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China Unveils World's First Facial Recognition ATM
An anonymous reader links to an article at IB Times according to which: China has unveiled the world's first facial recognition ATM, which will not allow users to withdraw cash unless their face matches their IDs. The machine was created by Tsinghua University and Hangzhou-based technology company Tzekwan. It has a camera installed in it that captures the facial features of the user then compares it with a database of identification photos.
Good luck running an errand for a friend. Do they not have debit cards and Pin Numbers in China?
ERROR: All users match same data set.
Let's say that I want to loan a trusted friend some money. I give him (or her) my ATM card and PIN. They get the cash they need and bring me back the card and receipt. For some people, that's not at all unusual, if they're right about who to trust. Even so, this facial recognition is going to make this kind of routine transaction impossible.
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You'd think the Japanese would be all over this. Covering the whole facial angle, if you will.
everyone looking alike. Just don't let that old joke even enter your mind while you read this. otherwise it will be hard to stop thinking about it. And don't giggle cause it's not funny.
I'm all for proper security- but that means a device which I control for which I can enter my pin on it to authenticate with the machine. There is no need for a camera, keeping a picture of me on file, or facial recognition software.
Quite frankly I think facial recognition software and other personal identification should be phased out. Authentication might be acceptable, but my bank shouldn't need to identify me personally. A simple device containing a keypad and authentication algorithm should largely be enough to eliminate the need to personally identify anybody.
not the first to use it.
How do you stop people being kidnapped and force to withdraw the cash - obviously the standard for university research in china Is fucking abysmal. Presumably they have a way of detecting a severed head being held up to the camera or did they not fucking think
Let's hope this thing is harder to fool than the Android's Face recognition unlock feature.
USA.. A country in which every face looks nearly the same beat us to it.
ATMs are already riddled with cameras. Small step to add facial recognition really, much smaller than you may have realised. Far from the only thing they're storing. Any time you pay with plastic that gets recorded too, along with date, time, location, possibly with security footage too. And often gets stored for years.
What they're trying to do is cover their own asses: Better to shut you out of your own money --including by shutting out your friend or family running an errand for you, fuck you gramps-- than to let someone else run away with your money and you insisting they compensate you. No skin off their noses it means you can now do even less with your bank account. And the government is just that much happier knowing they can keep that much better track of you doing things with your money.
Like every other "security measure" that seems reasonable as long as you don't look too closely, it ends up restricting your freedom of movement, and every other "stakeholder", bank, government, you name it, thinks that's just swell. It's been going on for a while too. Yes, I agree it's creepy. Welcome to our modern world full of technological abuse. All you get to do is accept, even like it, you consumer, you.
This scheme will work for one branch in Lesser Nowhere, Sechwan Province, with a finite and small set of pictures, and a small number of crooks. Once the number of faces increases, the probability of a false positive explodes, roughly as (N 2) (select every two out of N), where N is the size of the pools of pictures + the person being scanned.
The well-known example is the "birthday paradox", in which twenty-three people at a party increases the probability of two of them having the same birthday to fifty-fifty. That particular case was because the actual probability was multiplied by (25 2) = 25! / ((25-2)! * 2!) = 6900 comparisons being made, times 1/365 chances of a hit.
The German federal security service considered using one of my then employer's recognizers for airports to catch terrorists, but ended up facing the problem of accusing grandma of being part of the Bader-Meinhoff gang (;-)) No matter how accurate we were, a few more people in the pool would give us false positives. We'd need roughly an accuracy of 99.9 followed by roughly as many decimal places of 9s as there were powers of ten of people.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
... *crickets*
So I guess they'll need a photo of me then, right?
How about some of my DNA, hair and skin samples, and fingerprints too? Store it all on your super secure networks.
Is this system capable of dealing with women who wear heavy makeup and decide to change their style? Or what if someone works a side job as a party clown and needs to grab some cash right before a gig? Could you circumvent this system by simply holding up a photo of someone?
Good luck getting your cash, muslim women. I doubt this system is very niqab- or burqa-friendly, unless it has a camera that can see through clothing, in which case I want one!
nobody can show a longer dick into the camera than me.
I had a pair of these as a kid. I called them "Mom" and "Dad".
All Caucasians look alike.
... in the situation where my girlfriend (I swear) was held up while at an ATM and forced at knife-point to enter her PIN and withdraw money. Otherwise, it sounds like a good idea.
Which will trouble customers more - the false positives or the false negatives?
Istr the japanese having a soft drink machine or something similar that recognized a person, and gave them their preferred drink.
Hackable when you held up a life sized photo of someone else. ...
Good! If this becomes the standard, my 95 year old granny can move her ass herself with the wheelchair to the ATM.
How does that work? Don't they all look alike?
(I can't tell if my Korean wife is laughing or not... I'll let you know...)
In related news, Bill Gates no longer richest man in the world.
Have gnu, will travel.
When it's especially cold it would be a pain to undo the bundling just so the ATM can see your face. There's a fine art in layering your clothes (balaclava tucks inside the coat collar, scarf on the outside, etc) to keep the wind out on those -30C days.
is that once they steal my biometric data they have it forever. It is very hard for me to change face or fingerprints or my eyes... So if these ATMes get hacked one day whoever gets my data can pretend to be me forever. I just cannot change them like I can with a password or a smart card.
Common thing western folks say about other races. Bad joke, sorry.
At train stations and airports all over China there are luggage storage lockers that work with a combination of pin numbers and face recognition, so this technology has been tested for some years here already. Though adapting the design beyond these very specific environments might present a tricky set of issues.
Good luck running an errand for a friend
Yep, running an errand on behalf of the loansharks, right?
Tough shit!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In Taiwan, they photoshop the bastard out of every ID picture. By the time they were done airbrushing and bleaching my wife's picture, it looked like a geisha. They photoshopped makeup on her because she wasn't wearing any. No clue if they do the same thing in China, but that wouldn't match shit here.
.. should not beat you up before getting to the ATM but after....
Out of all places, in China? That's a single-face recognition algorithm. Not impressed.
A hand vein scanner is more secure, has fewer false matches/rejects and costs less. The only advantage I can think of is to join bank data (dob,sin,name,address,balance) to facial recognition systems running in public areas.