Dubai Police To Use Google Glass For Facial Recognition

cold fjord sends word about what the Dubai police plan on doing with their Google Glass. Police officers in Dubai will soon be able to identify suspects wanted for crimes just by looking at them. Using Google Glass and a custom-developed facial recognition software, Dubai police will be able to capture photos of people around them and search their faces in a database of people wanted for crimes ... When a match is made in the database, the Glass device will receive a notification. .... What's particularly interesting about the project is that facial recognition technology is banned by the Google Glass developer policy. ... The section of the policy that addresses such technology seems to disqualify the Dubai police force's plan for Glass."

Comments

Enforce

[mwvdlee]

I've always wandered if and how Google would enforce that rule.
Now we'll find out.
My money is on "Pay lipservice to privacy in the media, keep supplying the Dubai police anyway".

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they'll keep supplying them, no one else uses it.

Re:Enforce

[weilawei]

There's absolutely no potential to abuse this. Everyone knows that only rich people live in Dubai and rich people can't be criminals. Just look at the arrest rates.

Re:Enforce

[davecb]

The German Federal security service tried this years ago in airports, and got a combinatorial explosion in false positives (AKA the "birthday paradox") that drowned out the real positives. Google knows the math, and is trying to save the inumerate from an expensive failure (;-))

Re:Enforce

[swb]

But with facial recognition, the entire technology subsystems keep getting better -- high resolution cameras, faster processing which will enable improved and more sophisticated algorithms. It seems naive to say it doesn't work and can't work.

Re:Enforce

[i kan reed]

I know you're not being serious, but it's rich people and almost unpaid slaves.

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh. "worker" that pretended to be sick just to get a day off for the first time in six months, "criminal", same thing really.

Re:Enforce

[Wycliffe]

You can restrict first sale but I know places like ATT have tried to do that with the iphone but
I had friends that still managed to resell dozens of them over to china without much effort.

Google will most likely just enforce it by excluding it from their play store so they can't officially
sell it thru normal channels but they can still "enable 3rd party apps" and be fine.

Re:Enforce

[r1348]

Rich people, and a mass of immigrant semi-slave workers that built all of those slightly overcompensating skyscrapers...

Re:Enforce

[davecb]

better technology doesn't help enough!

To oversimplify, if you have 1 error in a thousand, and you have 10,000 (crooks + innocent people), you do (10,000 * 9,999) comparisons and get 99,990,000 / 1,000 = 9,990 errors. In stats, it's a selection of every two persons out of 10,000.

It's really something like (select one of 100 crooks from 10,000 innocents), but it's still an insanely huge number of comparisons. Hoeever good your technology, adding more people will give you (N * N-1) more chances of getting an error.

Facial recognition vendors are very careful to NOT report their error rates in ways that expose this problem: it's the "elephant in the room" for that industry. And that includes Siemens, my former employer.

Re:Enforce

[postbigbang]

You forgot to mention the necessary sense of walking around: liberty. Even if you're a "positive", what of due process? Will you land in a jail, await a long process? How and who guarantees that you'll be then excluded if you're falsely positive? It's a slippery slope. Google has opened a Pandora's box of paranoia.

Will people stop traveling in fear of false-positives? Where are governments permitted to gnaw on their citizenry, privacy death by a thousand cuts?

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

But google glass could make significant inroads. Yes there will be a large false positive rate. But it isn't going on just the photo. What it means is that it can flag someone, bring up their record (and some photos so the cop can do their own comparison), and any other data that might help. There is potentially a huge amount of additional steps before the cop even needs to ask "Excuse me sir, can you please show me some identification....". The cop could, for example, simply follow the person for a while and see if anything suspicious happens (or if the pattern of movements matches what is known about the suspect). Tie it in with mass surveillance and you can match the clothes they're wearing with recent purchases on their credit card etc etc. This is very different from just a side-by-side comparison of photographs.

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Better technology does help, and that is what is getting the error bounds low enough.

For example facebook will suppress positives on your images if they are far from you in your social circle. This can make the error rate go down by many many orders of magnitude.

Similarly, by using face recognition on groups of people, errors can go radically down.

Even if the face recognition doesn't improve enough per se, if you combine it with multiple other data sources, it is a solvable problem.

Re:Enforce

[gnasher719]

The German Federal security service tried this years ago in airports, and got a combinatorial explosion in false positives (AKA the "birthday paradox") that drowned out the real positives. Google knows the math, and is trying to save the inumerate from an expensive failure (;-))

There's an estimate that about one in a million people looks practically identical to you. So if you have a database of 100,000 criminals, about every tenth random person matches someone from the database so closely that you would look identical to a police officer who checks.

