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Facial Recognition Gone Wrong
An anonymous reader writes "John H. Gass hadn't had a traffic ticket in years, so the Natick resident was surprised this spring when he received a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles informing him to cease driving because his license had been revoked. It turned out Gass was flagged because he looks like another driver, not because his image was being used to create a fake identity. His driving privileges were returned but, he alleges in a lawsuit, only after 10 days of bureaucratic wrangling to prove he is who he says he is. And apparently, he has company. Last year, the facial recognition system picked out more than 1,000 cases that resulted in State Police investigations, officials say. And some of those people are guilty of nothing more than looking like someone else. Not all go through the long process that Gass says he endured, but each must visit the Registry with proof of their identity. Massachusetts began using the software after receiving a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Homeland Security as part of an effort to prevent terrorism, reduce fraud, and improve the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents that states issue."
As Whitey Bulger proved, it's not who you are, in Massachusetts, it's who you know. And now, who you look like.
Gently reply
Massachusetts began using the software... to prevent terrorism, reduce fraud, and improve the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents that states issue."
Came up snake-eyes on that role, dincha?
Kaprielian said the Registry gives drivers enough time to respond to the suspension letters and that it is the individual’s “burden’’ to clear up any confusion. She added that protecting the public far outweighs any inconvenience Gass or anyone else might experience. “A driver’s license is not a matter of civil rights. It’s not a right. It’s a privilege,’’ she said. “Yes, it is an inconvenience [to have to clear your name], but lots of people have their identities stolen, and that’s an inconvenience, too.’’
Tell me again why we need to raise taxes to close government deficits when they're spending money on crap like this?
... except my face apparently.
Anyone still wondering why privacy is such an important issue? I never want to hear the "I have nothing to hide" argument again.
And I cut myself with my own rapier wit by messing up a quote tag and using the wrong homophone.
Coffee needs to brew faster...
The ethnic population in Massachusetts has shrunk to one black and one asian.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
you're guilty until you prove your innocent
...because it would be unfair to put an innocent person on trial.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I don't see what the complaint is about. For years, the governments of the world have a no-fly list. If your name appears on it, you can't fly. It doesn't matter if you didn't do anything wrong, because Governments Are Always Right. Stop whining. :)
Don't stop where the ink does.
All you need to do is wear a welding mask as your Pastafarian religous headwear.
It works in Austria. G'day mate.
I hate my flatmate
After RTFA it appears that they're sending out maybe 1,500 of these every year, of which there are now 2 known problems, and his complaint is that he went without his license for a week or so while he cleared his name. Now he's sueing the state, for undisclosed sums, but even he would be hard pressed to really say he was out much other than a weeks wages. Given the 0.0013% failure rate, which results in a minor inconvenience this sounds like a VERY good system.
Massholes do all drive in the same aggressive manner
(I keed, I keed!)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
“Yes, it is an inconvenience [to have to clear your name], but lots of people have their identities stolen, and that’s an inconvenience, too.’’
So their defense is to list crimes that are worse than what they (law enforcement) are doing? I guess if you aim low, there's no chance of failure.
So if I went up to someone and said, "Hey, I know you think I'm a jerk because I call you harmful names but lots of people get raped in a parking lot and that's harmful too." They should thank their lucky stars I'm just calling them names and not raping them in a parking lot? Isn't that more of a threat than an excuse? I don't get it, is the Registry of Motor Vehicles threatening to steal or sell everyone's identity if they don't like being wrongly accused?
Facial recognition is not quite yet where it has to be. I worked on some of this stuff way back in college and the case studies we did on open face databases had abysmal recall rates. Basically it should be concluded that until your chance of a false positive is equivalent with winning the lottery, you shouldn't implement this. I say "winning the lottery" because it is such a terrible violation of rights that you should be prepared to pay out a million dollars to the poor citizen that is wrongly accused of some crime or infraction just based upon the features of their face. It's a high stakes game and if you're going to use it as a short cut, you better be prepared to accept a high amount of risk.
My work here is dung.
Nuff said!
