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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a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles informing him to cease driving because his license had been revoked.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."
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.’’
in Massachusetts, it's who you know
And here I was thinking the key question is whether your last name was "Kennedy".
I am officially gone from
... 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.
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
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.
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%.
They don't give numbers for Mass but they do for NY.
New York detected roughly 3,500 instances of possible fraud, resulting in 600 arrests since a system was adopted in 2010.
Looks like about 80% fail rate to me.
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
Please stop saying that identity can be stolen. If someone makes themselves look like you it is impersonation. If they use information associated with you to bamboozle the weak-ass authentication used by financial institutions, it is fraud.
In neither case has your identity been stolen. A man's wife would not sleep with a different man simply because the second man had a bank account in her husband's name, and so on.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
A man's wife would not sleep with a different man simply because the second man had a bank account in her husband's name
I think you underestimate what some women would do for money.
I was commenting about the authentication done by banks, not the expected behavior of the baser members of the species (I would clarify that I believe there are many men and women willing to nearly anything for very little).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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)
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