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Tampa Police Give Up On Face Recognition Cameras
Saint Aardvark writes "The city of Tampa has given up on their face-recognition system attached to street surveillance cameras."
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Not disapointing at all. Sure the gee-whiz factor is pretty cool, but I for one value my freedom.
The idea that if every damn corner has a camera , and it can report to a central database who it sees then it means that every damn step I take is monitored by central government.
Philosophers like Micheal Foucault warned that discipline and obeyance is largely something that comes from people self regulating moderated by the effects of social and institutional surveilance (his critique was deeper than this, but this is a nutshell take on it).
And I sometimes think DISobeyance is a good thing sometimes. When some power that be pisses you off, its almost incumbent on you to give em a kick in the shins. Or rather: F*k illegitimate authority.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Did they every have one?
If they were the same quality cameras they use in say convenience stores or banks how could they work in the first place.
You know what I mean, black and white, fuzzy, jerky motion of peoples its shooting. I am sure we all have seen them on the 10 o'clock news with the news person say "Have you seen this man/women".
They are so bad that a few months ago a truck rolled into a local convenience store for a smash and grab. The cameras were not even able to make out the license plate at this one particular location.
One would think with all of today technologies, massive digital storage space and low prices for this hardware a decent system could be put in.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
This system seems to have tripped across a common problem with all id recognition systems - face, retina, voice, fingerprint, whatever. That is that they are used in two completely different modes.
One mode is the verification mode: this person claims to be Mr XYZ: is he? For this purpose, you only have one identity to match. If the answer comes out "maybe" instead of "yes" or "no", you can take another photo/scan/whatever. You can use extremely number intensive checking techniques because you are only trying to match ONE face/eye/... to ONE record. And the people being checked have at least some incentive to help their system (remove glasses, get a rescan when they have hair cut or grow beard). Systems can be made to do this very reliably in this mode - call it mode 1.
You can scale this up a little bit, while maintaining reliability. A car, for example, might recognise the voices of four registered drivers and adjust itself to suit, or a secure area form a few tens of people. Call this mode 1A.
The second mode is when you are trying to detect any one of a large list of possible people in a huge crowd, when they may have changed their characteristics significantly, either intentionalyy or unintentionally. Call this mode 2.
The trouble is that a lot of people assume that, if you can scale from 1 to 1A, the scaling from 1A to 2 will be linear. Which it won't. As well as the linear scaling of vastly more records to match (a linear scaleing), there is the the no-rescan, chjanged face, uncooperative facto, which acts quadratically with the fist. This means the problem explodes uncontrollably very soon.
Some of the people making this assumption should know better.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Not necessarily true. Visionics failed miserably as we all know and fell flat on their faces. However new technologies are being developed that greatly enhance facial recognition technologies such as 2d to 3d facial modelling Cyberextruder, wireless mobile, light compensating camera systems JonesCAM.tv, and high speed database systems. Facial recognition and other biometric technologies are merely in their infancy. Biometrics is at the point where the world wide web was in 1994. Its truly about to explode and privacy issues will come up. But I feel in this day and age with all the acts of terrorisim people will give up a little bit of privacy to feel safer. You will also see the greatest use of the technologies in casinos first and foremost. They have money and a ton less privacy issues.
The logical extension is cameras in homes. Get robbed? No problem, the police have all your video on file, and can just pull up the footage to see who broke into your home.
No, that's the illogical suggestion. A slippery slope fallacy, if you will. X does not follow Y.
Or maybe there are pesky political demonstrators marching down the street, interrupting traffic. With the cameras in place, it will be easy to convict them for something to shut them up for a while.
Protesters use their own camera's. It helps prevent police brutality. If a protestor takes part in an illegal protest they are well aware that they can get arrested - often times, that is the whole point. Police already use video provided by the media in cases such as these as well. Should we ban the free press because it's infringing on your (misguided) expectations of privacy in public?
It's not as much what their doing now, it's that the same arguments for what they are doing now can be used to justify real loss of freedom.
CCTVs in public are no different than having a cop on every corner as long as people are aware that the camera's are there. In fact, in a few ways, they are better than a cop. A camera can't be racist or sexist. A camera can't plant drugs on someone or entice them to commit a crime.
It's also much better to secure a conviction based on an image rather than someone's description as well. It has been proven numerous times that people are downright useless when it comes to recalling a person's face.
Basically, what I am saying is CCTV can put more criminals in jail and keep more innocent people out of jail if it is properly used.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.