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King County, WA bans facial recognition software

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Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#181

Post by ALittleLight »

bozzcl wrote: post #174
hik wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me ask you a question: How many unarmed people were killed by police in 2020?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... According to this, 405, which is 405 too many.

I only see 50 there. Are you sure you're looking at unarmed 2020 and not for all years?

I also just looked at a few unarmed shootings at random to get an idea of what they were like. Of the three I looked up I saw one guy who was shot while fighting with a police officer after being discovered at the scene of a burglary. One guy who was shot after a car chase when, after they had caught him, he got behind the wheel of a police car and the police shot him to prevent another chase. One guy, after stabbing someone to death and being approached by multiple police officers, faked a draw to "suicide by cop". My point is, I don't think it's even clear that all (or even most) of the 50 unarmed shootings are unjustified.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#182

Post by an_opabinia »

hik wrote: post #152
an_opabinia wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or a means to Defund The Police, if that's your thing. Are there many sincere researchers studying flaws in facial recognition advocating its unequivocal ban forever? Joy Boulamwini: > At a minimum, Congress should require all Federal agencies and organizations using Federal funding to disclose current use of face-based technologies. We cannot afford to operate in the dark. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-…

Timnit Gebru is not a sincere researcher, in any respect. She has proven to be willing to act in bad faith on numerous occassions when she is losing an argument. Not to say that a researcher is forbidden to hold any political opinions whatsoever - but her research is primarily political activism, and when political activism goes into research, what you get out is political activism, not research. The whole Algorithmi…

I don't know dude. I understand there are a lot of impressions. For the purpose of furthering curiosity, it was easy to punch in their positions into Google and read their raw, reasonable words. You're welcome to highlight a bad faith argument, in the raw words.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#183

Post by wang_li »

abeppu wrote: post #170
wang_li wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how you read the specific text of the statute, I think they banned the usage of electronic mug shot databases. >"Facial recognition" means an automated or semiautomated process that assists in identifying, or verifying the identity of, an individual based on the physical characteristics of an individual's face. So I have a still from security camera footage. And I have 50,000 mug shots stored in the mug…

If when you take people's mug shots, you also record their age, gender and race (should you?), then you can filter by those characteristics without the automated process being "based on the physical characteristics of an individual's face" -- you'd just be filtering on a DB column like any other. But if you didn't record or have access to those fields, and you tried to infer age, gender and race from the photo, and t…

> then you can filter by those characteristics without the automated process being "based on the physical characteristics of an individual's face" -- you'd just be filtering on a DB column like any other.

A case agent looks at the still photo from security footage, concludes the person is male and white. They put that information into the mug shot database and it returns the subset of all mugshots that are male and white. They have just used a semi automated system to assist to ascertain the identity of the person in the security footage based on the physical characteristics of their face. This is forbidden by the ordinance.

>what if your system is much more accurate guessing ages for some racial groups than others, or more accurate in distinguishing between white and latinx than between latinx and asian? Suddenly your "filtering" process can also have a bias problem, where some people are more likely than others to be included in the results for a query which shouldn't actually include them.

What if it isn't? Doesn't matter. It's a tool to attempt to match two photos. If a tool is not as effective due to the way light and different skin tones interact, it just limits the leverage factor of the tool. It doesn't make it wrong and it isn't an infringement on people's rights. We use DNA matching even though it can't distinguish twins and sometimes it comes back and says it's a close match for Bob which leads them to suspect Bob's brothers family, e.g. Golden State Killer. I fail to see why tools have to be perfect or not be useful.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#184

Post by waiseristy »

abrahamepton wrote: post #148
waiseristy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a read, but this feature from KOMO goes over the Seattle situation pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WijoL3Hy_Bw

That piece, and KOMO's larger project, are toxic right-wing propaganda. Please don't consider that a reliable source.