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple statistics fix: take a larger sample size. Detain all the positive hits and sort out the actual identities through other methods.

Re:Enforce

[swb]

I get that, but it seems like it would be something that would improve over time based on all manner of improvements.

The inputs might get better -- comparison pictures in the database, which I would imagine are for the most part DMV or passport photos may end up being very high resolution images or include 3D scan data. The on-site imagery will almost certainly end up at 4K resolution if not some kind of real-time 3D scanning. And comparison and analytics will get better as the processing involved gets better.

Better technology doesn't help enough now, but why should it never help? That kind of seems to be the bottom line argument, the error rate can't ever be improved.

Re:Enforce

[bigpat]

I think the Google rule is more a function of battery life since that kind of constant radio communication uploading video back to the cloud is a drain on batteries.

In terms of personal privacy or police state concerns... The police already have decent facial recognition technology available to police and government along with fixed cameras that are hard wired for power. Yes there is a performance issue if you try to match too many faces to too many faces, but as others have said this is subject to Moore's law and the price performance curve of Cloud Computing making this more attainable and more affordable starting with the police and government and hopefully working its way down to civilian use.

To me it is of greater concern if facial recognition technology remains only affordable and practical for the police and government when the technology could be of great help to pro democracy activists. If I were a pro democracy activist in a police state I would want access to facial recognition in order to identify known or suspected police agents that were trying to thwart, subvert or otherwise undermine political organizing activities. Basically all it takes is one paid operative within a peaceful protest to start throwing rocks at the police to justify a police crackdown as law and order rather than political repression. It has even been an issue in the US with paid police infiltrators caught being the ones inciting violence and criminality in order to justify the subsequent police crackdown. If that person could be identified ahead of time as a police operative, then organizers can intervene and expel the person from the protest before they start causing trouble.

Identifying and controlling the troublemakers that try to blend in and cause trouble would be a sea change in a groups ability to organize peaceful protest. Not all troublemakers are paid operatives, some people just like causing trouble. So the ability to take someone's picture, tag them as a potential or known troublemaker and then share that with other organizers would be of great help in countering and exposing that kind of government sponsored sabotage or even just criminal elements out to cause trouble for sport.

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

These are solvable problems in machine learning. I've seen enough demos to expect that given a quality set of data and sufficient cloud computing resources you could at least run one facial image against a set of known criminals or terrorists and get some potentially useful result set in a reasonably short amount of time. Doing facial recognition on everyone that passes a camera... well that does seem expensive as you would likely need a non-trivial cloud computing cluster behind every camera and every facial search. But Cloud Computing is a game changer in terms of price performance for this sort of thing.

Re:Enforce

[Calydor]

The first thing to spring to mind about false positives is they'll (in most cases, one would hope) be pulled aside and questioned, while the Glass runs a more in-depth analysis of their face rather than just the quick scan necessary to look out over a crowd. Various science-fiction movies and shows already give ideas in this regard, I believe. It's not like computerized facial recognition when a police officer looks at you is a new idea.

Re:Enforce

[postbigbang]

Depends on the jurisdiction and the procedures used THERE. How many stories about languishing in jails do you need to become reviled at the concept?

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Slaves are not people.

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a Google shill who'd sell his soul to a megacorporation.

Re:Enforce

[davecb]

It's TERRIBLE public policy for people to be pulled aside for mere physical resemblance to a third person. A person the cop's never seen, and only has a photo of, but they've been told by a computer that this is the person in the photograph.

And computers are never wrong

Re:Enforce

[davecb]

No, that other commentator been mislead by a company that sells facial recognition. Google knows the math, and prohibits that particular stupidity by contract.

Re:Enforce

[davecb]

Detention without trial, on suspicion of looking like Dr. Evil (;-))

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you know how such a search works without facial recognition. Either that or you need to be selling a technique to police departments.

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

In a totalitarian system it's easier to arrest someone upon vague suspicion, though. Perhaps the police in Dubai doesn't care much about beating up the wrong guys ...

