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King County, WA bans facial recognition software

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Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#81

Post by zdragnar »

paxys wrote: post #65
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 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 to an image with a name attached to it. Like you said, no different than a human would do, with all of their own biases in play. We aren't talking minority report here, so there's no reason to think this is a hurdle that would be difficult to overcome.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#82

Post by FridayoLeary »

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…

At least ban speed cameras! I think we can all agree on that. Also, all those cameras that detect when you make illegal turns and send you nasty fines through the post.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#83

Post by tick_tock_tick »

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 math is incorrect with Black people's faces more than White people's faces.

That's a limiting aspect of the physical world less light back = less details. Flagging footage for manual review doesn't need to be bias free just the end component that actually effects the person in the video.

Yelling fire in a crowded theater is legal.....

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#84

Post by matz1 »

dabbledash wrote: post #79
matz1 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So then that is the actual problem, try to fix that problem instead of banning it. Allowing people to own gun also make it trivially easy to kill people. So ban gun ?

If there’s a way to make it impossible for the government to use facial recognition to monitor people other than legally banning them doing so, it’s hard to imagine it.

why would i want to make it impossible for government to monitor people ?

government monitoring people by itself is not a problem, government monitoring people to harm people is the problem.

What need to be fixed is the usage of tools to harm people, not the tool itself.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#86

Post by _fullpint »

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…

The lack of understanding of the downfalls and conflicts with facial recognition with justice system and this post is every reason why it shouldn’t be near the justice system.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#87

Post by kderbyma »

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 about security and convenience.....it's a tradeoff so it's impossible to achieve both perfectly.

typically you find the balance....right now you are suggesting that the improvement is a convenient way of increasing security but the reality is, that security in one sense can lead to loss of it in another.

example. Assuming all things are Good and no possibility for corruption then it would be purely beneficial....but since those aren't controls, and not realistic either, we cannot sacrifice security for convenience in this case.....if that makes sense.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#88

Post by 542458 »

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 mean, FISA warrants had (have?) a 99+% approval rate despite many applications having serious deficiencies.

Utah’s e-warrant program has a 98% approval rate. Some warrants are approved in less than 30 seconds.

Warrants across the US are frequently approved on evidence as shaky as a single anonymous tip.

The problem (at least in my opinion) isn’t that facial recognition itself is inherently evil, it’s that:

a) There are no standards around the algorithms themselves in terms of reliability. Worse still, this can inadvertently lead to serious racial bias.

b) It can launder lousy evidence (this person looks vaguely like this grainy photo) into solid scientific evidence (the algorithm says it’s a 99.5% match!) providing justification for all sorts of warrants and raids on even flimsier ground.

c) It creates lousy incentives in favour of creating a surveillance state. The police already have out-of-control hardware budgets, and many don’t like the idea of that budget being used to monitor and record people at all times they’re in public.

If we had better police and court systems and better privacy law this might not have been necessary - but we live in the world we live in so I can see why this county would do this.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#89

Post by madhadron »

WalterBright wrote: post #47
zorpner wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we forced the cops to wear their badge numbers, we'd know who was committing the violence and they could be prosecuted for it.

If someone is beating me, I'm not likely to be able to focus on his number and memorize it. When a thug put his gun in my face to rob me, I later could describe the gun in great detail, but not his face.

But with all the smartphones around, someone can get the officer's badge number hopefully while they're beating you.

Re: King County, WA bans facial recognition software

#90

Post by akomtu »

geephroh wrote: post #61
throwaway1959 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You mean the rampant hate speech and misinformation enabled by 1A?
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