Face-Scanning Loses by a Nose in Palm Beach

Rio writes: "A story from myCFnow.com reports that Palm Beach International Airport officials said face-scanning technology will not become part of their airport's security system." Looks like the ACLU was right. Checking a database of 15 employees, the technology gave false-negatives -- failed to recognize the test subjects -- over 50% of the time. A spokesperson said, "There's room for improvement." The Pentagon said the same thing in February. The false-positive rate is more important -- it isn't mentioned, but even if it were just 0.1%, Bruce Schneier argues, it'd be useless.

Comments

Try telling the Aussies that.

[serps]

Airport face identification isn't practical? Try telling the Australian Government that. They are trialling a hybrid face-recognition/biometric passport system that sends shivers up my spine.

Re:only 15 employees?

[Triskaidekaphobia]

If it is a small sample then a high false negative rate is even worse.

If it can't identify 1 of 15, then what chance has it got of finding 1 person out of millions?

No, it's 99.99% Read Cryptogram

[AftanGustur]

Bruce talks about 99.9%, so there's 0.1% left, not 0.01% as the story says right now.

No, sorry, just read Bruce's Cryptogram

Suppose this magically effective face-recognition software is 99.99 percent accurate. That is, if someone is a terrorist, there is a 99.99 percent chance that the software indicates "terrorist," and if someone is not a terrorist, there is a 99.99 percent chance that the software indicates "non-terrorist." Assume that one in ten million flyers, on average, is a terrorist. Is the software any good?

No. The software will generate 1000 false alarms for every one real terrorist. And every false alarm still means that all the security people go through all of their security procedures. Because the population of non-terrorists is so much larger than the number of terrorists, the test is useless. This result is counterintuitive and surprising, but it is correct. The false alarms in this kind of system render it mostly useless. It's "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" increased 1000-fold.