Re:Enforce

[davecb]

You need as many 9's after the decimal point as you have digits in (N * N-1). As N is unbounded and accuracy is bounded, you get screwed. It's fine for a 10-person company (90 comparisons, negligable false positives) It's out of the question for airports (10,000 * 9,999 comparisons)

As the ARPAnauts would say "it doesn't scale"

Re:Enforce

[davecb]

The number of cmparisons for sample size N is (N * N-1). You've just tied up all the computers in the universe doing realtime FR of the general population (;-))

Re:Enforce

[tlhIngan]

Google knows the math, and is trying to save the inumerate from an expensive failure (;-))

More like getting a product so tainted by the public that it's impossible to release it. I mean, Google Glass has its uses, but not only is general society not able to sort out its potential privacy issues (face it - we're still dealing with trying to fit cameras into our society properly, and those have been around for a couple of centuries now), but it takes just a few incidents before the public will conclude they're a bad idea and shun them.

There are a few technologies like this where the public has shunned their use - nuclear, for example.

Re:Enforce

[omtinez]

I think that you have your math wrong. Number one, you don't know who you are comparing the face of so according to your schema you would need to do 10,000 * 10,000 comparisons, since you don't have a way to say "Oh! This is John Derp's face, so let's only compare it to the other 9,999 faces!". Also, you don't compare each face with everyone else's, you only compare with a list of known crooks (hopefully not EVERYONE'S face is in the system, although I am not sure of anything these days).

Then, assuming there are 100 known crooks in the 10,000 population, you do 10,000 * 100 comparisons and, assuming the same error rate of 1 in 1,000 you get 1,000,000 / 1,000 = 1,000 errors. Which is not nearly as high but definitely not ideal.

I henceforth name this the subset-birthday paradox!

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

The truly scary thing about this is that it's posted by an NSA propaganda guy. cold fjord has always told us how positive the monitorinng done in the US was and how Snowden was a big traitor; What does this mean?

• The NSA suddenly saw sense and wants to stop increasing surveillence?
• The NSA suddenly is negotiating the price and wants Google to accept this in their normal TOS?
• The NSA is jelous?
• None of the above?
• The NSA is softening us up for information about their own version of this?

Only time will tell; however nobody will hear her because she will be locked away in a black site before she gets her message to the newspapers.

Re:Enforce

[ShanghaiBill]

Even if you're a "positive", what of due process? Will you land in a jail, await a long process?

The brain dead obvious solution is that if the software identifies you as a "positive", then a human would look at the photo of the perp and the photo of the suspect, and verify that they match. I doubt if anyone is going to be arrested just because the "match" LED blinks.

Re:Enforce

[Calydor]

"Meh, I'm bored. Nothing ever happens on my WAIT THAT GUY LOOKS LIKE THAT PHOTO I SAW LAST WEEK!" *bullrush*

See, this is the kind of thing we have RIGHT NOW.

Re:Enforce

[GLMDesigns]

Google Glasses may be tainted for everyday public use but it will gain ground in business uses. Surgeons, construction managers, etc...

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of better technology, there is also increased effort. Facebook is, famously, building a massive facial recognition database from tagged and untagged users in photos on their site. Facial regognition works much better when you have a database of many stock photos of each individual analyzed with principle components analysis and other adaptive machine lerning techniques. From what we know of the work they are doing, Facebook most likely plans to sell facial recognition as a cloud service.

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

No you Americans will just extraordinary rendition your citizens there without due process or due process according to the executive office - which ever side of of the coin is sat there and have them tortured as part of due process .

Re:Enforce

[cellocgw]

Slaves are not people.

Bah. Here in the US of frakking A, slaves are (well, were) 60% of a person. Take that, you backwater countries like Dubai!

Re:Enforce

[stephanruby]

The cynical in me says there isn't any need for high precision. As long as the facial recognition system can pick out foreign faces over native ones. All the system really needs to do is to give plausible justification for racial profiling.

Article 25 of the Constitution of the UAE provides for the equitable treatment of persons with regard to race, nationality, religious beliefs or social status. However...

[...]

Foreign laborers in Dubai often live in conditions described by Human Rights Watch as being "less than humane", and was the subject of the documentary, Slaves in Dubai.

[wikipedia entry]

At least, that's what the cynical in me says. I have no other basis for that theory. The other reason, which would be much more likely, is to justify a shiny new toy for a police force which has plenty of funding and to grab some headlines in a mainstream press which really doesn't know what's feasible and what's not.

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Eh, no...

Google can not enforce a policy as long as the underlying "open source" bits are open source.

Any political regime or law enforcement outfit can take the gear and make it do whatever they want. Isn't that what the Open source zealots keep insisting on?

It's a double edged sword. If you want an open device, you got to let the villains do evil with it.

Re:Enforce

[Khashishi]

Sounds like a recipe for memory tampering.

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to mention the necessary sense of walking around: liberty. Even if you're a "positive", what of due process?

This is Dubai, the police don't have these problems to deal with.

