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Police In China Are Scanning Travelers With Facial Recognition Glasses (engadget.com)
Baron_Yam shares a report from Engadget: Police in China are now sporting glasses equipped with facial recognition devices and they're using them to scan train riders and plane passengers for individuals who may be trying to avoid law enforcement or are using fake IDs. So far, police have caught seven people connected to major criminal cases and 26 who were using false IDs while traveling, according to People's Daily. The Wall Street Journal reports that Beijing-based LLVision Technology Co. developed the devices. The company produces wearable video cameras as well and while it sells those to anyone, it's vetting buyers for its facial recognition devices. And, for now, it isn't selling them to consumers. LLVision says that in tests, the system was able to pick out individuals from a database of 10,000 people and it could do so in 100 milliseconds. However, CEO Wu Fei told the Wall Street Journal that in the real world, accuracy would probably drop due to "environmental noise." Additionally, aside from being portable, another difference between these devices and typical facial recognition systems is that the database used for comparing images is contained in a hand-held device rather than the cloud."
Luckily they are not in the cloud, because that would be unsafe. It is much better to give each individual the database, because what could go wrong?
Or does 'In the cloud' now means 'On a server'? (Was this an example of a rhetorical question).
Not looking at the privacy issues here, just at the technical side of it. Having it on a dedicated server should be a lot safer. The time might go a bit up, but not to seconds. That way when one gets into the wrong hands, it will not be able to abuse it. For a criminal knowing if he will be recognized or not with his fake beard is very interesting information.
Combine it with fingerprint recognition and it should be a lot safer again. Say a device gets stolen and they cut of the police persons finger. That device can still be useless as the device can be blocked from elsewhere. You just block the secure access from that device.
Because what they are doing now is selling the database and you get a free device with it.
If I where a criminal (disclaimer: IANAC) I would not like that they use it, but the way they did it would give me a lot of options.
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Meritocracy don't work if the criterion for selecting who has the most merit is their bank balance or in which family he was born. Many people think they have merit when in fact they only got there because they have rich parents and rich friends.
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As someone who has serious issues remembering and recognizing faces (an iPhone 3 with a broken camera would outperform me), I would like a device like this. Something that remembers faces of people I meet and pops up their name when it sees them again.
Personally I don't have an issue per se with police (or surveillance cameras) being equiped with face recognition software, or with roadside cameras equipped with ANR. The issue I have with these is their use cases, and the way the extracted data is used. And those uses always get expanded once the tech is in place. Police can be flagged automatically about criminals under an arrest warrant? Great. But the same tech can be used to grab people with outstanding parking tickets, or people critical of the government, or even completely innocent people who happen to be near a crime scene. ANR can be used to flag stolen vehicles... great. But it can also be used to track every citizen across the highway network, and you can be sure politicans will come up with good reasons for doing so.
We (some countries) already have decent privacy guidelines, and decent checks and audits in place on the way such sensitive data is used. But what we don't have is a check on use cases. We're not going to stop invasive technology like this, but we can push for much stricter rules on how it can be applied. Potential benefits should always be weighed against the right to privacy and potential harm to innocents, and those potential benefits should be tested; if they aren't realised, the use case should be invalidated. And negligence or misuse should be treated as a criminal case.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
As someone else who has trouble remembering names, I would rather continue struggling through the several seconds of social disjointedness before having every personal interaction recorded, and probably then uploaded and stored.
I find it disturbing that of innovations imagined in the last few decades of science fiction, many of the technologies presently developing the fastest are those that benefit the surveillance state.
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Furthermore, the fatal flaw in the Chinese system is the inability to peacefully change leaders, governments, and laws. The current US president's tenure and his party's hold of much of governmental power will eventually end regardless of how much that president and party attempt to hold onto power. The US system allows the election of "undesirable" leaders but also provides a way to get rid of those undesirables. In the Chinese system, the undesirables never leave. The Chinese Communist Party has an unbreakable grip on the country. It remains to be seen if the current Chinese president will yield power at the traditional end of his terms or if he will adopt the Putin model of government.