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UK Police Plan To Deploy 'Staggeringly Inaccurate' Facial Recognition in London (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes the Independent:
Millions of people face the prospect of being scanned by police facial recognition technology that has sparked human rights concerns. The controversial software, which officers use to identify suspects, has been found to be "staggeringly inaccurate", while campaigners have branded its use a violation of privacy. But Britain's largest police force is set to expand a trial across six locations in London over the coming months.
Police leaders claimed officers make the decision to act on potential matches with police records and images that do not spark an alert are immediately deleted. But last month The Independent revealed the Metropolitan Police's software was returning "false positives" -- images of people who were not on a police database -- in 98 percent of alerts... Detective Superintendent Bernie Galopin, the lead on facial recognition for London's Metropolitan Police, said the operation was targeting wanted suspects to help reduce violent crime and make the area safer. "It allows us to deal with persons that are wanted by police where traditional methods may have failed," he told The Independent, after statistics showed police were failing to solve 63 per cent of knife crimes committed against under-25s....
Det Supt Galopin said the Met was assessing how effective facial recognition was at tackling different challenges in British policing, which is currently being stretched by budget cuts, falling officer numbers, rising demand and the terror threat.
A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
But a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
Police leaders claimed officers make the decision to act on potential matches with police records and images that do not spark an alert are immediately deleted. But last month The Independent revealed the Metropolitan Police's software was returning "false positives" -- images of people who were not on a police database -- in 98 percent of alerts... Detective Superintendent Bernie Galopin, the lead on facial recognition for London's Metropolitan Police, said the operation was targeting wanted suspects to help reduce violent crime and make the area safer. "It allows us to deal with persons that are wanted by police where traditional methods may have failed," he told The Independent, after statistics showed police were failing to solve 63 per cent of knife crimes committed against under-25s....
Det Supt Galopin said the Met was assessing how effective facial recognition was at tackling different challenges in British policing, which is currently being stretched by budget cuts, falling officer numbers, rising demand and the terror threat.
A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
But a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
Nailed it! Federal prison is exactly where a spammer like you belongs.
Now they can go after more efficiently anyone who says something unapproved on Twitter!
(e.g. someone reporting on pedophile gangs)
yay technology. UK is screwed.
Sorry, I have competent lawyers - LOL TREASON BURN
Even antivirus testers deduce marks for false positives.
For example in the latest AV Comparatives test Symantec got dropped a grade for having 90 false positives out of 20,000.
That's 0.45%
Whatever happened Blackstone's "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"
I think, therefore you are.
Just gotta look for the perp with pasty skin and gnarly teeth
If enough people start wearing anti-surveillance clothing:
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
it just might reduce the success rate below "justifiable cost"
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
CCTV and images of people goes back to the days of the ring of steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... :)
All driver and passenger face in and out of a city in real time. Every license plate. Thats was with early 1990's tech.
Talking collected on every generation of "encrypted" cell phone. Voice prints, wifi. It all got collected on. Faces linked to all passports, all photo ID in use in real time.
Smile for every flight into/out of the UK, all the ferry routes. Truck stops. Ports. Rail. Webcam use. All internet use. That decade of international VoIP calls
Voice print to face, face to voice print.
The part that is so difficult is the need for parallel construction.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
... one again.
How come that we in the West, who for half a century fought dictatorships with population surveillance and control, now willingly and without resistance walk into an unprecedented surveillance society?
The reasons cited ("budget cuts, falling officer numbers, rising demand and the terror threat") are not exactly new. Why is public face recognition, fingerprint recording and opening and reading mail acceptable nowadays?
Was the Ted Kazinsky correct in his prediction of the control society, that our modern society requires ultimate control of its citizens to function in an (post-)industrial setting and that our freedoms therefore must be taken away from us?
Several members of the astrology squad died in mysterious circumstances and the rest quit.
You know how it is in big bureaucracies - they had to use the budget for something.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
RIP GB
Basic stats. When you have highly asymmetric group size, the FDR (False Discovery Rate) will be high (I think that they wrongly described the 98% as FPR). The FDR is the number of false discoveries among the discoveries. If the facial recognition gives the right answer 99% of the time (very very good facial recognition) and there is 100 bad guys per million. The FDR is 0.01*99900/(0.01*99900 + 0.99*100) = 91%. The facial recognition is probably highly accurate but size matter, it always matter!