Re:Enforce

[flux]

Once the police learns that there are false positives, I'm sure they will learn to put the proper weight for computer recognition.

Re:Enforce

[davecb]

They're not supposed to learn things like that, it will affect their close rates

--dave
My local Chief of Police has fought for years to get his people to "keep the peace" instead of "show high case-closed numbers". He's started to succeed, and the crime rates are going down, but he's been rewarded by budget cuts and being phased out for being too expansive... Bummer!

Re:Enforce

[Panoptes]

Turn this on its head. Facial scans for ID cards, credit/debit cards, passports, driving licences etc. become the norm: a scanner fails to identify you at an airport, so you are a suspicious individual - guilty until proven innocent.

Re:Enforce

[hey!]

I suspect the restriction is impossible to enforce, because it's almost certainly the case that the facial recognition isn't performed on the device itself. So it's a bit like saying you can't use the things for pornography; you'd have to know somehow that the user intends to pleasure himself later by looking at pictures of ladies' shoes.

It's a bit too late on that score anway. Having boots on the ground is an anachronism, even if they've got high tech wearables. In 2000 Scotland Yard was able to foil the Millennium Dome diamond heist by tracking all the gang's preparations using a network of public and private security cameras. There was almost no in-person surveillance. The first time the gang was physically near the police was when they were surrounded by an armed response team inside the exhibit hall.

Here in the US, the NYPD has acquired similar, possibly even more advanced capabilities. They can for example find all the six foot-ish blond men wearing blue sweaters in a one block radius of Penn Station then run their images through facial recognition software, then follow their suspect almost anywhere in Manhattan with no chance of being detected.

In comparison to camera networks, having a cop wearing Google glasses isn't that big a deal. A lot of our legal privacy protections are based on the assumption it's too labor intensive to follow people around for frivolous purposes. An army of cops with cameras is expensive to maintain; a network of surveillance cameras is not.

Re:Enforce

[postbigbang]

Already here. One more intake method.

Re:Enforce

[Registered Coward v2]

You forgot to mention the necessary sense of walking around: liberty. Even if you're a "positive", what of due process? Will you land in a jail, await a long process? How and who guarantees that you'll be then excluded if you're falsely positive? It's a slippery slope. Google has opened a Pandora's box of paranoia.

Will people stop traveling in fear of false-positives? Where are governments permitted to gnaw on their citizenry, privacy death by a thousand cuts?

It's Dubai. They don't have those worries.

Re:Enforce

[postbigbang]

You see, it might be Dubai, but the software will be perfected there, and it will migrate elsewhere. Slowly, it becomes acceptable in a conventional sense. Then it becomes "the norm".

A thousand cuts..... then a million.

Re: Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

You mistakenly believe that liberty exists in Dubai.

Re: Enforce

[postbigbang]

Liberty exists rarely, anywhere.

Re:Enforce

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, that's what Ben Stein thinks

Re:Enforce

[Registered Coward v2]

You see, it might be Dubai, but the software will be perfected there, and it will migrate elsewhere. Slowly, it becomes acceptable in a conventional sense. Then it becomes "the norm".

A thousand cuts..... then a million.

I agree, my point was Dubai doesn't necessarily have the same due process concerns of the OP.

Re:Enforce

[billstewart]

The Constitution actually gave the slave states Congressional representation counting 2/3 of a person for slaves, even though the slaves didn't get the right to vote. It was a compromise between the Southerners who wanted to get 100% representation and the Northerners who mostly didn't want them counted at all. Effectively, it meant that a Southern white man's vote counted more than a free state man's vote, because it took fewer Southern whites to get a Congressman.

Re:Enforce

[RockDoctor]

and is trying to save the inumerate from an expensive failure (;-))

If you can get some fool of a company PHB to pay you to develop an application that will never work in the real world, then as long as you cash the pay cheques before they get cancelled, then it's an expensive success for you and and expensive failure for them.

Just make sure that you set out your project roadmap so that you get paid for delivering a system that works in the workshop, and let the client discover that it doesn't work in the real world.

Cynical? Moi?

Battery life

[Anonymous Coward]

So Glass gets about 45 minutes of battery life recording with the camera...probably even less if it's sending the video somewhere.

The quality of the camera is also pretty crappy. Surely there are a hundred better ways to do this than with a Google Glass as a video source...

Re:Battery life

[wiredlogic]

This is like the Iraqis using electronic dousing rods to find IEDs. They are too ignorant to know what they're buying.

Re:Battery life

[weilawei]

A dousing rod is a hose full of water. A dowsing rod is a stick used to find water.

