51–60 of 91 posts
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Ah yes, those american police who are so well known for their thoughtful and calm approach to suspected shoplifters in low income neighborhoods.
You have an alternative for handling law breakers aside from just letting them do it?
If the best face recognition software has an error rate of 0.08% [1] and Rite Aid serves 1.6M customers a day [2] what moron thought that was a good idea? [1] https://github.com/usnistgov/frvt/blob/nist-pages/reports/1N... [2] https://careers.riteaid.com/pages/company-info
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…
I think that an understanding of basic statistics still eludes a lot of people. Teaching it should be prioritized as much as teaching algebra. There are a lot of interesting real-life examples of how we get confused or tricked with statistics, enough to even keep the attention in class of the average high-schooler.
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"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?
"You don't think the technology will catch up?"
First, technology can not transcend GIGO. GIGO is fundamental.
Secondly:
"When a customer entered a store who supposedly matched an existing image on its database, employees would receive an automatic alert instructing them to take action — and the majority of the time this instruction was to “approach and identify,” meaning verifying the customer’s identity and asking them to leave." - the article
Face matching is not a hard problem for computers. Face matching is a hard problem, period. We humans seem to have dedicated hardware for it, and we are not generally a "dedicated hardware" sort of species when it comes to that sort of task. GIGO is fundamental for humans too.
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You're missing the parts where I said twice that I wasn't defending the practice.
I've found that adding that disclaimer is entirely useless. Like holding beef jerky in front of a dog and saying "I'm not offering this to you, just holding it here".
No one is disagreeing that 1 per store per day is a small number. We're disagreeing with the OPs statement that there's nothing wrong with one false positive accusation of shoplifting per store per day given the obvious consequences of such an accusation in the context of the US system of policing and global blame shifting to the machine, and that given such a context essentially any false positive rate is too high.
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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…
>In fact there is research that humans are not particularly good at matching people to photos... >(Someone is now going to suggest, right, that's why we should have computers do it instead, bringing the circle back around again... but just no). So where does this leave us for facial recognition? Should we ban both computer and human facial recognition, because they're both flawed? How would that be enforced? If a sto…
Where it leaves us is that it doesn't work, and it can't work. I see no evidence that there is some big reservoir of facial recognition quality to be extracted from the same basic data set. There is all sorts of reasons to believe that it is simply impossible to create a system that can be given a small percentage of the population as the targets and pick them out from millions of samples correctly.
Of all the disciplines, those trained in computer science should be aware of the concept that problems can be fundamentally hard or unsolvable.
However, I've been careful to phrase what I think may be fundamentally unsolvable as being related to "the same basic data set". Expansion of the data set provides other possibilities, and while I'm not ready to declare that adding that data will certainly solve the problem, I'm not ready to declare it as fundamentally unsolvable either. Add portable device tracking, gait analysis, speech analysis, anything else some clever clog can think of, and probably drop the requirement that de facto minimum wagers be asked to confront nominal criminals (I would assert there is no solution to the mismatched incentives there), and the problem may well be solvable. It would, however, require Rite Aid and anyone else planning to use this sort of thing to radically upgrade their hardware.
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"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…
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…
Banned lists are simply impossible to implement in general. Instead, police should be more active in shoplifting and organized theft cases. Someone shoplifts, it’s at least a felony, get them in the system, and apply penalties to repeat offenders. Having stores sort this out themselves is just crazy.
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>In fact there is research that humans are not particularly good at matching people to photos... >(Someone is now going to suggest, right, that's why we should have computers do it instead, bringing the circle back around again... but just no). So where does this leave us for facial recognition? Should we ban both computer and human facial recognition, because they're both flawed? How would that be enforced? If a sto…
"So where does this leave us for facial recognition?" Where it leaves us is that it doesn't work, and it can't work. I see no evidence that there is some big reservoir of facial recognition quality to be extracted from the same basic data set. There is all sorts of reasons to believe that it is simply impossible to create a system that can be given a small percentage of the population as the targets and pick them out…
You didn't answer the second part of my comment:
"How would that be enforced? If a store employee thinks they recognize someone from a few minutes ago, are they supposed to ignore that fact, and pretend that they're different people, on the off chance that the guy might be someone else[1]?"
>and probably drop the requirement that de facto minimum wagers be asked to confront nominal criminals
Are you saying this on the basis that they're not qualified to make an identification, or that confrontation would put them at risk of violence? If it's the latter it really doesn't have anything to do with facial recognition. It would still apply even if replaced facial recognition with a 100% accurate oracle.
Also, I think ppl would be surprised at the number of places that use this type of sw (maybe not ppl here.) Walmart has amazing sw that id's ppl before they even enter the store and regularly work with LE in helping find ppl.
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I've found that adding that disclaimer is entirely useless. Like holding beef jerky in front of a dog and saying "I'm not offering this to you, just holding it here".
So it's useless to say that A is wrong, but not because of B as claimed -- A is wrong for other reasons? That sure does limit discussion, and human reason generally. I mean, what do you suggest instead?