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Face-Recognition Software Fingers Suspects
eldavojohn writes, "In Holyoke and Northampton, Massachusetts, the police have a new member on the team. It's facial recognition software that will mine the 9.5 million state license images of Massachusetts residents. From the article: 'Police Chief Anthony R. Scott said yesterday he will take advantage of the state's offer to tap into a computer system that can identify suspects through the Registry of Motor Vehicle's Facial Recognition System.' The kicker is that this system been in use since May and has been successful." An article from Iowa a few weeks back mentions that software from the same company (Digimark) is in use to catch potential fraud in applying for driver's licenses in Alabama, Colorado, Kansas, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Texas. But offering the software and photo database as a resource to police departments raises the stakes considerably. I wonder what the false positive rate is.
Speaking as someone with (a) some common sense and (b) a formal CS background including image processing work, I think it's fair to say that it won't be zero.
I hope they have good procedures in place to immediately drop any proceedings against those who are misidentified, and that any automatic identification using this system is not somehow considered 100% reliable in court.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I fear "automatic" matching of criminals and trying to catch them, e.g., when they renew their license. Here is a true false-positive story that happened to me. I went to renew my driver's license, and the nice lady informed me that she could not issue me a license because I had had mine revoked in Maryland due to felony charges. Now, I have never committed a felony and I have never been to Maryland, let alone had a driver's license there. The nice lady was unpersuaded by this information. The database said I was a felon in Maryland, and that was the end of the story.
After much yelling about the problem, it was finally revealed that the real felon's name was exactly like mine except for one letter, and some moron doing data entry had gone ahead and decided we were the same person, based solely on name. Since this data problem was local to the "matching" system they had implemented, and not prevalent in who-knows-how-many databases, it was cleared up with a little investigation. However, if that "match" had been replicated into other systems, I could very well have had a nasty time clearing my name. The lady at the DMV was 100% convinced that I was a felon based on what the computer told her. Quite likely, no one else would have believed I was innocent either.
I can see this system playing havoc with people too. I have met people with no connection to each other but who nevertheless look virtually identical.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Sounds promising for law agencies but given that no caught suspects have been named and that criticism persists that face recognition technology is inherently unreliable, I wonder how much of this is just (sales) hype. I mean, come on, give us some real data where you can say it's effective because ... here are the names of the criminals we caught and it can all be credited to the system.
A whole lot of moustaches and beards become the new fasion...
I have a short barreled semi-automatic 12 gauge shotgun and other weapons loaded and ready to kill anyone (police or not) who tries to force their way into my home without showing a warrant first. I realize I would die in the process if it were a cop or SWAT team executing a so called "no-knock warrant", but some things are worth dying for, and the sanctity of my own home is one of them.
I had one criminal conviction when I was 18. It has dogged me my entire life. It is so upsetting to hear people say, oh well, as long as it's only *convicted criminals* who go into these insane database searches.
It's wrong to mass-search drivers' license pictures. It's also wrong to mass-search pictures of anyone who has ever been convicted of a crime. Many, many people have a regrettable misdeed in their past. It's wrong to continue to punish people who have, as was once said, "paid their debt to society."
Penitent and paranoid in California.
How does it handle identical twins?