Re:Battery life

[Anonyme Connard]

Glass may be connected to an additional battery that would not add much weight to a policeman equipment.

Re:Battery life

[Anonymous Coward]

A dousing rod is a hose full of water. A dowsing rod is a stick used to find water.

It's been well established in evidence-based, double-blind research that a dowsing rod works like this:

1. Point stick down.
2. Dig deep.
3. While not (found water) goto 2.
4. Claim that stick found water.

Re:Battery life

[Anonymous Coward]

They already do constant streaming with fix position CCTV
With the Glass app they need to take a photo and it auto-uploads to the server where the recognition takes place.

Google policy simply does not apply.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google policy simply does not apply. Period. The end. Corporate policy does not trump the authority of a sovereign government.

Re:Google policy simply does not apply.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck to that sovereign government in building its own glasses, then.

Power comes in many forms.

Re:Google policy simply does not apply.

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. State sponsored efforts to reproduce a shitty plastic frame with some commodity electronics embedded in it will succeed with trivial effort. Google aren't sorcerers, ya know. There isn't a secret incantation needed to make glasses. Hell, they've got the funding to simply hire the designer away from Google if they actually care enough to do so.

Re:Google policy simply does not apply.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really. And what could Google possibly do to enforce the policy? They could block any known devices from the Play Store (and how they would even get identified in the first place is a big question), but it's not like they can refuse to sell them once they leave beta and enter stores around the world.

False Positives

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a very hard time believing this kind of application would not be fraught with false positives. The companies producing such software tend to claim that they have a high match rate, but often those test results are in almost laboratory settings with high resolution cameras, optimal lighting and using cherry picked data. In the real world I'm betting that these kinds of systems would result in thousands if not tens of thousands of false arrests/harassment in even a moderate sized city.

Re:False Positives

[davecb]

Even worse, they have a combinatorial explosion problem (mentioned in the "Enforce" thread above).

Re:False Positives

[Anonyme Connard]

Dubai is not a democracy. False positives resulting in unjustified arrests is not a problem.

Re:False Positives

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to break your bubble but being in a democratic country isn't really protection against unjustified arrest either. The US has the largest prison population of any country on the planet despite having a relatively small percentage of the global population.

Re:False Positives

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a problem if they expect the system to be useful.

If they didn't care about the accuracy they could issue dice instead and save a ton of money.

I got a deal for Dubai police!

[ihtoit]

I got dowsing rods for bomb detection, a Pacific road bridge on discount, and - oh, this is a gem - a barge that used to be a British aircraft carrier. All you's gotta do for that one is steal it from the Turks before they sell the keel to the Chinese.

If they like, we have a surplus of cardboard policeman standies as well.

Not going to work.

[popoutman]

Facial recognition, like all biometrics, is not good for this purpose. You either have decent rates of true positive results at the expense of many false positives, or few false positives with many failures.

It's never like it is in the TV shows. The results form biometrics are far too fuzzy to be useful in this context where one looks for one of a large set within a much larger set. It's somewhat useful in non-time-critical situations where one looks for one identity from a large set.

In general, you can regard all biometric identification as not really worth the trouble. Too easy to fake or avoid detection.

Re:Not going to work.

[Charliemopps]

Or, you just jail everyone using facial recognition as a pretense. You're assuming this is a real police force. It's not. This is Dubai. It's a monarchy/theocracy and a police state.

Re:Not going to work.

[Wycliffe]

Facial recognition, like all biometrics, is not good for this purpose.

Even if the technology is poor, it should be able to pop up a photo and a confidence level then the cop can look closer
and decide if it really is the right person. Even with today's technology a computer is going to be much better than a
cop studying a list of a thousand pictures and trying to memorize them. If a computer can narrow it down to the top
10 most likely then it's made the cop's job alot easier.

Of course, this is Dubai, everyone knows what they are really looking for.
They aren't looking for criminals. They are looking for escaped slaves.

Re:Not going to work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, most people are looking for prostitutes.

Re:Not going to work.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that there's no incentive for the cop to override the computer.

If they computer identifies someone as being on a wanted list, and the cop brings them in than worst case scenario for the cop it an "I applaud your diligence but that's obviously the wrong guy" from a superior. On the other hand if the cop uses their own initiative to determine that someone isn't who the computer thinks they are, they could easily get fired for letting a wanted criminal walk, or have to fill out paperwork explaining why they ignored the expensive computer.

