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King County, WA bans facial recognition software

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Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#121

Post by throwawaysea »

loeg wrote: post #66
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them. It’s a shortcut for manually digging through databases to identify people. Any identification is followed up with investigation, just as it would b…

> Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them. The article directly contradicts both of your claims: > "Facial recognition technology is still incredibly biased and absolutely creates harm in…

The article provides no details on those cases, and I am not willing to trust the ACLU at their word, given how politically biased they are these days (https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/347375-a...). I would like to know whether those incidents involved a human in the loop. It's also worth considering the benefits of facial recognition. Just like policing as a whole, I am willing to accept a small number of incorrectly handled incidents against a much larger body of good policing.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#122

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

lewdev wrote: post #102

Why ban it? It's not the facial recognition that's the problem; the problem is that the justice system believes that it's enough to convict someone of a crime. It's hard to believe that prosecutors can be like, "The computer says it's you, so you're guilty." Especially when there's probably a known margin of error.

Because even the hassle of being hauled into jail for someone to realize the software got it wrong can cause someone to lose their job, and since the software remains flawed it’ll keep picking them!

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#123

Post by cryptoz »

lewdev wrote: post #102

Why ban it? It's not the facial recognition that's the problem; the problem is that the justice system believes that it's enough to convict someone of a crime. It's hard to believe that prosecutors can be like, "The computer says it's you, so you're guilty." Especially when there's probably a known margin of error.

> It's hard to believe that prosecutors can be like, "The computer says it's you, so you're guilty."

Why is that hard to believe? The article very explicitly and clearly quotes a lawyer who says that is pretty much exactly what is happening.

And regardless, even if there weren't a direct quote from a lawyer on this topic in the article, it still shouldn't be that hard to believe that a computer's output is going to influence the court cases at all. That's not how humans work, for one - people will include everything they 'know' about a situation when making a decision. You can't have a computer producing output and then people ignoring the output and then calling the computer system useful. If people are ignoring the output, then why have the system? And if people aren't ignoring the output, then, the (FALSE) output is being considered in decision-making of which innocent minorities are to be jailed.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#124

Post by gweinberg »

I can understand wanting to put heavy restrictions on the use of this technology, for example a rule that someone cannot be arrested based on software alone, and a rule that it can only be used to help identify individuals that are clearly committing a crime. But it seems to me to be batshit insane to ban it completely. If we have video of, say, an armed robbery, and we (only) use software to get a suspect list before we have human beings looking at mug shots, what is the alleged downside?

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#125

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

cactus2093 wrote: post #107
Arainach wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's just a tool that would save tax dollars No, nothing is "just a tool". Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks. Automation makes things feasible. Cheap storage that allows weeks or months of security footage to be preserved changes what's possible. License plate scanners are "just" a technology that could be done with a bunch of cops on corners with notepads, but in aggregate they're a tracking…

I still don't see why this is the place we should draw the line. If we want to ban license plate scanners because they can be used to track location, should we also make it illegal for police to access cell phone records or cell tower ping data with a warrant? Should we ban cell phones altogether so that the location data can never be collected in the first place to be misused? Lots of new technology has some downsid…

The trick is that police need a warrant to invade your privacy via cell phones or whatever, but they won’t need a warrant for the flawed surveillance stuff that can end up severely fucking over someone’s life/their family if the police ever decide they don’t like them for whatever reason, such as being an advocacy against police abuse ;)

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#126

Post by cryptoz »

gweinberg wrote: post #124

I can understand wanting to put heavy restrictions on the use of this technology, for example a rule that someone cannot be arrested based on software alone, and a rule that it can only be used to help identify individuals that are clearly committing a crime. But it seems to me to be batshit insane to ban it completely. If we have video of, say, an armed robbery, and we (only) use software to get a suspect list befor…

> If we have video of, say, an armed robbery, and we (only) use software to get a suspect list before we have human beings looking at mug shots, what is the alleged downside?

Based on my reading of the article, the 'alleged' downside (this is very clearly real, there is no need to say alleged here!) is that minorities are being swept up in the system and wrongfully accused of crimes and then jailed.

Your suggestion is, what if we didn't jail them? Just round up the innocently identified minorities and start investigating them? That is....hardly an improvement. In fact it would seem that while it might reduce falsely accused innocent people from going to jail, it could increase the number of racist incidents where police are harassing innocent minorities. And worst of all, it could further entrench racist decision making inside police departments.

A much better suggestion in my opinion would be, test the software before deploying it so that it doesn't make racist decisions. Set the bar VERY high for this, so the software has to be really, really, really good. Otherwise don't use it.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#127

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

lewdev wrote: post #97
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they're doing. The problem is automated identification of faces. The solution is banning that.

I don't think that's the problem. The problem is that the justice system believes that it's enough to convict someone of a crime.

Even just arresting them or bringing them in for assessment is enough to put someone in a dangerous position, because cops can effectively legally execute people. So the problem is any police interaction is potentially deadly and this is giving cops another arbitrary, potentially racist tool to interact with people who are just living their lives.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#128

Post by microdrum »

diamond_hands wrote: post #46
microdrum wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right take. Can't ban math. Facial rec is here. If you don't like it, win a public policy debate about making it evidentially weak in front of a judge. Banning facial rec is like saying "you can have security cameras and iPhones, but only human eyeballs can look through them, not computers!" Arbitrary, and doomed to fail.

The math is incorrect with Black people's faces more than White people's faces. "Can't ban math", that's like saying "can't ban words". Yes, but you can ban a combination of words in a location, such a "There's a fire!" in a crowded theater. You can ban a combination of math in a police station that leads to people going to jail.

Wrong. It isn't. By your logic, CMOS cameras themselves are "racist" because they have exposure defaults that make just slightly more sense for light complexions than for dark.

Or maybe you think highlight curves for TV shows must be adjusted so that lots of white things are blown out, but we can see the fine grained detail on a very dark object or person. Only then are we being antiracist!

See how this stuff makes you into a numbskull?

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#129

Post by rantwasp »

gweinberg wrote: post #124

I can understand wanting to put heavy restrictions on the use of this technology, for example a rule that someone cannot be arrested based on software alone, and a rule that it can only be used to help identify individuals that are clearly committing a crime. But it seems to me to be batshit insane to ban it completely. If we have video of, say, an armed robbery, and we (only) use software to get a suspect list befor…

now assume you’re a racist pos that is also by chance enforcing the law. also assume that you’re allegedly going to use this as a pretext to investigate people that even though don’t appear on the footage sort of look like the persons in the footage (the software told you so!). now assume that based on your harassment you find something and you arrest those poor souls.

does this seem far fetched? if you haven’t experienced this you may allegedly be privileged.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#130

Post by DubiousPusher »

lewdev wrote: post #102

Why ban it? It's not the facial recognition that's the problem; the problem is that the justice system believes that it's enough to convict someone of a crime. It's hard to believe that prosecutors can be like, "The computer says it's you, so you're guilty." Especially when there's probably a known margin of error.

Unfortunately, the absolutist nature of the criminal justice system means it does not do a good job of integrating nuance.

Take for examples:

How unimpeachable police testimony is.

How hard it is to overturn a conviction.

How hard it is to dislodge forensic techniques that are known to be bunk.

I could go on. Probably the best correlate we have to this is the rejection of the polygraph and boy in retrospect are we just lucky about that. If King County manages to be the first in such an action against facial recognition they may be worthy of a great deal of praise.

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