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FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

washingtonpost.com

21–30 of 128 posts

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#21
post #18

I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an artic…

[deleted]

I read the summary, and I don't agree. The tests being done are used under special circumstances. No way a camera mounted 12 or 14 feet up at an angle is going to provide the same type of results as youtube videos which are at a flat angle. There are simply too many "angle" like issues that will result in the accuracy being quite poor.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#22

Sensible regulations around what the government can do/not do in regards to things like facial recognition tech seems like it’s becoming more and more necessary. I am far more worried about privacy invasions/abuse by the government than I am by private companies that seem to get all the press (ie facebook). For the simple reason that 1) facebook can’t arrest me 2) facebook has no incentive other than targeting me wit…

The issue here is it is not an either/or. We commonly run into joint partnerships where the government doesn't have/maintain the data at all. The goverment just 'buys' an answer from the private corporation and the courts ok this behavior.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#23

This line caught my attention: > The FBI said its system is 86 percent accurate at finding the right person if a search is able to generate a list of 50 possible matches, according to the GAO. But the FBI has not tested its system’s accuracy under conditions that are closer to normal, such as when a facial search returns only a few possible matches. What the GAO study[1] actually said: > However, we found that the te…

But also, no-one understands percentages. WaPo should really present this information as a probability tree or an icon array chart.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#25

I don't know too much about facial recognition technology (I work more in the ALPR space), but I know enough to tell you that a single photo is not enough to train the software to do anything useful. Either they were sold a dream by a company making bogus claims, or they just don't give a shit about false postives in the slightest and they use it as justification to randomly stop and search people. There was an artic…

modern data augmentation techniques can be very effective especially when fine-tuning already pretrained model. But still very much work in progress

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#26
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never publicly proposed. When was it proposed, and by who? It's not been seriously debated by Congress.

I thought the point of RealID was to make state ID databases accessible to federal agencies?

You are 100% correct. I remember complaining about this way back in 2005 when RealID was passed. To my chagrin I just got my RealID driver's license as it became mandatory in my state.

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#28
post #4

What did you think was going to happen? Did you speak out against it when it was proposed? How would they NOT use this data available to them? https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/national-id/r...

It was never publicly proposed. When was it proposed, and by who? It's not been seriously debated by Congress.

It was passed by Congress in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_ID_Act

Re: FBI, ICE using state driver’s license photos for facial-recognition searches

#30
There is nothing you can do about it. You have no meaningful impact on any government policies. Why waste time writing about this stuff if legislative representatives do not care about your writings? Genuinely curious why people waste time complaining about things they have zero control over.
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