The Really Rich Client exemption

[Applehu Akbar]

Facial recognition may be against the terms of the beta, but you can bet that in production this will be a major application for Glass. It will be a hit with prosopagnostics, for example, despite the social stigma against the product.

Contractors all over the world find it easy to bend whatever restrictions their own cultures may impose in applying tech of any kind when Dubai threatens to make a large purchase. Our best hope is that the technology will leak to ISIS. If the Silicon Valley beta experience is any guide, seeing Glass on Jihadi John in beheading videos to come will cause ISIS to suddenly lose favor with al-Ummah.

Re:The Really Rich Client exemption

[torsmo]

Well said. Also, this is Dubai, with a king and God as rulers. They don't care about false positives, as long as the rich aren't inconvenienced, and the enslaved foreign labour in the slums is kept in check.

White criminals will be OK

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, they all look just the same.

This is an inevitability.

[mitcheli]

But I do wonder, have they considered hiring Tom Cruise for this? Of course, if this technology does take off, you can rest assure that after the events in Ferguson, Missouri, that chest cameras will be the least of the criminal's worries....

Facial Recognition is the Obvious Killer App

[Anonymous Coward]

Facial recognition is the obvious killer app for glass. It would be very helpful for people like me who can't remember names or faces for the life of me. I think google's policy is short-sighted.

Why this is bad

[Charliemopps]

For those that were unaware, Dubai is an awful place to live.
The majority of low wage workers are shipped in from out of the country and are treated as slaves. They've no hope to leave and any question of the system will land you in prison. There are dozens of documentaries on the situation.

Vice has a good one: http://www.vice.com/vice-news/...
Caution, it's an auto-play video and it's got a loud intro.

Re:Why this is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I happen to live in Dubai, moved here from Russia about a year ago. Now working in IT, and get pretty good salary even compared to US, especially give zero taxes.
Everything around done by indians, filipino or pakistani people, most locals work in government organisations and military. For all my time here I never met a person who didn't speak english.
Also it is not quite true that it is hard to leave, there are a lot of cases people getting into debt and just leaving the county for good. Problem starts when one tries to work without a working visa, which is of cause a crime like in any county. Laws are strict, but crime level is one the word lowest if not the lowest. I leave my car open for the night, door has a lock that could be picked by my 8 yo son, I never saw a fist fight or drunks on the streets.
Dubai is nice place to live really, nice weather, bleaches, green areas, zero taxes, good salaries, chip cars and gasoline for 30c/ liter. That is true for qualified workers, lots of UK expats around. But, if you are from indian village Dubai could be even worse than the village.

Re:Why this is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

You must spend all your day in the office in Dubai. I see drunk Arabs all the time on the weekend, often getting into their SUVs and driving home.

Wild parties are not too hard to find. If that doesn't float your boat, then just drop by any hotel lobby to find groups of foreign prostitutes.

Re:Why this is bad

[Bacon Bits]

I suppose the trains run on time, too.

Re:Why this is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I was comparing to Moscow, where you can encounter drunks looking for fight near local supermarket on every holiday. And you don't even have to look for them, troubles will find you first.
Sure, drunk arabs looking for pussy near hotel Moscow is quite common. However, it is where they belong not to, as opposite to residential areas.

Re:Why this is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically it's ok for the middle and upper classes, and you are blind to the suffering and effective slavery of the lower classes.

Re:Why this is bad

[mjwx]

I suppose the trains run on time, too.

Dubai is fine, if you're a white guy with marketable skills and dont run afoul of an Emeriti citizen... But it sucks if you're an Indian or Filipino "guest worker" (pointing out they're sarcastic quotes for extra sarcasm). There is an enforced pecking order with the Emirs at the top, Emeriti citizens then white people. It start to go seriously downhill from there. Even amongst the privileged classes, more money meant you had more rights. Libertarians who've never seen the reality of unbridled capitalism wonder why I think they're batshit insane. Places like Dubai where more money means you're legally allowed to shit on people with less money are the reasons why I think they're delusional.

Why did I work there, well the money was good. I stuck around for 2 years before I had enough.

However if you're not amongst the privileged classes in Dubai, it's little better than slavery. Some slaves have more rights like the Indians with an IT qualification who can have a beaten up old car, maybe even a room to themselves. These people dont live in Dubai itself though, they live in neighbouring cities and travel in as they dont earn enough to live in Dubai. There are those even futher down the pecking order like Filipinos that work as maids, service people and guards and finally Bangladeshi's and the like who work as menial labourers. The last group literally get trucked in and out, a bus is a luxury for them.

