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King County, WA bans facial recognition software

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Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#111

Post by alach11 »

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…

There are many things the law permits at a small/manual scale but forbids at a larger/automated scale. This makes sense because in the latter case, the cost to the person doing the act is smaller.

For example, there's no law against making one phone call to a random number in the phone book. But if you use an autodialer to call everyone in the city, you're breaking the law.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#113

Post by RobRivera »

zdragnar wrote: post #81
paxys wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since when do search warrants get automatically approved by a black box? It is on the judge to approve, not a machine. If that's not enough, make a human sign off that they have confirmed or at least agree with the black box's conclusion, and put the department on the hook if it was obviously wrong. > Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias? The box is comparing a source image…

and people who take the oath as a court witness never lie

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#114

Post by rllearneratwork »

lewdev wrote: post #102

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.

exactly. There must be a person in the loop. Facial recognition is just a tool and a very useful one. Banning it is silly virtue signaling. A proper way to address all sorts of possible problems with it is by requiring qualified people in critical decision points within the overall system.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#115

Post by Manuel_D »

didibus wrote: post #54
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 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.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#116

Post by TheRealPomax »

lewdev wrote: post #102

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.

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 permitted use should be reasonably fine. But the US isn't, and the US doesn't, so in the US, it can't be.

(but then you look at countries where it might be fine, and it turns out that they don't need facial recognition to have a decent enough catch rate, kind of making the whole thing moot. No police force should use it, for wildly different reasons)

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#117

Post by drewmol »

zdragnar wrote: post #81
paxys wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since when do search warrants get automatically approved by a black box? It is on the judge to approve, not a machine. If that's not enough, make a human sign off that they have confirmed or at least agree with the black box's conclusion, and put the department on the hook if it was obviously wrong. > Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias? The box is comparing a source image…

I don’t discount the usefulness of ai or facial recognition, however,

>Since when do search warrants get automatically approved by a black box? It is on the judge to approve, not a machine.

The USA PATRIOT ACT removed judicial oversight and allows for warrants to be issued that notify the judiciary and simultaneously issue gag orders on those notified. For federal cases warrants no longer require judicial approval in an undisclosed number of cases. Try and find a list of current Guantanamo Bay detainees or the judges who approved the warrants used to detain them. Until that’s dealt with I see why King County would ban this use as a defense against automated enforcement.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#118

Post by colinmhayes »

lewdev wrote: post #102

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.

Because people don't enjoy the government knowing what they're doing all the time? It's a bit creepy that in places like London the government knows where everyone is 100% of the time.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#119

Post by Manuel_D »

didibus wrote: post #54
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 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…

> Say a model is wrong 37% of the time, and so are humans, but the model runs 1000 times a minute, where as humans perform the task 10 times a minute. That means the model makes 370 false accusations a minute, where a human makes only 3 a minute.

Or they spend 100x as many man-hours and achieve the same number of false accusations, but at a much higher cost to the taxpayers.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#120

Post by akomtu »

throwawaysea wrote: post #58

Considering how rampant property crime like car break-ins or catalytic converter thefts or shoplifting are in King County, this seems like a really bad decision. I would definitely like to see criminals identified, located, arrested, and sentenced. Not to mention, we just had a whole year of regular rioting in Seattle, with fiascos like CHAZ and daily illegal blockades of highways. This technology makes it much more…

Police isn't going to chase guys who stole your precious catalytic converter, even if you give PD scans of the bad guys' DLs. The face recognition data, on the other hand, is going to stay forever and ten years down the road, you may get flagged for sitting next to a drug dealer who's been evading police for years. And it will be your responsibility to explain what you did there that day ten years ago.
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