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Half of American Adults Are In a Face-Recognition Database (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Half of American adults are in a face-recognition database, according to a Georgetown University study released Wednesday. That means there's about 117 million adults in a law enforcement facial-recognition database, the study by Georgetown's Center on Privacy and Technology says. The report (PDF), titled "The Perpetual Line-up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America," shows that one-fourth of the nation's law enforcement agencies have access to face-recognition databases, and their use by those agencies is virtually unregulated. Where do the mug shots come from? For starters, about 16 states allow the FBI to use facial recognition to compare faces of suspected criminals to their driver's licenses or ID photos, according to the study. "In this line-up," the study says, "it's not a human that points to the suspect -- it's an algorithm." The study says 26 states or more allow police agencies to "run or request searches" against their databases or driver's licenses and ID photos. This equates to "roughly one in two American adults has their photos searched this way," according to the study. Many local police agencies also insert mug shots of people they arrest into searchable, biometric databases, according to the report. According to the report, researchers obtained documents stating that at least five "major police departments," including those in Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles, "either claimed to run real-time face recognition off of street cameras, bought technology that can do so, or expressed an interest in buying it." The Georgetown report's release comes three months after the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the FBI has access to as many as 411.9 million images as part of its face-recognition database. The study also mentioned that the police departments have little oversight of their databases and don't audit them for misuse: "Maryland's system, which includes the license photos of over two million residents, was launched in 2011. It has never been audited. The Pinellas Country Sheriff's Office system is almost 15 years old and may be the most frequently used system in the country. When asked if his office audits searches for misuse, Sheriff Bob Gualtieri replied, "No, not really." Despite assurances to Congress, the FBI has not audited use of its face recognition system, either. Only nine of 52 agencies (17%) indicated that they log and audit their officers' face recognition searchers for improper use. Of those, only one agency, the Michigan State Police, provided documentation showing that their audit regime was actually functional."
all look like Guy Fawkes.
They track you. They track everything they can get their hands on. They abuse the information in any way they please, with no consideration for how that abuse will impact you. They profit from this abuse. They get away with it, and will continue to get away with it in the future.
Cops can search through driver's license photos to see if they can find suspects. Come on, how can anybody think this is bad. Either you're a match and they check you out or you're not and they keep going. Maybe the algorithm is wrong - maybe malicious - but just checking violating your snowflake-like privacy? Come on.
From TFS:
No doubt they're too busy playing golf, eh? Kind of like... slashdot editors...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you are in the database?
dont forget the fingerprint database thanks to Apple's iPhones :)
The CBP has a penchant for taking photos and finger prints when you enter via airports. I wouldn't be surprised if all that data ended up in such a DB.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I'm so confused I think congratulations to Michigan for being the least abuse of something i wish didn't exist at all.
Your face is on your driver's license with all your particular biometric data: height, age, eye color, hair color, whether you need wear glasses, etc.
The national ID card everyone feared is here, and it's already being abused.
You should be ashamed of yourself!
that's a bit low, but you're not supposed to know that it's really 90% not half.
or why only half?
That's the databases they tell you civilians about.
The other ones they lie to you, and say they don't exist.
But they do.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Never.Ever.Use.TFS.... kthxbye
I am just as paranoid as the average Anonymous Coward, but when you look at what the government is willing to pay for IT, which is public knowledge, versus what private companies are willing to pay for real IT talent, I don't worry about the quality or reliability of information in government databases. The real danger is that an international corporation can decide to get rid of you, and they will be able to plant your data into some official database to frame you for a crime. This kind of article targets the institutions which are actually accountable to the public but are lacking in funding support by that same public, and ignores the abuse by companies that are only accountable to private shareholders.
I am pretty sure that facebook face recognition has more than half of all americans and is publicly searchable....
If it's the bottom half, then it won't be that useful
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
The masses have no respect for people's rights, privacy, or dignity. They will give up these things on the mere promise or order by those with malicious intent of making us 'safer'. If you don't want to give up these things there is really only one option. It's to plan a move to join liberty-minded activists from across the US and around the world in New Hampshire. We're too spread out and weak to have any positive impact as things stand.
Principled libertarians (as opposed to the callous **** that represent 'libertarians' nationally) that are moving to New Hampshire are against the use of violence, fraud, and coercion by government to achieve political gain. If there is no violence, fraud, theft, or coercion there should be no crime. The government commits violence on peaceful people routinely and we need to work together to end it- end the government that has interfered in all of our lives without our permission.