The police and emergency services in England have *never* used the incredibly widespread CCTV and surveillance technology in England, and especially in London, are not used for solving crimes. They're not used to track theft, or assault, since I've been robbed and assaulted in London and no law enforcement was willing to check the cameras, even the ones inside or next to the Tube station and fire station. No, these are to fund a very large bureaucracy that taps the video for social and political tracking, for taxation causes like censuring gypsy taxies, parking in what an officer calls inapprpriate if seen from the right angle even if the obvious, closest sign says it's permitted, and "protecting us from Sinn Fein^H^H^H^H^H Al Queda^H^H^H^H Anonymous^H^H^H^H Polish students who overstay visas^H^H^H^H the constable's daughter's visit to that unemployed soccer fan.
London CCTV in particular is so *bad*, and so overwhelmed, that it cannot be used for courtroom prosecution because the data is usually poor quality and has no provenance, no reliable chain of custody. It's useful only for taxation monitoring and the kind of automated taxation that gave them the TV Tax (which is misnamed a licensing fee, it's a tax) and the London driving tax (also called fee, it's a tax). The English, and it's the English that do this, not the UK, the English have been inventing taxes and pretending they're not for hundreds of years. It's baked into their law, even if various former colonies found it revolting and successfully revolted. The taxes are used to fund the bureaucracies, which they wouldn't need if they didn't need a bureaucracy to collect the tax and pretend it's not one.
The guy who found so long ago all died, or are all but dead. The average MP and police chief in hierarchy is now 50, means they are the older children or grand children of those who fought, and were born in a time of boon. Those who have security and comfort are trying to keep it using method their parent would have blushed or cursed to. Frankly, this is the same type of people which deride millenial when at the same time 50 years ago they had comparatively cheap housing and a great potential. They are the same one predominentely wanting an empire they knew only in their stories. They are also the one wanting demographically brexit. that should tell you all. They are looking inward and going to the fetal position.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I have not worked on face recognition, but I have worked on text recognition, which has some of the same problems. You have several recognition algorithms that work. You can make some super-algorithm by polling all of the better ones. Oddly, the performance of the super-algorithm is measurably worse if you take away the worst one out of ten. It turns out that diversity is an important part of recognition. Sometimes the errors are trivial - I heard from someone who's lab had a face location system that had been trained on internet pictures of faces and cats, and could identify everyone in the lab except for one guy with a beard who was always a cat.
Let us compare this with our baseline, which is what we do. We recognise people but we come with a lot of faults and biases. We are able to see small differences in people like us, and are less able to distinguish people who are different. We can have our memories altered after the event. We cannot even run proper tests the way we can with computer recognition systems. People usually know when they are being tested. So, the baseline is pretty poor, too.
We can fix this. I see no reason why computer recognition systems should not be superior to humans. But this software is going to need training and development, and this process should be open if we are to be sure it does not have any built-in biases. Software does not spring fully-formed from the brow of Alan Turing, and to expect it to work from day one is unrealistic. To rely on a boxed solution from some private contractor is also unrealistic, and also dangerous. If we automatically identify any development in recognition systems as Orwellian evil, then I am afraid that's what we are going to get.
Nuke London from Orbit
and get it over with.
fake brexit junkies.
They donâ(TM)t care. So how are the western democratic countries actually bad again?
The facial recog doesn't need to be that accurate - only needs to be accurate enough to sub-select the database down to a few people. Then, after a dose of IR photons (emitters always now at doorways throughout the country) - correlated photons give the signature needed to absolutely identify. Quite beyond steel ...
This technology might be justifiable if the UK were serious about fighting terrorism, but they're not really serious. At best this is just security theater. At worst it's part of an ever-growing police state. Terrorism is just an excuse. They'll ignore it until it's impossible to stop the totalitarianism.
Seems like it could become a thing for there to be contests to trigger a false positive.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Do I see a public response using Guy Fawlkes masks?
They can't shake off their authoritarian,Big Brother tendencies, but they do attempt to implement them poorly.
Just like dope sniffing dogs and broken tail lights.
Have gnu, will travel.
Crimes have been continually decreasing in the UK since 1995 and have been decreasing in much of the rest of Europe, too (not the same in Eastern Europe for obvious reasons like changed statistics, fall of the wall, etc.) The same for the US, it's a general trend in all Western societies. Especially violent crimes like murder and armed robbery have been going down since the mid 90s.
You could easily find that out by using Google and taking a look at the statistics, you know. Countries publish pretty solid crime statistics at regular intervals. (For a more in-depth interpretation you need to be aware of the occasional changes in statistical measurement, though, but the general trend is clear enough.)
Crime, including violent crime has been falling in European nations fairly steadily over the last 25 years, with occasional jumps, which are often due to changes in crime classification.
Especially violent crimes like murder and armed robbery have been going down since the mid 90s.
Just checked that assertion. It is not true. What actually happened is it skyrocketed after 1995, peaked, then began to fall. Reaching levels similar to 1995 levels around the 2010 time frame.
