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King County, WA bans facial recognition software

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Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#61

Post by geephroh »

throwaway1959 wrote: post #53
diamond_hands wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have survived as a society for long time without the need for this. You could say the same thing about the 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments. "what about the children"

You may be right. The facial recognition does seem to interact with the 4th amendment, at least. But then it happens in the public place? I don't know the answer to that one. I fear that in the age of social media and Antifa, the protections that we had before are no longer enough. Now we have additional actors on the streets who may turn to physical violence on a dime. I feel that the streets should be free from phy…

Well, there's another amendment to the US constitution that is a substantial contributor to the level and severity of physical violence on our streets. But we won't talk about that...

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#63

Post by matz1 »

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…

> Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks

Sure, but like any other tools it also enable all sorts of new benefit.

The preferable action would be to take advantage of the benefit while also try to fix whatever it is that cause problem with the tools instead of simply banning it.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#64

Post by bsenftner »

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.

The issue here is a complete lack on the behalf of the FR industry from impressing the importance of human oversight, and then validating that human oversight does not suffer racial blindness. It is pointless if the operators of an FR system cannot distinguish between similar age siblings or cousins of the ethnicity they are seeking via FR. This is far too often the case, and those police officers operating an FR system could simply be replaced by same ethnicity operators to receive significantly less bias.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#65

Post by paxys »

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 recolonization or AI in general, could anyone really tell you why the computer decided to flag your face and why another similar one was rejected? 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? Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias?

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#66

Post by loeg »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #59
cryptoz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article and discussion is not about privacy. The people against facial recognition are against it, at least in this case, because it is racist - or at least, it produces racist outcomes. Removing bias from facial recognition is the problem you would have to solve to appease the concerns right now, not privacy. When innocent minorities are getting locked up because the software running it was trained with poor dat…

Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them. It’s a shortcut for manually digging through databases to identify people. Any identification is followed up with investigation, just as it would b…

> Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them.

The article directly contradicts both of your claims:

> "Facial recognition technology is still incredibly biased and absolutely creates harm in the real world," said Jennifer Lee with ACLU Washington. "We now know of three black men who have been wrongfully arrested and jailed due to biased facial recognition technology.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#67

Post by didibus »

Bostonian wrote: post #2

Suppose looters ransack a store when it is closed and are caught on video. Why wouldn't you want facial recognition software to identify them? Do you have a right to privacy when you break into a building? You can support some uses of facial recognition without wanting it to be used to say ticket people for jaywalking.

> Do you have a right to privacy when you break into a building

To find the person who appears on video footage filmed in the building, you need to spy on everyone and then match the face from the footage against the face of everyone else walking about. All of those other people did not break into the building, yet for this to work, their privacy is expunged by having their movement and faces filmed, tracked and catalogued so that the FR software can cross-match them.

I think there is a privacy argument here. If I didn't commit any crime, maybe it shouldn't be that my face gets recorded in some database alongside my latest location.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#69

Post by geephroh »

gnopgnip wrote: post #19
FridayoLeary wrote: post #12

What's the point when they can buy the information from private companies?

The CA ban includes the police using facial recognition services from private companies as well

And the same applies to KC governmental authorities as well.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#70

Post by wizzwizz4 »

matz1 wrote: post #63
Arainach wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks Sure, but like any other tools it also enable all sorts of new benefit. The preferable action would be to take advantage of the benefit while also try to fix whatever it is that cause problem with the tools instead of simply banning it.

That's what they're doing.

The problem is automated identification of faces. The solution is banning that.

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