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European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

politico.eu

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Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#121

Post by atoav »

throwawaysea wrote: post #90
nitrogen wrote: post #73

Earlier 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.

You are not allowed to take a photograph of people in Germany if they are recognizable as individuals.

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#122

Post by nocturnial »

sentinel wrote: post #107
nocturnial wrote: post #103

Earlier 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.

I'm sorry if I misread your message.

This is were I'm at:

You brought up the fact that FR could identify criminals. I brought up the fact it could also identify innocent people as criminals. When innocent people are accused of crimes they didn't do, they usually get upset.

I didn't say I personally was upset with your message. I said they would get upset. I'm not a "people" person, but this should be obvious. And I think I would be upset too if I got accused of something I didn't do.

You still didn't tell me how you would resolve an innocent person being misidentified by a facial recognition system. Can they sue the company or person who developed it?

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#123

Post by sentinel »

nocturnial wrote: post #122
sentinel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm sorry if I misread your message. This is were I'm at: You brought up the fact that FR could identify criminals. I brought up the fact it could also identify innocent people as criminals. When innocent people are accused of crimes they didn't do, they usually get upset. I didn't say I personally was upset with your message. I said they would get upset. I'm not a "people" person, but this should be obvious. And I t…

> how you would resolve an innocent person being misidentified by a facial recognition system

Due process, which they'll still be entitled to.

Not sure about suing. I'm sure people will try and sue.

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#124

Post by Closi »

bko wrote: post #91
brightly-salty wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you can no longer transparently explain the reasoning behind a decision made based on the statistics, and instead have to just shrug and say “because the model told us so”. Accountability is very important in this issue.

Apart from neural networks most models are somewhat transparent in terms of reasoning. Neural networks would be the wrong model to use for this anyway. For instance, decision trees can tell us if the population density between this range and the percentage of single family residence is between this range, the probability of a package being stolen is X. Or regression could tell us that the square of the population den…

This law isn’t talking about banning decision trees or banning regression analysis though, it’s talking about ML being used in specific listed applications.

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#125

Post by Closi »

bko wrote: post #98
da_big_ghey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if face images also are acquired from a legitimate investigation (ideally a prior criminal conviction). Police cannot observe a face for years until they get a warrant then all suddenly have years of data, that is wrong.

What if someone is known to have committed a crime and police look at surveillance footage from nearby red-light cameras? Or if that person is thought to have visited that location in the past, could they use that footage? Which brings another question, what about facial recognition performed by a human? Investigators can presumably scour video or surveillance data by hand, but I guess just not by machine? Can they u…

Well the legislation is pretty specific in terms of what facial recognition is allowed actually, and the scenario you are describing is listed and explicitly allowed.

The text is completely open so you can see exactly how they have scoped it.

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#126

Post by bsenftner »

atoav wrote: post #119
nitrogen wrote: post #73

Earlier 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.

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?

What is the threshold of scale when a private citizen has multiple homes? Can that individual collect biometrics from their visitors and do whatever, privately, with that data as long as they wish? What if that same individual owned one or more private companies? Can they collect biometrics for internal, private use, then? Even if that private individual is an internationalists, traveling to different countries with access to that data at will, perhaps with specialist staff analyzing that data?

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#127

Post by bsenftner »

yholio wrote: post #84
smarx007 wrote: post #13

No, 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.

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.

It's pretty hard to ban - it is not that hard a problem to crack with modern processing and an intermediate understanding of computer vision. The issues related to skin tone bias are practically old news now, with the stress the international press placed on the issue, addressing problem areas and their fixes are well documented. I'd go as far as saying FR is at stage 3 of 5 for the technology life cycle: early majority. Its is already ubiquitous, inside commodity mobile camera chipsets and accessible with a little more than a page of python anywhere opencv can be installed.

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#128

Post by da_chicken »

bko wrote: post #98
da_big_ghey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if face images also are acquired from a legitimate investigation (ideally a prior criminal conviction). Police cannot observe a face for years until they get a warrant then all suddenly have years of data, that is wrong.

What if someone is known to have committed a crime and police look at surveillance footage from nearby red-light cameras? Or if that person is thought to have visited that location in the past, could they use that footage? Which brings another question, what about facial recognition performed by a human? Investigators can presumably scour video or surveillance data by hand, but I guess just not by machine? Can they u…

If only there were some system in place where police would request the judiciary evaluate their evidence and reasoning to see if violating the privacy of the suspects were approved and warranted.

Whatever would we call such a process?

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#129

Post by potatoman22 »

rsynnott wrote: post #51
toss1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>AI, by its complexity and opacity should not be used to profile people. Just because it could be so easily manipulated. True, but I'd add in a touch of Hanlon's Razor — don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to mere incompetence — far too much of the time, the technology is just bad and wrong. It has been over-promised and under-delivered. It is so often wrong that there are numerous lawsuits, including o…

> don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to mere incompetence Police use of this nonsense is either malice or _negligence_; it's not mere incompetence. If you're the enforcement arm of the state, you largely lose the right to plead incompetence; if you don't do the research; that's negligent.

I don't think police using ML is negligent in and of itself. Overly relying on a model, however, would certainly be negligent.
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