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
I was looking at facial recognition algorithms some while back, the problem is you get too many false positives.
The problem with all of these algorithms is that it doesn't matter how accurate they are, they are only ever going to be a way to reduce the search space - you should never base a decision solely on the algorithm telling you "this is person X".
For example, some sales person says "Hey I've got this great facial recognition software it is 99.99% accurate!" (that's better than most facial algorithms out there) sounds pretty good right! - Wrong!. Suppose you set it up to look for one terrorist at Heathrow airport. The system is likely to flag up 650 000 people a year (based on 65 million passengers a year); of course it gets even worse if you start looking for more people.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I work for a company that develops neural network software which is used for face recognition on a number of airports. The problem we've had over and over again is that government officials and airport security personnel have great difficulty understanding some elementary statistics.
Let me give you an example. One version of the software offers 99.99% accuracy (symmetrical true positive and true negative), a number that always seems very impressive to various officials.
What they don't understand and what we have to remind them all the time is that they need to take into account the large number of faces that are scanned by the software and that a 0.01% false positive rate isn't something you can ignore.
For instance in a large airport that has say a million people getting scanned yearly it means that 100 people will be incorrectly flagged by the system. The prior probability that a traveler is a 'person of interest' is less than 1/100,000. Plugging the number into Bayes' theorem you get that when the system flags a passenger, the probability that the passenger was actually a person of interest is around 9%.
The officials typically only listen to the 99.99% figure and ignore the reality of the relatively large numbers of false positives when dealing with huge numbers of people. Subsequently they treat the people the systems flag much worse than they would if they realized that the probability of a 'catch' being correct was less than 10%. We've done our best to try to educate them but usually they don't want to listen as it's an uncomfortable truth and it's much more convenient to say that the system has an accuracy of 99.99%.
All you IAALs out there, can we get some ThisIsAdviceButNotLegalAdvice?
Motorcycle riders would escape this system, wouldn't they? And they are almost the only group allowed to wear helmets.
I thought I read (but it may have been an unreputable source) that we are allowed to wear helmets while driving our cars. Is that true? Or do the other characteristics of driving cars such as different view ranges negate that legality?
What if a cop pulls you over and actually states that he doesn't like you wearing your helmet?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Third Citizen
Your name, sir, truly.
CINNA THE POET
Truly, my name is Cinna.
First Citizen
Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.
CINNA THE POET
I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.
Fourth Citizen
Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.
CINNA THE POET
I am not Cinna the conspirator.
Fourth Citizen
It is no matter, his name's Cinna; pluck but his
name out of his heart, and turn him going.
Third Citizen
Tear him, tear him! Come, brands ho! fire-brands:
to Brutus', to Cassius'; burn all: some to Decius'
house, and some to Casca's; some to Ligarius': away, go!
Exeunt
- from Julius Ceasar
you work on the Future Attribute stuff?
The leading repliblican presidential candidate Governor Mitt Romney. Oh the Irony.
I got here through a series of tubes
maybe I read a different article but the description sounds like a database search; they compared copies of the license pictures and similar pictures were selected.
Because he could really drag me down with him.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
they spent millions of taxpayer dollars for a system that has no proven benefit, all it does is further erode civil liberties which 'our brave men and women in uniform' are said to have died to defend.
thats right. adolph hitler.
"I don't know where to begin"
-- Mein Kampf, 1987.
That was right before he killed all the Muslims.
So their defense is to list crimes that are worse than what they (law enforcement) are doing?
"Your Honor, it's true that I've stolen millions of dollars, and beaten people to within an inch of their lives, but remember that there are people out there who have KILLED hundreds of people!"
"You know, you make a really compelling argument there. You're free to go."
or, does this only work if you're in the government?
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
I did find the /. quote earlier today quite funny in this context. For those that missed it the quote was about QA and testing 1 in 1000 products to ensure that only 1 in 100 fails products work.
Time to offend someone
I wonder what the dimwits would say when I tell them I'm an identical triplet and loan my pickup truck to my brothers...It's as if the people that think facial recognition is so great have never heard of identical twins, triplets, etc. They might say something stupid like "you look enough different to tell apart" and I'd tell them them they're full of crap. This article being case in point.