They steal peoples money (from taxes to asset / civil forfeiture- ie government taking your money without charging you with a crime), children, and homes. We have to severely limit police and government. We need to eliminate the laws used to persecute non-violent and peaceful people: 'hacking' isn't a crime, boarders should be open (we don't need goons to give us permission to come and go as we please), laws dictating what we can put in our bodies (drugs), permission slips to travel (drivers licenses, whatever happened to the right to travel in our constitution), vehicular registration (a form of theft/tax), moral laws regulating consensual acts like sex, nudity in public/pornography/etc (nudity/sexual images and words can't actually hurt people, get rid of the nanny state), hate crime laws (they don't help minorities and are used against them), hypocritical open container laws, social security / ss numbers, social security (you can pay for your own retirement/childs education if the government doesn't steal your money and make you dependant on it), government schools, government funding of education, government involvement in marital matters such as regulating who one can choose to marry, copy"right"/'intellectual property', laws against filming police ('wire-tapping' laws), etc.
Check out:
http://www.freekeene.com/
http://www.freestateproject.org/
http://shiresociety.com/
Obviously that's a low estimate. We should presume there is out there at least one database containing the photo of billions of unique individuals.
to the police state that the USA has become. Where the US constitution isn't perfect, it was far better than what you poor bastards have now.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
And you wonder about the clown sightings across the US? Who wants to be identified by the authorities when they are simply walking to the coffee shop? Soon everyone will wear camouflage makeup. It will be a colorful world !
...omphaloskepsis often...
Voluntary donations via Facebook and Google+: The federal police of the world are, oh so pleased with that real name policy. So are the burglars, it's so much easier to find where all that stuff you show in your photos, is hidden.
And give access to the other 3/4ths of law enforcement? Then they would much easier jail the people that steal and trash Trump signs.
OK reading even the summary seems to refute the inflammatory title.
It isn't quite as George Orwellian as it sounds. Half of Americans are in facial-recognition databaseS. Meaning multiple, not one central uber repository. Also how is facial-recognition defined? Does that mean the databases have the ability to scan and match, or just that that databases have photos of peoples faces? Think DMV etc...
Now think about the technical difficulty involved in trying to query what must be hundreds of unconnected databases. Now add the historical evidence of things like Obamacare registry as to how well government and indeed multiple governments and agencies are at integrating databases.
Anyway I think it is much less sinister than the story suggests. This isn't the movies where they have a grainy CC still that they match to a central database that comes back with a match in 30 seconds. That is fiction. People overestimate the capabilities of what government is able to realistically do. Much like the movies showing satellite imagery following individual people etc... The technology isn't there, let alone the coordination and infrastructure required to do so.
Is it interesting to note? Sure, but not all that surprising. Indeed look at the wording. Law enforcement have "access" and FBI are "allowed"... There are a lot of spectrum to "access", I have "access" to a lot of things that is neither easy, convenient, or useful. Similarly, I am "allowed" to access a lot of things that I wouldn't bother with due to the previous criteria. Anyway I have seen enough IT reality in my day to make me very unworried about this being anything more than it is. A bunch of independent databases that by law allow for lawful access by law enforcement for a variety of reasons, but most of which is probably not used at least not in the suggested "real time" fashion due to the lack of real capability.
Talk to your Mayor. Talk to City Council, talk to your state representative. They have more power to restrict/restrain this kind of behavior (at the local level where it really would effect you) and are more likely to respond to constituents complaints on this topic than anyone at the federal level. I for one will be talking to my state rep about this next month.
The feds have been setting up 'collusion centers' where local law enforcement can use giant federal databases/computers to run face recognition searches. Some states restrict their local police forces from being able to co-operate with the feds in this way. Make sure your state becomes one of these non-compliant freedom zones!
In that hack, the Chinese got information about thousands of people (and their relatives and friends) who were applying for security clearances. All that was done was the government said "sorry" and offered some free credit monitoring for a few years. These people willingly handed over their information to the government.
What is going to happen when the government collects all of this information on your average everyday Joe and Jane, and that gets hacked? These people absolutely did not willingly hand over their information to the government. What will the masses say when their information is then stored in databases spread throughout the world, being held by friendly and unfriendly countries alike?
What will the government say to us when this happens?
In Ohio, TriHealth and Group Health Associates are both "coming up with a cool new system" for hipsters and people who love to use computers instead of talk to people. Oh, wait.. They're FORCING people to use the automated systems (look like mini kiosks) instead of talking to someone just to "check in" or announce that you have arrived for an appointment.
You can get around it, but you have to talk to a single person sitting at a desk for usually 5+ minutes just to convince them you're not going to use this stupid system and want them to check you in manually. They try to convince you to use it and that they can't help you. You have to call bullshit and raise your tone of voice before they will ask for your name and perform a few clicks, followed by "Dr. [so-and-so] will see you whenever."
Why? They take pictures of you every time you use them. I'm sure TriHealth nor Group Health Assoc. feed information to anyone else for $ or $ breaks. *cough*
how can anybody think this is bad
Depends on whether you believe in the principle of innocent before proven guilty -- because this is guilty before proven innocent. Same as any form of tracking, spying, stalking, or recording without explicit consent.