use to pick people out of a crowd, and you want to ban it. Fat chance -- the best you'll get is a lot of procedural verbiage that sounds convincing but ultimately does nothing.
As usual there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the tool. The problem is over: who uses it, for what purpose, with what motives, and with what accountability and redress in case of misuse and abuse?
It's the answers to those questions that are the issues at stake. Whether facial-recognition tech or ID Cards 'work' at a technical level is kind of a side issue, although obviously not completely irrelevant.
When our putative Governments have such a track record of dishonesty, mission creep and general irresponsibility when it comes to dealing with cock-ups and wilful misuse it doesn't inspire confidence amongst the intended victims of the latest wheeze to ensure the money keeps flowing to where it's needed most, i.e. the pockets of me, my chums and the bastards who pull my strings.
On the other hand a lot of this is about ordinary fallible human beings trying to do impossible jobs and get out at the end without being crucified by either the baying mob or the money grubbers who take embiggening their wealth and power a little too seriously.
Voters would never agree to its implementation in the first place, assuming they bothered to understand the full technical capabilities of facial recognition technology.
It is a genuine threat to the democratic process, because you know where people are and you know where people will be to a high degree of accuracy at a certain time. Just knowing that, you can do a lot of damage, i.e. it's a threat to life. ANPR already does this to a fairly high degree of accuracy.
Currently, it's already done on a smaller scale. Cameras can track you immediately you enter airport security and keep track of you, all the way to the gate, there is nothing to say, with time, (other than cost) that can't be expanded fully.
Just play around with Google Lens, it's incredible how well it will recognise any picture of Priti Patel, from any angle, even blurry. From analysis of the Google Lens App, Google seems to be hashing all photos uploaded to news websites in real time, and indexing them through the text around them.
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