Twin or more? ITA
Apache/Spring/La
"Last year, State Police obtained 100 arrest warrants for fraudulent identity, and 1,860 licenses were revoked as a result of the software, according to Procopio."
Okay, so that sounds to me like a 94.7% error rate among the positives. Unless they just kind of said, to over a thousand people with fraudulent licenses, "Oh, that's okay...just stop doing it, and we'll let it slide"?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Let Clarkson show you how it's done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3i-HRxf8z4#t=04m39s
(Skip to 4:39 if the link won't do it for you.)
Computers used to be tools used by a minority of professionals and hobbyists. But for almost 20 years now, certainly for the last 15 years, computers have become ubiquitous -- practically everyone in the United States has one on their desk and/or at home. And yet, after all these years of working with computers, people still naively, stupidly, assume that any output from a software program is 100% accurate and trustworthy. "The computer says it is so, therefore it must be true."
My unscientific, gut feeling is that this is a distinction within my generation -- the generation which is now running things -- who grew up with simple devices like digital watches and foolishly have extended the reliability and accuracy of those baubles to machines and software which they barely comprehend.
I hope and pray that the next generation, my daughter's generation, who have grown up with spam, spoofing, malware, faulty operating systems, and software inaccuracies, will have the intelligence to treat software as a useful tool to help us make decisions, rather than as founts of truth that make our decisions for us.
Proverbs 21:19
Being a member of a functioning society means you need to participate -- check your mail and respond when asked reasonable questions by state authorities...
A computer says I look like a lawbreaker, so I have to take time off work and get myself to a government office with my ID in order to prove the computer wrong. In what non-Fascist, non-totalitarian country is this a 'reasonable question'?
To me, this is about as 'reasonable' as having to be fondled and/or irradiated to board an airplane. This 'functioning society' is growing more disfunctional with each passing day.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
and that he had 3 weeks to resolve the issue by providing supporting data or his license would be suspended
It's actually about 5 business days.
Letter dated Mar 22, with a suspension date of Apr 1
Arrives at his PO box no earlier than Mar 24
Take out the weekend, and that leaves Mar 25 & 28-31
5 businsess days.
Yes, the other guy did get it done in the window. But that still seems a pretty short timespan for notification of a license revocation.
Add to the terms of sale:
"This product is to be used only by experts trained in the proper interpretation of statistics. Use by untrained personnel is likely to result in misleading results and mis-identification of people who are at low risk as high risk and vice-versa. [Company] is not responsible for mis-use of this equipment."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
A woman was (allegedly) deliberately rear-ended because she looks like a well-known criminal who was recently acquitted of killing her daughter.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
She had the nerve to claim in the article that it's the driver's burden to prove he's not a criminal. We know that driving is not a right, but people DO have rights to liberty and property, and arbitrary removal of people's vital privileges without a hearing affects both of these. What if they decide to start revoking licenses because your name's spelling is similar to someone else's? How about if they find some data that claims people with brown eyes are likely to be terrorists? Haughty bureaucrats like these need to be educated.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Not yet.
My question still stands. I am thinking ahead to the next iteration of this stuff.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
So far it is, however I am pursuing the Pandoras Box theory of the news, which is "what is the next step of the current iteration"?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
As far as I know, motorcycle riders wear the helmet when driving, not when inside the DMV having the the picture taken for their drivers licence.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
This guy was flagged ... it took 10 days to undo and resolve a process that was triggered by his original failure to respond.
That's a pretty amazing bit of transference right there. You couldn't even keep it straight in your own head from one sentence to the next.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Massachusetts began using the software after receiving a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Homeland Security as part of an effort to prevent terrorism, reduce fraud, and improve the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents that states issue.
In what way is using this technology to issue speeding tickets preventing terrorism, reducing fraud, improving the reliability and accuracy of personal identification documents?
If the money really was earmarked to be used in that specific way, I think somebody has some 'splainin to do.
