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a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles informing him to cease driving because his license had been revoked.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."

Comments

Nice work.

[geminidomino]

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?

Guilty until proven innocent

[yincrash]

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.’’

Re:Guilty until proven innocent

[Vanderhoth]

According to the statement you're guilty until you prove your innocent, so much for innocent until proven guilty. I'm sure using tax dollars and grants to use a system that illegally convicts innocent people without a trial or hearing is considerable different then a criminal stealing someones identity.

Re:Guilty until proven innocent

[indyogb]

“A driver’s license is not a matter of civil rights. It’s not a right. It’s a privilege..."

So says the government(s). I disagree. Just because something isn't specifically protected by the Constitution doesn't mean it isn't a right. Travel by the standard means of the time (in this case, automobiles), is a natural right. Also, it is nice that a system used to "prevent terrorism" is being used to suspend driver's licenses of ordinary, non-terrorist, citizens.

Government(s) in the US are at flank speed ahead towards power and control. Even the court system is on their side (e.g. imminent domain for increased tax revenues from a few years back, recent rulings about police entering homes w/o warrants in IN, etc., etc.). In the end, it is all about the $$$. Where is it, who has it, and how can we get more of it.

Re:Guilty until proven innocent

[Dunbal]

You don't need a license to drive a car. You need a license to drive a car on a PUBLIC ROAD. You have an inherent right to drive. When you want to drive in a public place, you have to prove that you meet certain standards for the safety of other public road users (thus the driving test). A license is not a "gift" from the government, it is in fact a responsibility that the government has ensured you are a safe vehicle operator. Eventually this has turned into an additional source of revenue and now, apparently, a "privilege". Beware of people who say rights are privileges, they are the ones who would see you in chains.

I've got nothing to hide

[captainpanic]

... 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.

Re:I've got nothing to hide

[Gideon Wells]

I tried explaining the TSA mess to my sister and mother this weekend. They said it sounded terrific that they were checking elderly people with diapers and making wheel chaired bound people prove they needed a wheelchair.

Mother: "We'll be safer."
Sister: "I have nothing to hide."

Me:"Terrorists have announced plans to start trying to hide bombs surgically implanted in their skin."

Mother: "So... they have to perform surgery mid-flight to blow themselves up? *laugh*"

Me: "Remote detonation. First time they catch someone attempting this the TSA will start requiring medical records if they see an operation scar."

Sister: "So what? I got nothing to hide. In fact, I think it is a good idea for them to have our medical records to make sure our flights are safe."

They are the first to Google people, gossip, etc. My sister has been caught looking at homes with binoculars at night. When a family friend joking texted her saying he could see her at night you'd be surprised how fast her translucent curtains were replaced with thick drapes. Some people don't care about privacy until it affects them.

In other news

[larry bagina]

The ethnic population in Massachusetts has shrunk to one black and one asian.

Oblig. Star Trek reference

[TapeCutter]

you're guilty until you prove your innocent

...because it would be unfair to put an innocent person on trial.

Re:Oblig. Star Trek reference

[cHALiTO]

I used to work with fingerprint identification systems for some police forces, and that's how they do it. AFIS systems are only a tool to narrow down and (enormously) speed up the candidate search process. The decision to declare a match is ALWAYS up to a human expert, after careful review of the results from the system.
The only kind-of-exception to this are from portable devices the police uses for example at football matches, on which they have loaded the patterns for wanted persons. They scan everyone going into the stadium, and if they got a match (automatic, 99.9% accurate, but false positives ARE possible), the person is taken into the nearest police station for a more serious AFIS check, with an expert determining if there's a match.

Instant revoking of licenses or serious decisions like that shouldn't be left to automatic systems, no matter how accurate they might be. This has to be always a human decision, and one of the main reasons is that humans have to take responsibility for their actions and can be held accountable. The identification system is just a tool to help people do their jobs better/faster (not to do it for them).

Pastafarianism will solve this

[TenDollarMan]

All you need to do is wear a welding mask as your Pastafarian religous headwear.

It works in Austria. G'day mate.

Bayesian statistics

[denoir]

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%.

Re:Bayesian statistics

[captainpanic]

If the 99.99% figure is apparently misleading, and if the 99.99% figure is apparently the only one that the politicians look at, stop presenting the 99.99% figure!!!

Re:Bayesian statistics

[djmurdoch]

The 99.99% figure is the only one that is reliable. The 9% figure depends on things that vary over time outside the control of the company selling the software, i.e. the proportion of true terrorists (or other true targets) in the passenger stream.

The problem is the education system, that doesn't teach even basic numerical reasoning to people who need to use it all the time.

Re:Nothing to see here...move along

[jenningsthecat]

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.