This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Despite concerns about accuracy and potential misuse, facial recognition technology seems poised for a surge in popularity. California-based restaurant CaliExpress by Flippy now allows customers to pay for their meals with a simple scan of their face, showcasing the potential of facial payment technology.
Oh boy, I can’t wait to be charged for someone else’s meal because they look just enough like me to trigger a payment.
I have an identical twin. This stuff is going to cause so many issues even if it worked perfectly.
If it works anything like Apple’s Face ID twins don’t actually map all that similar. In the general population the probability of matching mapping of the underlying facial structure is approximately 1:1,000,000. It is slightly higher for identical twins and then higher again for prepubescent identical twins.
And yet this woman was mistaken for a 19-year-old 🤔
Shitty implementation doesn’t mean shitty concept, you’d think a site full of tech nerds would understand such a basic concept.
And a lot of these face recognition systems are notoriously bad with dark skin tones.
No they aren't. This is the narrative that keeps getting repeated over and over. And the citation for it is usually the ACLU's test on Amazon's Rekognition system, which was deliberately flawed to produce this exact outcome (people years later still saying the same thing).
The top FR systems have no issues with any skin tones or connections.
There are like a thousand independent studies on this, not just one
I promise I'm more aware of all the studies, technologies, and companies involved. I worked in the industry for many years.
The technical studies you're referring to show that the difference between a white man and a black woman (usually polar opposite in terms of results) is around 0.000001% error rate. But this usually gets blown out of proportion by media outlets.
If you have white men at 0.000001% error rate and black women at 0.000002% error rate, then what gets reported is "facial recognition for black women is 2 times worse than for white men".
It's technically true, but in practice it's a misleading and disingenuous statement.
Edit: here's the actual technical report if anyone is interested
Please tell me a lawyer is taking this on pro bono and is about to sue the shit out of Facewatch.
For what? A private business can exclude anyone for any reason or no reason at all so long as the reason isn't a protected right.
I'd be surprised if being born with a specific face configuration isn't protected in the same way that race and gender are.
In the uk you can pet much guarantee that won't happen because it would shut down their surveillance state.
The developers should be looking at jail time as they falsely accused someone of commiting a crime. This should be treated exactly like if I SWATed someone.
I get your point but totally disagree this is the same as SWATing. People can die from that. While this is bad, she was excluded from stores, not murdered
You lack imagination. What happens when the system mistakenly identifies someone as a violent offender and they get tackled by a bunch of cops, likely resulting in bodily injury.
People should be thrown in jail over a hypothetical?
That would then be an entirely different situation?
I'm not so sure the blame should solely be placed on the developers - unless you're using that term colloquially.
Developers were probably the first people to say that it isn't ready. Blame the sales people that will say anything for money.
They worked on it, they knew what could happen. I could face criminal charges if I do certain things at work that harm the public.
I have no idea where Facewatch got their software from. The developers of this software could've been told their software will be used to find missing kids. Not really fair to blame developers. Blame the people on top.
Even if someone did steal a mars-bar... Banning them from all food-selling establishments seems... Disproportional.
Like if you steal out of necessity, and get caught once, you then just starve?
Obviously not all grocers/chains/restaurants are that networked yet, but are we gonna get to a point where hungry people are turned away at every business that provides food, once they are on "the list"?
They've essentially created their own privatized law enforcement system. They aren't allowed to enforce their rules the same way a government would be, but punishment like banning a person from huge swaths of economic life can still be severe. The worst part is that private legal systems almost never have any concept of rights or due process, so there is absolutely nothing stopping them from being completely arbitrary in how they apply their punishments.
I see this kind of thing as being closely aligned with right wingers' desire to privatize everything, abolish human rights, and just generally turn the world into a dystopian hellscape for anyone who isn't rich and well connected.
This is why some UK leaders wanted out of EU, to make their own rules with way less regard for civil rights.
nah i think main thing was a super fragile identity. i mean they have been shit all the time since before EU. when talks between france,germany and uk took place the insisted to take control of EU.
if you live on an island for generations with limited new genetic input...well, thats where you end up.
We humans have these things called "boats" that have enabled the British Isles to receive regular inputs of new genetic material. Pretty useful things, these boats, and somewhat pivotal in the history of the UK.
sure
This can't be true. I was told that if she has nothing to hide she has nothing to worry about!
Well, this blows the "if you've not done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about" argument out of the water.
the way I like to respond to that:
"ok, pull down your pants and hand me your unlocked phone"
Gotta say, I don't think Officer Chauvin is going to take well to your request.
As an American, I don't know what opinion to have about this without knowing the woman's race.
If she's been flagged as shoplifter she's probably black!
Why, because all shoplifters are black? I don't understand. She's being mistaken for another person, a real person on the system.
I used to know a smackhead that would steal things to order, I wonder if he's still alive and whether he's on this database. Never bought anything off him but I did buy him a drink occasionally. He'd had a bit of a difficult childhood.
Why, because all shoplifters are black?
All the ones that get caught. When you're white, you can steal whatever you want.
Facial recognition still struggles with really bad mistakes that are always bad optics for the business that uses it. I'm amazed anyone is still willing to use it in its current form.
It's been the norm that these systems can't tell the difference between people of dark pigmentation if it even acknowledges it's seeing a person at all.
Running a system with a decade long history or racist looking mistakes is bonkers in the current climate.
The catch is that its only really a problem for the people getting flagged. Then you're guilty until proven innocent, and the only person to blame is a soulless machine with a big button that reads "For customer support, go fuck yourself".
As security theater, its cheap and easy to implement. As a passive income stream for tech bros, its a blank check. As a buzzword for politicians who can pretend they're forward-thinking by rolling out some vaporware solution to a non-existent problem, its on the tip of everyone's tongue.
I'm old enough to remember when sitting Senator Ted Kennedy got flagged by the Bush Admin's No Fly List and people were convinced this is the sort of shit that would reform the intrusive, incompetent, ill-conceived TSA. 20 years later... nope, it didn't. Enjoy techno-hell, Brits.
