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Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

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Re: Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

#31

Post by the_doctah »

jerf wrote: post #17
crazygringo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not defending Rite-Aid at all, but that's not the problem here. It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person. Facial recognition software should always be implemented under the assumption that it makes plenty of false positives, and human review is always necessary. (What you're talking ab…

"It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person." I would contest that. Determining if someone is the same person as a low-quality photo is not necessarily something a human can do, and that's especially true if the human in question A: basically doesn't care and is likely to screw it up every w…

Why is the photo in your imaginary scenario low quality?

Why do you think the plan is "infeasible and stupid"? You don't think the technology will catch up?

Re: Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

#32

Post by JohnFen »

jdksmdbtbdnmsm wrote: post #30
JohnFen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please express my admiration for your friend's actions here. We need more people like him.

More people who make fascile pleas inevitably resilting in hopeless failure? I think it would be better to actually change things. This and other everyday examples show that this means overcoming capitalism.

We need more people who are unwilling to do work that they think is harmful in exchange for a paycheck.

Re: Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

#33

Post by ProjectArcturis »

crazygringo wrote: post #27
jrochkind1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. In fact there is research that humans are not particularly good at matching people to photos... this 2014 study showed a 15% error rate (with photos from identification documents , high-quality standardized photos, not low-quality random angle ones!), and the real kicker is passport officers (who do this as part of their job all day and presumably care about doing it well) surprisingly performed no b…

Which is precisely why you combine the two systems. If humans get it wrong 15% of the time, that means they're reducing false positives by 85% . That's the whole point of combining facial recognition with human review. You still have to decide what to do with that final information considering that it's still not perfect. But you should never be relying on facial recognition by itself. Even if humans are imperfect, t…

The question is how correlated are human and machine errors. I would guess fairly strongly, in which case human review would add little additional accuracy.

Re: Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

#34

Post by the_doctah »

twisteriffic wrote: post #15
crazygringo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not defending Rite-Aid at all, but that's not the problem here. It's pretty easy for the system to show the source photo to an employee, and then they themselves can judge if they feel confident the shopper is actually the same person. Facial recognition software should always be implemented under the assumption that it makes plenty of false positives, and human review is always necessary. (What you're talking ab…

Just a reminder that the "1 per store per day" is an innocent human being who probably would have been put through hell on earth by what you considered an acceptable rate of error.

What is "hell on earth" to you?

Cops have probable cause and search you. Find no evidence. "Oh boy sorry for the mix up sir". Hell on earth!

Re: Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

#35

Post by sokoloff »

crazygringo wrote: post #27
jrochkind1 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct. In fact there is research that humans are not particularly good at matching people to photos... this 2014 study showed a 15% error rate (with photos from identification documents , high-quality standardized photos, not low-quality random angle ones!), and the real kicker is passport officers (who do this as part of their job all day and presumably care about doing it well) surprisingly performed no b…

Which is precisely why you combine the two systems. If humans get it wrong 15% of the time, that means they're reducing false positives by 85% . That's the whole point of combining facial recognition with human review. You still have to decide what to do with that final information considering that it's still not perfect. But you should never be relying on facial recognition by itself. Even if humans are imperfect, t…

The error reduction from applying a different system applies if the source of the error does not manifest itself in both systems (if errors are uncorrelated, you can get an improvement that looks like that implied by the simple application of statistics, but not if they are correlated).

As an example, you can combine human review with automatic facial detection of identical twins and likely not see much (any?) reduction in error rate at all.

Two independent "85% accurate" humans are not 97.7% accurate for identical twins either.

Re: Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

#36

Post by fritzo »

Thorrez wrote: post #21
brookst wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah any warning system will just turn into California’s prop ~~86~~ 65, which led every building in the state to add signage reading “this building may or may not contain cancer-causing chemicals.” Which is completely useless.

One difference is that it's hard to know if you have the chemicals in your building, or be able to eliminate them. Knowing that you have facial recognition and eliminating it is much easier.

True in theory, but is the chemical composition of a building really more complex than the software installed in a building? I feel like theres some 2nd law of supply chains that guarantees that every supply chain --physical or sofware-- will grow in complexity beyond auditability.

Re: Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

#37

Post by crazygringo »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #33
crazygringo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is precisely why you combine the two systems. If humans get it wrong 15% of the time, that means they're reducing false positives by 85% . That's the whole point of combining facial recognition with human review. You still have to decide what to do with that final information considering that it's still not perfect. But you should never be relying on facial recognition by itself. Even if humans are imperfect, t…

The question is how correlated are human and machine errors. I would guess fairly strongly, in which case human review would add little additional accuracy.

> I would guess fairly strongly

No, evidence suggests they are not. We're all very aware of the horror stories of AI misidentifying species. Different AI systems are different, but in general AI seems to make quite different classes of mistakes from humans. Our brains work very differently from current statistical models.

So human review absolutely adds accuracy, you can generally assume. And it adds human-accountable judgment which is just as important.

Re: Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

#39

Post by twisteriffic »

the_doctah wrote: post #34
twisteriffic wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a reminder that the "1 per store per day" is an innocent human being who probably would have been put through hell on earth by what you considered an acceptable rate of error.

What is "hell on earth" to you? Cops have probable cause and search you. Find no evidence. "Oh boy sorry for the mix up sir". Hell on earth!

Ah yes, those american police who are so well known for their thoughtful and calm approach to suspected shoplifters in low income neighborhoods.

Re: Rite Aid banned from using face recognition software after false ID shoplifters

#40

Post by [deleted] »

jdksmdbtbdnmsm wrote: post #30
JohnFen wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please express my admiration for your friend's actions here. We need more people like him.

More people who make fascile pleas inevitably resilting in hopeless failure? I think it would be better to actually change things. This and other everyday examples show that this means overcoming capitalism.

[deleted]
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