If you can ban public deployment of facial recognition, you can also ban public deployment of engagement maximizers.
It’s time to start regulating algorithms.
European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition
111–120 of 160 posts
Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition
#112I have mixed feelings over this. As a recent victim of crime (burglary and robbery) I know there is nothing the police can do about it even though the robber was caught on tape. There is a lot of crime that goes unpunished that contributes heavily to morale of the honest part of the population and their belief in the system. Why work when some thugs can take your staff for free and won't even be bothered by police ov…
Are you in California, maybe? Or one of the EU countries this would apply to?
Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
They should ban facial recognition though, in all and every context where the owner of the face has not given explicit consent. Nothing good can come of it.
Shouldn't this already be covered by GDPR thought? While we usually associate it to the Internet, tracking and cookies, from what I understand it is much more general and should include facial recognition (but of course IANAL etc.)
Should or shouldn't. I guess they want to make it clear to everyone. Good call.
Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The 1% there is that “the criminal won’t get caught”. So the 99% is for the facial recognition system to identify criminals? What error rate does the best facial identatification have? If it's not zero then my original point still stands. You are throwing a lot of innocent people into the judicial system. Or at best being pestered by police for no good reason. > Also what you described can happen to you today as we…
> So instead of improving it, you suggest to automate it? I said no such thing. Read the whole thing again, take the upset level down a few notches and get back to us.
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Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are opacity and complexity so often invoked as a reason here? I don’t want to be mass-profiling populations with totally clear and simple technologies, either.
Even if the below commentor is correct about the lack of accountability - which I assume is important in a democracy - and the more insidious danger is the obvious moral and ethical issues.
Could you be a little clearer on what the “obvious moral and ethical issues” are? Personally I’m not sure what you’re referencing, and I also don’t think the many of the moral and ethical issues are obvious. If they were, then I suspect countries like the UK wouldn’t already be trialing many of these technologies.
Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
An argument here is that it disincentivizes others from doing similar crimes. If the technology is so spot on that 99% of the time you commit the crime you'll get caught, then others will likely not take the risk. Granted there's an easy counter argument there (all the more prescient these days) that they could wear a mask while committing the crime. There's a similar (less discussed about) trend happening these days…
> If the technology is so spot on that 99% of the time you commit the crime you'll get caught And in 1% of the time[1], you are an innocent who had nothing to do with the crime. Now you have to spend your time: getting arrested, spending time with lawyers, getting people to collaborate your alibi ( If you want to make a case for facial recognition, criminal justice is one of worst possible cases you could make for it…
A claim of 99% sensitivity sounds good, and is often achievable. Any real system will also have false positives, so let’s say that we have a specificity (test true negative rate) of 99% as well. This is probably unrealistically good, most systems will false positive more. This sounds great.
However, Bayes’ theorem paints a very different picture.
If the prevalence of wanted criminals in the population is say 1/10000 (this is hard to guess), what are the odds that a person that is flagged is a wanted criminal?
The unintuitive answer is less than 1% of the time (~0.98%) will the suspect actually be a criminal.
By far the most important term is the prevalence of the thing you are testing for in the population, in this case criminality. Any dragnet facial recognition is invariably going to get more innocent people caught in its web than true criminals.
Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition
#117Actually the European Commission called for it, the parliament (which cannot propose legislation) just rubber stamped it.
Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a shopkeeper submits footage of a crime to the police, the police should be able to keep it as evidence. What's problematic is proactive gathering and aggregation of footage by police or by corporations.
Why is that problematic? Individuals are allowed to capture photos and footage in public spaces, and there isn't an expectation of privacy there. I don't see why capturing footage is a problem - without that the cost to actually apprehend a criminal is so high that we might as well not have laws for many crimes.
Any crime that is not worth having humans investigate is not worth disrupting a suspected criminal's life. If it isn't worth the cost to society, then society should leave it alone. Due process should be owed to every single citizen, and disrupting their lives should be considered worth the cost.
Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because a free society is a finely tuned balance between state power and individual freedom, and the pendulum is on the far side of state power since 9/11 anyways. The same thing that can be used to find perpetrators in minor crimes can also be used to trace political movements, that any given government happens to dislike. IMO there are certain uncertaintiws that any free society has to accept. One of those is that…
If a shopkeeper submits footage of a crime to the police, the police should be able to keep it as evidence. What's problematic is proactive gathering and aggregation of footage by police or by corporations.
Sure. But we are talking about a global facial recognition technology, not about someones private surveilance video.
There is a slight difference between the state having facial recognition AI-Cameras and a privat citizen submitting surveilance footage of their private shop after a crime has been committed, don't you think?
Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition
#120No, EU parliament is not calling for a ban on facial rec. They are proposing to: forbid using it indiscriminately in public places and to forbid the use of any AI/ML in predictive policing.
Which is already more than a first step. Using facial recognition as part of a legitimate investigation is an acceptable thing to do.
> Using facial recognition as part of a legitimate investigation is an acceptable thing to do.
That’s not what predictive policing is, though. Nor indiscriminate use in public spaces.