King County, WA bans facial recognition software • Hacker News Board

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#201

Post by hik » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

bozzcl wrote: post #174

hik wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask you a question: How many unarmed people were killed by police in 2020?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... According to this, 405, which is 405 too many.

So we have 50 total out of thousands, if not millions of potentially negative police interactions.

You can't build a system of robots without some fault-tolerance. How are humans supposed to keep up to that?

Based on this data - how can you make the assumption that a police interaction is an inherent risk to life that is always unjustified?

We mostly pay police to show up and be generally aggravating to people who might be doing bad stuff - in some sense "being sketchy in the vicinity" is a valid reason for police action, which doesn't even always turn into an arrest, let alone a life-or-death situation. Those cases are the vast minority of police interactions total.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#202

Post by bobthepanda » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #115

didibus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a matter of accuracy and bias. If the tech keeps making false accusations, especially against the same kind of people over and over, then a ban might be in place. You could argue that humans make similar mistakes and bias, but the scale is always smaller when humans are involved, just because of how slow they are. Say a model is wrong 37% of the time, and so are humans, but the model runs 1000 times a mi…

Is facial recognition more biased than manually comparing against mugshots? A lot of people seem to be writing under the impression that if facial recognition software is banned, police and government won't use facial recognition. The reality is that they will still use facial recognition, just in the old fashioned way by looking at suspects and looking at mugshots. And humans are often biased, too.

The problem is that jurors place higher faith in technology than they do in people, and that’s not necessarily warranted.

It’s one of the things swept under the umbrella of the “CSI effect.”

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#203

Post by waiseristy » Thu, Jun 03, 2021, 7:29 PM UTC

waiseristy wrote: post #184

abrahamepton wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That piece, and KOMO's larger project, are toxic right-wing propaganda. Please don't consider that a reliable source.

I don't even want to begin to engage upon what you purport KOMO to be, because I don't really care... But the people and lives that video shows are real. Do you have left-wing friendly media pieces to balance it out? This is not something that is typically portrayed positively in media in Seattle, so it's not easy to find good news

You do you HN. Downvote the uncomfortable opinions! That'll surely help everyone

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#204

Post by TheRealPomax » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 12:45 AM UTC

exporectomy wrote: post #153

TheRealPomax wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because that's the only option. There is no scenario in which it's allowed in a narrow set of circumstances that isn't going to get abused by law enforcement. Either you ban it, or law enforcement is going to find ways to abuse the right to use it, including appointing people whose job it is to say "this was fine". If this was a reasonable society, with a reasonable police force: absolutely, narrow definitions of per…

Except this is allowed in a narrow set of circumstances - to look for missing children. So they can probably dragnet everyone they see to find the missing children or abductors. Now the residents need a way to prevent the police misusing it by sneakily letting it find rapists and murderers.

Welcome to the security vs. privacy debate. Glad to have you here, please read the pamphlet and please don't resort to a "won't anyone think of the children" argument. Because the statistics around facial recognition just don't work for that argument. However many children you think are saved with this: it's nowhere near that figure, if not flat out zero.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#205

Post by femiagbabiaka » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 4:45 AM UTC

abrahamepton wrote: post #147

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any sources I can read through on this? I'm very interested to hear that this is the case.

There's a great book on ~roughly this topic - Ghettoside, by Jill Leovy. The thesis is that police in some cities (her work is in LA, but I lived in Chicago for a while and the idea transfers seamlessly) do an abysmal job of solving homicides. That has all sorts of knock-on effects: people close to a murder victim lose the sense that the state will do something about their loss, so they take the matter into their own…

This has already been a fantastic read: thank you!!

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#206

Post by jacobwilliamroy » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 11:43 AM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #192

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a dream a few months ago where I was standing in front of a computer. I typed in my name and got back a stream of video which showed every single moment of my life from multiple angles starting from the moment I was born. The footage came from a variety of sources, CCTV, smartphone cameras, dashcams. The system had videos of everything anyone had ever done. I didn't like it. Found it kind of disturbing.

Then basically you says its boil down to matter of subjective preference. So you don't like it, fine fair enough then don't be surprised that other people may like it.

I don't say that? You just have to think about how this stuff is going to be used in the real world where we actually live. The thing which is objectively disturbing is how easy it is to lose control of one's life once the government is able to record, observe and judge every single thing a person does. I believe such a level of transparency is only beneficial when it's applied to people who hold power over others; to subject everyone in a society to that kind of scrutiny would just be laying the foundations for abuse.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#207

Post by matz1 » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #206

matz1 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then basically you says its boil down to matter of subjective preference. So you don't like it, fine fair enough then don't be surprised that other people may like it.

I don't say that? You just have to think about how this stuff is going to be used in the real world where we actually live. The thing which is objectively disturbing is how easy it is to lose control of one's life once the government is able to record, observe and judge every single thing a person does. I believe such a level of transparency is only beneficial when it's applied to people who hold power over others; t…

The government simply record, observe and judge every single thing a person does is not problem, in fact it can be used for my benefit.

The problem is when they use it to harm me.

What need to be fixed is The government record, observe and judge every single thing a person does to harm people.

>to subject everyone in a society to that kind of scrutiny would just be laying the foundations for abuse

It can be used for abuse but not always, It can also be used for good, what need to be prevented is the use for abuse.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#208

Post by verall » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

ggreer wrote: post #60

verall wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't want facial recognition software to identify them because I can't understand its failure cases. If it is allowed in court as evidence, prosecutors will talk up the recognition as "state-of-the-art" and juries will be influenced by its opinions.

Do you also apply this reasoning to fingerprinting, DNA analysis, tire prints, and ballistics comparisons? Like most people, I don't understand all of the failure modes involved with those technologies, but they do seem to be helpful tools for bringing violent criminals to justice. I also think eyewitness testimony has many failure modes. If anything, it's probably less accurate than current facial recognition tech a…

Yes, I do.

Ballistics comparisons in particular been found to be nearly complete bunk, yet experts continue to use them in court.[0]

Tire prints are also pretty bad.[1]

We live in an age of unprecedented HD video surveillance. We don't need automated facial recognition to bring violent criminals to justice.

[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/reversing-legacy-jun... [1] https://www.apmreports.org/story/2016/09/27/questionable-sci...