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

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#101

Post by dabbledash » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 10:59 PM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #84

dabbledash wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there’s a way to make it impossible for the government to use facial recognition to monitor people other than legally banning them doing so, it’s hard to imagine it.

why would i want to make it impossible for government to monitor people ? government monitoring people by itself is not a problem, government monitoring people to harm people is the problem. What need to be fixed is the usage of tools to harm people, not the tool itself.

The only thing that keeps them from harming you is your power relative to them. Handing them more power only increases the probability that they will abuse what powers they do have.

I thought the election of Trump would disabuse people of this idea that it’s smart to hand more and more power to central authorities. But at this point I think it’s hopeless. People just want the state to be Daddy, and assume or hope that its power will always be wielded by people they like against people they don’t.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#102

Post by lewdev » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:00 PM UTC

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.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#103

Post by birdyrooster » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:00 PM UTC

TechnoTimeStop wrote: post #100

The ridiculousness that is King County at this point is borderline a conspiracy. Most of it surrounds, "insert skin color" bad, all others good. Our subreddits are cancer and have been known for a while to be the highest manipulated forums for astroturfing on reddit. Can anyone help? Can we help ourselves?

What are you saying?

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#104

Post by waiseristy » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #73

kyleblarson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may not be enough unsolved violent crime to justify facial recognition, but one thing there is too much of in Seattle, Portland, SF, LA, NYC is un-prosecuted violent crime.

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

Not a read, but this feature from KOMO goes over the Seattle situation pretty well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WijoL3Hy_Bw

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#105

Post by gamegoblin » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

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.

Does anyone know of any data about the racial bias of human police officers vs. facial recognition software?

That is, I am not sure if it makes sense to ban the software if it is less biased than the human. But it might make sense to ban it if it is more biased.

There are loads of people of color who have been falsely imprisoned for looking like someone in a grainy security camera footage well before facial recognition technology was widespread.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#106

Post by _jal » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:02 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #92

cactus2093 wrote: post #36

Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use of computers in police stations, make them write up all their reports by hand. I truly don't understand why there would be a line at facial recognition, it's just a law against making a process more efficient. It's clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at all. Don't replace…

I agree. It's hard to understand how this is different than using a computer to detect, for example, credit card fraud. Both pour through tons of private data (typically using algorithms that don't make sense to a layperson -- or maybe even to experts since they likely use some DNNs) to determine is something problematic may have occurred. Both technologies can be used for nefarious purposes, but both can have safegu…

You won't have to choose. We'll see guns attached to facial recognition systems soon enough, both "authorized" and not.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#107

Post by cactus2093 » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:02 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #51

cactus2093 wrote: post #36

Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use of computers in police stations, make them write up all their reports by hand. I truly don't understand why there would be a line at facial recognition, it's just a law against making a process more efficient. It's clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at all. Don't replace…

>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 downsides, the laws should more specifically target the downsides instead of require that everyone pretend the technology doesn't exist. If nothing else, it's just far too impractical for a technology that is easily available and in everyone's pocket to be illegal to use. It will just incentivize obscuring and lying about using it, rather than truly prevent it from ever being used. It reminds me of the history of banning encryption, you're basically just making math illegal.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#108

Post by throwawaysea » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:03 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #65

cactus2093 wrote: post #36

Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use of computers in police stations, make them write up all their reports by hand. I truly don't understand why there would be a line at facial recognition, it's just a law against making a process more efficient. It's clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at all. Don't replace…

Everything else that you described – computers, digital records – has simple algorithms understandable by the average police officer or citizen. You type a document, it gets saved. You can do a full text search on it. You can pull up an old case and look at photos. You can quickly cross reference. All these tasks could be done step by step by a person and it would just take more time. When it comes to facial recoloni…

> Would you accept a search warrant when the judgement wasn't based on any human's perception but something which came out a black box?

Isn't every PD that uses facial recognition keeping a human in the loop to confirm algorithmic matches first? And if so why would the overall process be any less accurate than a human match?

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#109

Post by jacobwilliamroy » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:03 PM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #77

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.

>The problem is automated identification of faces Whats the problem with this ?

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.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#110

Post by starkd » Wed, Jun 02, 2021, 11:03 PM UTC

cactus2093 wrote: post #36

Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use of computers in police stations, make them write up all their reports by hand. I truly don't understand why there would be a line at facial recognition, it's just a law against making a process more efficient. It's clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at all. Don't replace…

I was thinking much the same thing. Facial recognition is just a tool that makes it easier. If there are problems with false detections, you should be able to insert a human check in the process. But banning something makes it look like they are doing something. Meanwhile, it makes the job harder for police.