However, the cameras take their pictures while driving, so there'd be nothing tocompare them to.... Except some other driver in a car who looks like them -- I see your point now.
That's an unacceptably high failure rate of 1 person in 6593 or 0.00015% and that's accurate only if only 1000 people have been affected since the software began being used. Bureaucrats may find that failure rate acceptable but it's an unwarranted exercise of power and an intrusion on people's daily lives. This exact kind of error was commented on by Paulos in his article "Who's Counting?: Privacy and Terrorists" (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/WhosCounting/story?id=97755&page=1) : "Assume for the sake of the argument that eventually ..., some system of total information-gathering becomes so uncannily accurate that when it examines a future terrorist, 99 percent of the time it will correctly identify him as a pre-perpetrator. Furthermore, when this system examines somebody who is harmless, 99 percent of the time the system will correctly identify him as harmless. In short, it makes a mistake only once every 100 times.
Now let's say that law enforcement apprehends a person by using this technology. Given these assumptions, you might guess that the person would be almost certain to commit a terrorist act. Right? Well, no. Even with the system's amazing data-mining powers, there is only a tiny probability the apprehended person will go on to become an active terrorist."
Can't work without a car in most of this country. If the gov't makes it too hard to keep driving, just quit and go on welfare because you can't get to work.
Blar.
No, it works if you work on Wall Street too.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
According to the clerk at a convenience store near my house, there is someone who looks just like me and comes in all the time to buy cases of Bud Light. He commented on it because I was purchasing a six-pack of a local craft brew, instead of "the usual". Granted, the consequences aren't quite as harsh as being misidentified as a chronic traffic violator, but being mistaken for a Budweiser fan is almost as offensive.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
this system uses the stock photos used for created the Drivers Licence (the one snapped at the DMV)..
but your question is - Motorcycle riders in some places are required to ware helmets - the rest of us it is optional..
If you want to ware a helmet in your car go for it - i do it all the time on the track and have done it before on the interstate (it was next to me as i was returning from the track - and given the weather and traffic situation i felt there was a very very strong need for it, luckily there wasn't).
what is illegal in some places (and where i live) is wearing headphones.. and i wish they would enforce it, too many people driving around not paying attention.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
wanna bet that someday
1 when you get your motorcycle endorsement you will have to report to the office WITH YOUR HELMET(s)
2 they will issue you (and charge you for) some sort of bar code sticker to be placed on your helmet so that photo id systems can recognize (you)
3 make it illegal to use an "unregistered" helmet
heck this would even be useful if they did a check of the helmet at the same time (for fitness of use ect)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
First you have to understand that there is no national ID card. Passports kind of fit the bill but you are not required to have one. Social Security numbers are getting close to mandatory but are not – and lack almost any personal detail information [Picture, etc.]. Partly this is due to the legacy that this was a state’s reasonability, not Federal. Partly this is due to the historical opposition of a centralized database from the individualist types.
Second, just consider the phrase: “state issued picture ID.” Yes, it start our as a driver’s license, but now it just a plain old ID card. Sure, some have a “Automobile”, “Motorcycle”, or “Commercial Driver” stamp on it – but view those as extras that get tossed on top of the basic ID card. I have never heard anybody having an issue getting a state ID card because of driving ability.
In this case the person’s driver license was being revoked because the state asserted [incorrectly] that he was a crappy driver and that he was driving under a false ID. The ID portion was not suspended – just the driving privilege.
I understand and approve where the state is coming from. It looks like this is a combination of a false positive [I wonder how many false negatives there are???] and a 2nd rate notification process.
You know the party trick of asking if anyone in a group has the same birthday as someone else? In a 40-person group, you have would expect to have about 11% of the people match. Surprise, you have a 90% chance of a match! That's because there are 720-odd different pairs in 40 people (the Birthday Paradox)
Now ask what happens if you have 20 criminals and 2000 honest travelers that that you're trying to match using a programs that has a 99.99 accuracy, or 0.001 error rate. My leaky brain says you have the same 90% chance of a match... or in this case, a mismatch and the arrest of an innocent person.