If it's so bad why do they do it, well the money is better than what they earn in the Philippines or wherever they came from. When they accept a contract, they arrive and basically have their passport confiscated by their employer for the duration of their contract. Despite how abusive it is, they still get volunteers because of the unemployment and poverty in their home countries. The Filipino guard who worked at my apartment building was a good bloke but after expenses could only afford to send about US$50 a week back to his family. He considered himself lucky as he worked in a building with Americans instead of Arabs (we were mostly Australian and Europeans, but he was a good bloke) because we'd give him food and small gifts so he could afford to send more money back home to his family.

Re:Why this is bad

[Charliemopps]

You have no idea what Libertarianism is... none. You're basically arguing that Republicans, unregulated, would be a terrible idea. Something I agree with. The ideals you suggest are republican ideals, not Libertarian ideals. Republicans have about as much to do with Libertarianism as Democrats have to do with Socialism... as in, they steal some of the more popular ideas, but in reality could care less unless it furthers their ambitions. Dubai is about as polar opposite from what a Libertarian government would be as you can get.

I got a deal for Dubai police!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dowsing rods are last century, now we have con men selling cheap novelty electronic golf ball finders as explosives detectors to governments for millions.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2442300/Fake-bomb-detectors-based-novelty-golf-ball-finders-used-checkpoints-Iraq-months-British-conman-convicted-4-500-people-killed-conflict.html

So Dubai plans to ban the Borqa?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or are they just going to target men and westerners?

This is sexist and racist policing!

Continuum

[Anonymous Coward]

If anybody watches this series, this sort of automatic facial recognition of whoever the law enforcement officer is looking at, along with displaying their crimes, etc, was some of the scary hyper-future tech we were all supposed to be wowed by. I was wowed. Now that this is a reality today, I'm a bit dumbstruck. We all need to sit down and have a conversation about this, it's too much too fast to let grow without guiding specific legislation.

Google already testing this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is already planning and testing Glass for facial recognition internally for their security staff.

Take a look at this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Other stuff from Abu Dhabi

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who aren't very familiar with Middle East geography, Abu Dhabi is a capital of UAE, when Dubai just a well known emirate.
Abu Dhabi has some neat traffic cameras all over the place. These cameras run plate recognition software and send records to a central database. Police can track all vehicle movements for a year within an emirate, if required or even longer.

Crimes

[Anonymous Coward]

Haaaaa you mean drinking alcool and being infidels

Do no evil

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, for the money, google will transgress that particular ethical issue..

Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Minority Report, we're almost there! Now if only their cars could fly.

I thought police did that already

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought police did that already. Just look at somebody, and pow, they are guilty of something.

Evil eye?

[MagickalMyst]

I never put much merit to the saying "never trust a person with glasses". That could change.

countermeasures...

[whopub]

Technology is already being developed to countermeasure this google glass thing in Dubai. It's called the Burka and it's supposed to shield the device from doing its job. Specs remain unavailable at this time.

Field Testing

[globaljustin]

It's literally a matter of time before we see US cops wearing glass doing this same thing.

I have seen it happen *over and over* throughout the years...it goes like this:

"contractors" get ahold of technology X
X has major privacy implications that prevent advanced nations from using it
implement X in foreign countries then use w/e civil unrest happening at the moment to justify it's use
profit

Re:Field Testing

[Ravaldy]

ANPR which automatically detects plate numbers has been in use in the US for a while now.

As far as I'm concerned there are only benefits in having cops wear a camera.
1. They're actions are monitored which deters corruption and abuse of power
2. They can tie the face recognition system to identify wanted individuals

Re:Field Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

You forget

3. Keep the idiots who falsely claim that police abused their power from sparking expensive witch hunts that distract from real abuses.

I wonder why this uses Google Glass. Police already have body cams. Why use the consumer technology instead? What does Google Glass have that BODYCAM does not?

Does it actually work?

[gnasher719]

I will easily believe that someone sold a system that uses Google Glass for facial recognition to the Dubai police. It's much hard to believe that someone sold them a system that actually works.

Re:Does it actually work?

[Ravaldy]

It works. The technology has existed since the 90s. The face recognition algorithm have improved significantly in the last 10 years due to better processing power and new imaging technologies.

As long as the list of individuals put on the wanted list is limited, existing processing power can provide almost live results. The more profiles there are to evaluate the longer it will take. If the client application actually does the conversion from the image to the vector matrix the server can actually be far more productive and handle more requests per minute.

This technology has huge potential.

[Anonymous Coward]

Once this technology matures, you'll by able to dynamically have facebook profiles pop-up as you walk up to someone or even look at them. Forgetting names will be a thing of the past, and most people will have a general knowledge base of whoever they meet which creates some interesting social dynamics. Very exciting.

