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

[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

[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:Battery life

[weilawei]

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

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: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.