I don't even want to begin to engage upon what you purport KOMO to be, because I don't really care... But the people and lives that video shows are real. Do you have left-wing friendly media pieces to balance it out? This is not something that is typically portrayed positively in media in Seattle, so it's not easy to find good news

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#185

Post by newscracker »

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…

Your (poorly informed view, IMO) of the world does not consider immoral and illegal activities carried out by law enforcement and those with authority. Stalking, and harassment and abuse based on stalking, is a problem. Making it easier and simpler with facial recognition causes bigger problems. And this is just one example.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#186

Post by natch »

zdragnar wrote: post #178
natch wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then it would actually make things better. If you are stuck living somewhere where music is illegal, and you happen to listen to some music on the sly and get caught by a perfect system, and punished, how is that better? Better would be if people can live freely without having to worry about a perfect system tracking their every action. There is no person alive on earth today who does not do things that would get t…

No, I want them to be held accountable for when they are wrong, and the hypothetical example of a good facial recognition system removing human bias was an example of that, and could protect people from the other example the post I replied to, which was search warrants granted under a single unreliable source's statement. Facial recognition isn't going to care that you procured illegally distributed copies of protect…

>isn't going to care that you procured illegally distributed copies of protected works

Sorry, I wasn't clear maybe, but somehow you misunderstood me.

I wasn't talking about pirated music.

I was pointing out that some regimes have laws that forbid listening to music, period.

Fixing bias doesn't help when all it does is help accurately catch innocent people who in fact were accurately detected to be doing innocent things, and punishes them for doing those innocent things because those innocent things are illegal in that country for no good reason.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#187

Post by natch »

zdragnar wrote: post #179
bob_roberts wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then it isn't making things substantially worse At least in the United States, any encounter with law enforcement can potentially end in violence, so anything that makes it easier to get a questionable warrant will make things worse.

As the parent post pointed out, questionable warrants are already supposedly trivial to get. This system, being more auditable as a single source rather than individual anonymous statements, means that it is far less likely to stick around if it consistently punts out bad matches.

Why aren't you afraid of good matches? Good matches open up far more horrifying possibilities.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#188

Post by Smarjerry »

yarg wrote: post #144
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…

Watch Netflix' Coded Bias if you want a deeper understanding of the political motivations here - and they really are almost purely political. I'm not for an instant saying that there aren't any implications in terms of how the technology can and should be deployed - but some people just want to be angry and offended despite a lack of understanding of what they're actually on about. Facial recognition struggles to acc…

That's all very true but any person using their own eyesight would have the same issues. This should be used as a narrowing of a search, same as Google's algorithm. Google doesn't give you the answers to your questions, they hopefully point you in the right direction, but sometimes don't give you a clear answer at all, but in clear and obvious cases it does match. Google also has programmed biases, but we all accept Google is one of the best tools.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#189

Post by yarg »

Smarjerry wrote: post #188
yarg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch Netflix' Coded Bias if you want a deeper understanding of the political motivations here - and they really are almost purely political. I'm not for an instant saying that there aren't any implications in terms of how the technology can and should be deployed - but some people just want to be angry and offended despite a lack of understanding of what they're actually on about. Facial recognition struggles to acc…

That's all very true but any person using their own eyesight would have the same issues. This should be used as a narrowing of a search, same as Google's algorithm. Google doesn't give you the answers to your questions, they hopefully point you in the right direction, but sometimes don't give you a clear answer at all, but in clear and obvious cases it does match. Google also has programmed biases, but we all accept…

Not to the same extent - we've got good enough binocular vision and pretty good handling of dynamic lighting.

Compare that with the usable colours and bad blacks of standard absolute colour encoded video.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#190

Post by kyleblarson »

abrahamepton wrote: post #148
waiseristy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a read, but this feature from KOMO goes over the Seattle situation pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WijoL3Hy_Bw

That piece, and KOMO's larger project, are toxic right-wing propaganda. Please don't consider that a reliable source.

Have you walked through Pioneer Square or down Third Avenue in Seattle recently?
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