King County, WA bans facial recognition software

>I think facial recognition just needs some PR help

They are making their own bed in many cases. Here's one of several interesting moves by Clear View AI, for example: https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1220876741515702272

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 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.

In effect, the number of people you bothered falsely accusing is still less when done manually, simply because it can't scale.

Lastly, there's an argument that the police shouldn't be too efficient, because some crimes might be better off existing in a grey area.

People do fear police supremacy and police states, the idea that they can find you for j-walking or jumping a fence as a dare, etc. Or that the state could become authoritarian, but you'd have no way to fight back as rebels due to advance tech of surveillance the police would have, etc. I'm not saying those are justified, but I think it plays into it, people are fine saying that only the highest risk cases are worth pursuing, but if a tech comes along that lets police pursue all cases, it might start to feel abusive to people.

P.S.: I'm neither against nor in support of a ban here, I'm still making up my mind, just answering some of the reasons I know off for being for the ban.

Sure...just give the public the same access that police have. Then if dirty cops break the law or mislead the public, everyone will know.

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 likely that the police department can actually enforce the law as it exists on the books by identifying and locating these criminals. It also makes it much more likely that home surveillance footage from law-abiding residents can be put to use.

I do not think this technology is intrusive or invasive as the quoted council member claimed. Recording in public spaces is completely legal to begin with. And we can always limit the use of facial recognition by police departments to cases with either a warrant or probable cause, to prevent completely uncontrolled surveillance. The allegations of racial biases are also not meaningful. In practice, false positives in machine vision algorithms are contained by maintaining a human in the loop to verify matches. It is trivial to use this technology in a way that matches human-levels of accuracy with this layer of safety in place.

Banning this kind of technology outright feels like a fear-driven decision by luddites. That's a charitable take - a more direct perspective is that the politicians and interest groups supporting this ban are looking to protect their favored groups, which very frankly seems to include criminals.

Do you also apply this reasoning to fingerprinting, DNA analysis, tire prints, and ballistics comparisons? Like most people, I don't understand all of the failure modes involved with those technologies, but they do seem to be helpful tools for bringing violent criminals to justice.

I also think eyewitness testimony has many failure modes. If anything, it's probably less accurate than current facial recognition tech and biased in ways that are harder to determine. Yet I wouldn't want to ban all use of eyewitness testimony.

Banning facial recognition seems like overkill. Instead, it makes more sense to restrict it so that we can get the good parts (catching violent criminals) without the bad parts (oppressive surveillance state). Instead of banning all fingerprinting and DNA analysis, we have rules for how police can use them. Why not have similar rules for facial recognition?