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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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!

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.

Re:Battery life

[weilawei]

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

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: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.

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

[Bacon Bits]

I suppose the trains run on time, too.

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:False Positives

[Anonyme Connard]

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

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.

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.