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British Cops Will Scan Every Fan's Face At the Champions League Final (vice.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the scan-copy-print-repeat dept.

Using a new facial recognition surveillance system, British police will scan every fan's face at the UEFA Champions League on June 3rd and compare them to a police database of some 500,000 "persons of interest." "According to a government tender issued by South Wales Police, the system will be deployed during the day of the game in Cardiff's main train station, as well as in and around the Principality Stadium situated in the heart of Cardiff's central retail district." From the report: Cameras will potentially be scanning the faces of an estimated 170,000 visitors plus the many more thousands of people in the vicinity of the bustling Saturday evening city center on match day, June 3. Captured images will then be compared in real time to 500,000 custody images stored in the police information and records management system alerting police to any "persons of interest," according to the tender. The security operation will build on previous police use of Automated Facial Recognition, or AFR technology by London's Metropolitan Police during 2016's Notting Hill Carnival.

3 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Fairly easy to defeat by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Face dazzle paint in team colors, reversible pattern hoodie and scarf, fake nose and or eyebrows (team colors).

    Hit ratio drops from 50 percent false positive to below threshold.

    Basically, if it worked during WW II, it still works. That's how inaccurate facial recognition actually is. It's even worse for women than for men.

    --
    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  2. An amazing probability of failure by davecb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They have 170,000 * 500,000 faces, for a total of 85,000,000,000 comparisons. If you have a 99% chance of sucess (ie, NOT identifying grandma as a wanted terrorist), then a 1% failure rate will give you 850,000,000 wrong comparisons.

    In tests with football-crowd-sized sets of people, the very best recognizers hit 80% and the worst were below 20% accurate. See http://www.washington.edu/news...

    How many people will be pulled out of line, I wonder, before the police notice that the're getting an larger number of false positives than they were prepared to handle? I wonder if it will identify everyone who shows up as a terrorist (:-))

    --dave
    [The German federal security service noticed this many years ago, when they tried to scan airports with a former employer's product]

    --
    davecb@spamcop.net
  3. Re:Minority Report by infolation · · Score: 3, Interesting
    On slashdot that would work. But meanwhile in the real world of UK policing:
    • Police spotters identify the individuals with facepaint/hoods/etc.
    • Police approach them and ask them for name & ID (eg debit card) to weed out the 'ordinary people'.
    • If anyone resists, claims their rights not to give name, are belligerent etc, police wave a drug dog somewhere near them which barks on cue (signal from handler)
    • Police now have 'reasonable suspicion' and demand name, address, DoB etc. If they think the person might be of interest, they'll run an on-the-spot fingerprint scan against the Police National Computer.

    Am not saying this is right, but have seen this happen many times at festivals, protests, demonstrations, rallys etc.