Ads On Facebook

[retroworks]

I walk into Staples to buy something, and then am distracted by the price of an HP laser printer, spend a minute looking it over. I get home and find an ad for the same HP Laser printer on Facebook. Ok, maybe they identified me from the credit card I used and just randomly advertised that? Nope. Because this weekend I walked into a Best Buy and wound up getting curious about a particular Sony movie camera. Left the store without making a purchase. Facebook ad for that specific Sony camera when I got home.

Minority Report is here, and I don't see any AntiPhorm or Digital Haystack / Data Pollution solution. Guy Fawkes Masks or Groucho Marx glasses don't seem realistic. Maybe if people boycott the stores using facial recognition cameras for internet advertising it would blunt the ads, but the tech is still there.

Re:Ads On Facebook

[LessThanObvious]

Anyone else heard of this? Is that actually happening at Staples or other retailers?

I've had experiences like this, but usually I find out later it was a coincidence. I know retailers use cameras to track traffic and shopping patterns, but I've not seen actual facial recognition.

Re:Ads On Facebook

[Gavagai80]

Take off the tinfoil hat. Facebook knows you like cameras and printers from your techy profile, and you happened to look at popular ones.

Re:Ads On Facebook

[Anonymous Coward]

Pleasssse. you likely looked at websites about them before you wnet to the stores. Thou this is the future of course.

Re:Ads On Facebook

[retroworks]

Maybe it's only Tesco and Walmart, then.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/11/08/tesco-facial-recognition-scanners_n_4241801.html

http://adage.com/article/digital/facebook-walmart-write-rules-facial-recognition/245707/

Even in the Middle East?

[NotQuiteReal]

With all those gutras, agals, keffiyah and turbins, as well as hijabs, burqas, niqabs, and chandors.

Toss in a variety of Ray Bans...

Well, you see the problem? (But not much of a face.)

Ugh, the middle east is backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking dubai, what a literal shithole. The cops get lambos and money out the ass while the people can't even get a proper septic system. Someone needs to line up every single "leader" there and execute them all.

And they expect it to work?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does FR work when everyone is wearing a head-item that goes to their eyebrows, and a beard that starts at their cheekbone and is inches past their jawline?

Here's the solution ...

[CaptainDork]

... right here.

GOOD reasons for Facial Recognition with GG

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure there are obvious nefarious purposes for facial recognition in Google Glass but there are some damn good reasons for it too, not the least of which is for use by Alzheimer, other brain illnesses & injuries. My Mom has a degenerative brain disease, she even has trouble recognizing her own Sons or when she last saw us! So when GG first started really getting some play I thought I might try to develop an app that would do FC and then put a little 'name tag' like icon on a persons chest, maybe provide an easy way for the user to also see basic information etc. Of course my thought was that it would only recognize 'friends & family' (e.g. only people who had been introduced to the GG user and accepted that the user had such information/the app at their use).

For people will memory impairment the possibilities of something like GG are endless. I may not be able to cure the diseases but I damn well hope I could make suffering through one easier to handle.

Battery life

[flux]

You can probably multiply the time by taking an image once a second, or a short clip every 30 seconds. Also the display needs to be active only on positive match, but I suppose that consumes very little electricity.

But the police are criminals too...

[j0ebaker]

Just wait till police officer's, bankers, politician's faces are recognized by this technology as THE CRIMINALS.

Oh, and imagine the ramifications for false positives!

This won't be handled under civil lawsuits.

The ramifications of this go very deep.

There will be alternative databases of information to search against..

It's a non-issue.

[tlambert]

I've always wandered if and how Google would enforce that rule.
Now we'll find out..

Given that the policy applies to "Glassware", which is on-board software, and the facial recognition is on a back end server ("not Glassware"), they probably are not going to do dick about it.

If they *were* going to do something about it, it would be to not allow the Dubai police to distribute their Glassware in the Google store. I'm pretty sure the Dubai police will be side-loading the client app anyway, and would be just as happy that *NOTHING* from the Google store got onto their officers Glass devices anyway.

So it's a non-issue.

Burqas

[d'baba]

...for everyone.

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

That's going to be some really impressive recognition technology. I have really sharp vision and I still can't tell these burqa'd out women apart.

They don't need Google glass they could just strap

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't need Google glass they could just strap a camera to their head, have the recognition performed in the cloud, then get a message on their regular phone.

Google glass is not the "enabling" technology here, merely an implementation choice.