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a letter from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles informing him to cease driving because his license had been revoked.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