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."

Comments

Glassholes!

[freax]

Police in China are now the new Glassholes.

Re:Glassholes!

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re:Glassholes!

[rmdingler]

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.

China leads the way

[DNS-and-BIND]

Once again the fearful USA is left behind by the boldness of China in adopting and utilizing advanced technology. Under globalism, those who do not keep up are destined to be left behind in the dust. There is also a significant first-mover advantage as whoever adopts these technologies first realizes a distinct advantage over the timid ones who wait too long. The American response has been one of avoidance and evasion. Why? Because Americans seem to fear that if they stare at reality squarely, they will find reality staring back in a most discomforting way.

A lot of smart people are starting to argue in favor of the China Model. It avoids the pitfalls of American dumbocracy, of which the hazards are only too clear after the results 2016 election. Political meritocracy has a lot of upside, in fact a better word for it might be "vertical democratic meritocracy". Democracy works well at the lower levels of government. But, in a huge country, as you go up the political chain of command, the issues become more complex and mistakes become more costly. Thereâ(TM)s a need to institutionalize a system to select and promote leaders with superior qualities. China has it, and America is trying with all its might to pretend globalism doesn't exist and it can still get by with its antiquated system. Democracy on the bottom, experimentation in the middle, and meritocracy on top is a good way of thinking about how to govern a large country.

Re:China leads the way

[TheDarkMaster]

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.

Re:China leads the way

[AHuxley]

What "of which the hazards are only too clear after the results 2016 election"?
The US voted and the election was won. Every state had its vote counted.
Give a good speech, have a good candidate and win the states needed.
Re "China has" Communism that gave the world the Cultural Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Re "promote leaders with superior qualities."? China was filling its university system with students who did not pass entrance exams. It's not "superior qualities" when the only question is about been loyal to the Communist party.
So now China has to use facial recognition glasses to track people who would spread freedom and democracy.

Re:China leads the way

[larryjoe]

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.

Go to the source.

[Gravis Zero]

Engadget just reposted what Gizmodo wrote which reposted what WSJ and Sixth Tone wrote.

These are the real sources:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/c...
http://www.sixthtone.com/news/...

Re:Go to the source.

[Baron_Yam]

I started with the WSJ article but submitted the Engadget link because the WSJ is paywalled.

Re:The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

[gtall]

Space is amazingly big, so big you wouldn't believe it. And filled with radiation. Get over it, the Universe hates us as evidenced by the cue balls it periodically tries to bean us with.

Prosopagnosia

[iTrawl]

Can I get one with a reduced database containing just my friends and people I've met a few times? I need the thing to project a HUD onto my retina and tell me who they are and maybe some metadata about what they do and how we met. People don't like it when I walk past them like they don't exist, and I don't realise I'm doing it.

Re:I already feel safer

[Baron_Yam]

Some notes for you:

1) Bandwidth is an issue. Live video streaming from every cop wearing these simply is not practical.

2) Power is an issue. Sure, it takes some cycles to do the processing, but in a portable unit you don't need to constantly transmit a high bandwidth stream.

3) Encrypted devices that don't allow direct reading of the database and will lock every 12 hours are possible. And they have a very limited hardware interface, so you'd need someone to steal the device and crack it to get more than a cop's shift out of it.

4) The stored information would be (more or less) public record. People wanted by the police or people with convictions and release conditions being watched by the police - stuff you'll see published by your local news media or in FOI-accessible court records.

In short, so long as they can't scan and track every face and keep logs over long periods of time for data mining, this device isn't really a big problem. However, it ought to be looked at closely (at least in those nations where we care about privacy) so that it doesn't become a monster as the technology improves.

Fake news

[Excelcia]

Fake news. We all know that all Chinese look the same.

Computer assisted/enhanced police work

[VeryFluffyBunny]

To me this looks like an example of how these technologies should be used. Rather than for illegal dragnet surveillance and profiling that turns everyone into a suspect, they're using facial recognition to help cops do what they've always done: Look for criminal suspects for whom the police already have probable cause or an arrest warrant. It's probably a lot cheaper and easier to manage than the massive databases of innocent citizens that the NSA, CIA, FBI, DEA, etc., are collecting and is far less likely to suffer from false positives and negatives.