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European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

politico.eu

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Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#91

Post by bko »

brightly-salty wrote: post #80
_ke2e wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you draw the line between statistics and ML?

When you can no longer transparently explain the reasoning behind a decision made based on the statistics, and instead have to just shrug and say “because the model told us so”. Accountability is very important in this issue.

Apart from neural networks most models are somewhat transparent in terms of reasoning. Neural networks would be the wrong model to use for this anyway.

For instance, decision trees can tell us if the population density between this range and the percentage of single family residence is between this range, the probability of a package being stolen is X.

Or regression could tell us that the square of the population density is positively correlated to this crime .

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#92

Post by simion314 »

sentinel wrote: post #81
simion314 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if the masks will be here forever then this guys complaining they can't use face recognition anymore in public places do not know this or they are betting that masks will be gone soon.

Rephrase please.

We have:

1 some people complaining that EU will block innovation if it is not allowed to do face recognition on public places or without consent. This people want to "disrupt/innovate"

2 we have the theory that people will wear masks so facial recognition is impossible

So 1 and 2 can't happen at the same time, if the guys from 1 need to innovate then they need no masks , if 2 will happen then the guys from 1 are complaining for nothing because the virus fucked up their disruptive ideas.

Sorry if I was unclear before.

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#93

Post by throwawaysea »

Closi wrote: post #58
bko wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> forbid the use of any AI/ML in predictive policing I don't get what this means. If you use basic statistical methods and realize that murders are more likely to occur in this location between these hours and adjust your police force accordingly, is this bad? Shouldn't police use basic statistical methods in determining effective policies?

> If you use basic statistical methods and realize that murders are more likely to occur in this location between these hours and adjust your police force accordingly, is this bad? It depends - These models are often non-transparent in terms of how they calculate, so what if the AI/model decides/calculate that a higher percentage of minorities in an area is a high predictor of crime, thus indirectly creates a policy…

I am still not clear on why that's a problem. If the goal is to reduce or deter crime, and there's an effective way to do that, why does it matter what correlation it has to outside demographic factors? I would argue that not containing crime in a known high-crime area just because of correlation to 'high levels of ethnic minorities' is itself racist, since that is itself an act of making race a factor in decision making. It also doesn't fit what minorities actually want. As an example, an overwhelming majority of Black Americans want policing to stay the same or increase (https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...), rather than decrease, despite what (predominantly-white) activists have been pushing for in the last year.

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#94

Post by throwawaysea »

Luker88 wrote: post #41
literallyaduck wrote: post #19

"Okay, we will send all our video surveillance to a third party intelligence partner with whom we own stock and they will do facial recognition and send us a list of suspects." - Most police and government entities. If the ban doesn't prevent 3rd party data access the above will likely happen.

No, that is still banned. The problem is not whether it's private or government. The problem are multiple, but the main two problems found in an experiment with public facial rec. in an Italian city (Como, and now in Udine, too) are: * municipalities should not have the power to conduct an investigation. That is a clear breach of the separation of powers. At least in Italy every access to information for investigatio…

Do you need consent to be photographed or filmed in public spaces? At least in the US, there is no expectation of privacy in public spaces and if someone wants to film you - whether an amateur photographer, a journalist, or a police officer - they are permitted to, simply because it is their constitutional right to do so.

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#95

Post by mrighele »

yholio wrote: post #84
smarx007 wrote: post #13

No, EU parliament is not calling for a ban on facial rec. They are proposing to: forbid using it indiscriminately in public places and to forbid the use of any AI/ML in predictive policing.

They should ban facial recognition though, in all and every context where the owner of the face has not given explicit consent. Nothing good can come of it.

Shouldn't this already be covered by GDPR thought? While we usually associate it to the Internet, tracking and cookies, from what I understand it is much more general and should include facial recognition (but of course IANAL etc.)

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#96

Post by Closi »

_ke2e wrote: post #72
Closi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you use basic statistical methods and realize that murders are more likely to occur in this location between these hours and adjust your police force accordingly, is this bad? It depends - These models are often non-transparent in terms of how they calculate, so what if the AI/model decides/calculate that a higher percentage of minorities in an area is a high predictor of crime, thus indirectly creates a policy…

Where do you draw the line between statistics and ML?