I suspect, therefor, that trying to match bad drivers will produce a scary false positive rate!
--dave
[I also suspect I have the group sizes wrong: someone with a brain, please feel free to fix the numbers]
davecb@spamcop.net
From TFA, "Kaprielian said the Registry gives drivers enough time to respond to the suspension letters "....Jesus, is it too much to expect a reporter to uh, report, exactly how much time we're talking about? The article states that the Registry sent a notice on March 22 that his license would be terminated on April 1. That doesn't sound like much time to me, but we never learn if there were any earlier warnings sent to Gass, and it appears that our genius of a reporter NEVER THOUGHT TO ASK.
God, what passes for journalism these days just makes me weep.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Wow, yeah. I guess they didn't pay enough for that program, huh?
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Well it is the logical next step....
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
We are hearing more like this every day. If we as a People don't act decisively to correct the course of our country, we will soon have no recourse but to shed blood. Note, this is not a partisan question of which party holds power, because the reality is that both are fronts for the same power. They are so corrupted and the system so thoroughly gamed that there are few and rapidly dwindling non-violent courses left to a People who want their will done. I love my life and my kids and my family and my country, but I would gladly sacrifice the first if it meant the latter could live in freedom. I believe there are still many patriots from both sides of the political spectrum who would as well.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
guilty until proven innocent
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Being a member of a functioning society means you need to participate -- check your mail and respond when asked reasonable questions by state authorities...
.
Functioning?
Society?
Need?
Participate?
Asked?
Reasonable?
State?
Authorities?
I have a problem with every word I put a question mark behind, and that's just with one of your sentences.
You can't handle the truth.
I am over 35, and it's time for you to wake up.
You can't handle the truth.
What is it with these stupid Arkansas jokes? Arkansas is just as developed and civilized as anywhere else in the USA. One can find low-class, uneducated people in every state and every major city in the country, even the world. By making such inane comments, you're showing your ignorance or prejudice. Grow up.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Governments need to learn to rely less on identification to get shit done. We put so much power into these tiny pieces of easily falsified information, it's a wonder this society even functions at all. Real life does not actually look like hollywood crime dramas. Mob bosses don't hide in plain sight, and everyday hoodlums don't go around getting plastic surgery to impersonate Average Joes.
Cops don't need face scanning software, they need functioning brains, apparently a rare luxury these days. You'd think if someone was flagged to have their license revoked, they might have arrested that person a few times in the past. Why didn't they revoke the license back then, in person ? It's a whole lot easier to identify a repeat DUI offender when you're staring at his dented bumper and glassy eyes. If cops no longer have the guts to confront oh-so-terrifying traffic offenders face-to-face, maybe they should choose a less stressful career, like a Wal-Mart greeter ?
I've dealt with this sort of nonsense on a few occasions. In one particular incident, they couriered a license revocation notice to the wrong address, yet somehow sent a cop to my apartment complex on the very morning the order came into effect. He parked outside the gate and waited for me to drive out, nailing me with a viciously steep fine. A few weeks later my license was reinstated, and they blamed it on a computer glitch. Well I just happen to be a computer guy, I wasn't buying it. Eight months and a lawyer later, they finally fessed up that the cop used to date some chick I was seeing, and he got his brother at the DMV to add a few unpaid fines to my file. I'll let you imagine what happened to them afterward... But the point is, this facial recognition bullshit is just another excuse for convenient "glitches" to slip through the system. I'm not saying the software is perfect, it never is, but the humans manning it are infinitely more flawed.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
gknoy said,
However, the cameras take their pictures while driving, so there'd be nothing tocompare them to.... Except some other driver in a car who looks like them -- I see your point now.
Yes, thank you! I had to endure about three RTFA comments because of my bad phrasing.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Not having been evaluated, the technology will then be described as "having been deployed in Maasechusetts without any adverse findings reported" (because the report wasn't written, reported or published).
Ka-ching! Another victory for lawyerly double-think over the masses. Can I have my peanut now?
Caveats - have to classify the records, so you can't have pesky workers read and write up the report pro bono publicio. That would destroy the economics of the farce.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"