I think they are two different things - statistical modelling to me is about understanding relationships between data (i.e. we are highly confident that X and Y are correlated, and can infer a reason and thus put a policy around that based on open reasoning), and ML is about making predictions in new situations based on historical training data from different situations (but we can't necessarily infer the why).

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#97

Post by ginko »

throwawaysea wrote: post #94
Luker88 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is still banned. The problem is not whether it's private or government. The problem are multiple, but the main two problems found in an experiment with public facial rec. in an Italian city (Como, and now in Udine, too) are: * municipalities should not have the power to conduct an investigation. That is a clear breach of the separation of powers. At least in Italy every access to information for investigatio…

Do you need consent to be photographed or filmed in public spaces? At least in the US, there is no expectation of privacy in public spaces and if someone wants to film you - whether an amateur photographer, a journalist, or a police officer - they are permitted to, simply because it is their constitutional right to do so.

>Do you need consent to be photographed or filmed in public spaces?

You do in Europe. You essentially own the copyright to your face.

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#98

Post by bko »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #31
hef19898 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is already more than a first step. Using facial recognition as part of a legitimate investigation is an acceptable thing to do.

Only if face images also are acquired from a legitimate investigation (ideally a prior criminal conviction). Police cannot observe a face for years until they get a warrant then all suddenly have years of data, that is wrong.

What if someone is known to have committed a crime and police look at surveillance footage from nearby red-light cameras?

Or if that person is thought to have visited that location in the past, could they use that footage?

Which brings another question, what about facial recognition performed by a human? Investigators can presumably scour video or surveillance data by hand, but I guess just not by machine? Can they use face detection to simplify picking out faces? Zoom in and enhance?

It's very tricky when passing legislation to narrow in on the pernicious aspects of "facial recognition"

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#99

Post by viktorcode »

Consider the scenario which is now legal in the EU: A group of police personnel watching CCTV recordings and live feeds trying to find a suspect. They do it with their own eyes. They employ state of the art neural networks, trained on just a blurry photo and verbal description of the suspect. And it takes a lot of time.

The benefits of automating this step are so large, that the ban if it were to happen will be temporary. Facial recognition is already here, and it becomes more accessible every year.

I think instead of banning facial recognition we should find ways to prevent it from being abused. Something that would prevent democratic countries turning into another China or Russia of surveillance.

Re: European Parliament Calls for a Ban on Facial Recognition

#100

Post by Closi »

bko wrote: post #86
Closi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you use basic statistical methods and realize that murders are more likely to occur in this location between these hours and adjust your police force accordingly, is this bad? It depends - These models are often non-transparent in terms of how they calculate, so what if the AI/model decides/calculate that a higher percentage of minorities in an area is a high predictor of crime, thus indirectly creates a policy…

> It depends - These models are often non-transparent in terms of how they calculate, so what if the AI/model decides/calculate that a higher percentage of minorities in an area is a high predictor of crime, thus indirectly creates a policy that, for instance, areas with high levels of ethnic minorities require higher levels of policing or harsher restrictions (i.e. curfews, more CCTV e.t.c.). It's pretty simple to m…

> It's pretty simple to make the models transparent. Just select the inputs you want the model to have access to. You shouldn't be feeding your model the percentage of minorities in an area.

That doesn't make the model transparent, it just makes the input and output transparent, but it's still a black box.

It's nice to say that everyone will ensure that the model isn't fed with information which will allow it to make decisions or be biased based on sex / gender / race / income but in reality accidental racial bias has already shown up multiple times in applications where it should be easier to detect than an invisible 'crime prediction' algorithm that the general public won't have access to but public policy will be implemented on the basis of.

> I don't see how you make a meaningful separation between the two. Either you can use predictive models or not. It's hard to carve out "use predictive models but not too predictive". The more likely scenario is just not using any model and distributing police resources uniformly regardless of need.

I make a meaningful separation because one has clear logic which can be viewed to be unbiased, and the other has a black box calculating it.

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