You could easily find that out by using Google and taking a look at the statistics
Easy for you to say, but per my brief, which denotes easy, search a vast majority of the crime statistics data seemingly does not exist after 2010ish time frame.
Overall I'm not implying the poster you are replying to is correct and you are incorrect, I just don't see any solid evidence your assertions are correct.
Caution: Contents under pressure
Why is this a problem? Burkas and other facial coverings are common in the UK.
That's just GOP propaganda. The actual figures reveal that crime has been going down world over steadily for a few decades now. There have been local upticks in time, like (possibly) a current one, but the long-term trend is indisputable. But, do not believe me, and do not look up yourself the figures; just keep eating the Fox News garbage.
You're right I was slightly inaccurate because I looked at an overall statistics on Wikipedia. In the UK, crime rates were at an all high in 1995 and fell down since then (but with fluctuations, not "continuously" in the sense of monotonically decreasing), with current crime rates at beginning of 2017 being lower than in the 80s. Homicide, however, was still going up at 1995 and peaked at the early 2000s, and since then has declined to a level lower or around that of the 80s. Homicide rate was overall lower in the 70s than now, though.
What I meant is that if you or the OP are really interested in this kind of data, then it's easy to find out because every country (plus the EU) publishes these kind of statistics openly on official websites. For example this is what I found as one of the very first links for the UK.. Notice that it's going slightly up again since 2015, which is probably what the fear mongering OP had in mind...
So who made that software....
The fifth of November?
Based on the linked article, the system issued 104 alerts of which 2 were valid.
Even with that inaccuracy, 104 alerts would be much fewer faces to look through than the millions that would bpossible if they were just watching it all.
Because they've learned to program the people to believe they're not under control, when they're under control, they're not being told what to do, when they're being told what to do, and they're not being told to say what they say, when they've been told to say what they say.
The first re-programming step in the transformation is to "program out" any and all beliefs that they are under control. It's the real face of double-think, which wasn't what most people thought about it.
Bear in mind that a couple of upticks in homicide rates in the UK were due to Harold Shipman and Hillsborough, as those historical crimes get assigned to the year of the conviction or other court case, etc., not the year they occurred.
Also, in the 2000s (2005?), a number of changes were made to categorisation of violent crimes across police forces, which led to an apparent 10% increase in violent crime. If you look at the BCS, you see a more consistent figure. On knife crime, for example, you see the rates from the BCS have been static for almost 15 years, but arrests and so on are up, as knife crime is being taken more seriously and more effort put into it. It's generally worth looking at a range of statistics, as just like KPIs in IT, if you focus too narrowly on a particular figure that is simply a proxy for what you want to find out from a complex system, you miss the wood for the trees.
British Home Office minister (from April 2018) is Sajid Javid, who is muslim. ... from Pakistan.
Really an old and established "british name"
He served in the Cabinet as Culture Secretary from 2014-2015, and President of the Board of Trade from 2015-16 and Communities Secretary from 2016-18.
He was appointed to his current role as Home Secretary in April 2018 following the resignation of Amber Rudd for misleading the Home Affairs Select Committee over targets for removal of illegal immigrants during the Windrush scandal.[2] As Home Secretary, Javid took a more liberal approach to immigration than previously, lifting the immigration cap for NHS doctors and nurses and softening the “hostile environment” policy.
So, he is really intimate with "muslim problem" and Soros pocket money for destroying the Europe.
...the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society.
I like this one - it is quite comedic in its unabashed self-contradiction. Being in a public place does of course means that you cannot expect privacy - what else can it mean? If you want privacy, find a private space somewhere. It is nonsense to claim that it has a 'chilling effect on society' - every survey I have read suggests that the public wannt more, not less, survelillance in public spaces.
Apart from that, I think people need to realise what these technologies are about. Recognising the face of a person in a crowd is is not a trivial task - even a human has trouble doing it; most people will have experienced not spotting even a close friend in a crowd, or thinkign they recognise a stranger. Whay should we expect an AI be any better? But what an AI can do better, is the continue for hours on end, without losing concentration. It isn't a fundamental problem that the process isn't accurate - it is only supposed to flag up a potential recognition and alert human operatives, who will then, hopefully, use their own judgment and take action if appropriate.
So, is it horribly inaccurate? I still don't think it is a major problem - no doubt the technology will improve in time. I have no problem with people criticising the establishment, the police, public services etc etc, but I do object to being shilled by fools like this.
The system isn't judge jury and executioner. The system is just trying to reduce the search space for good old fashioned policing. False positives don't mean that it will only identify 2% of cases, it means from the cases its identified 2% are correct.
If you're looking at a million people, and you're looking for 1 person, having a search space of 49 to go through is an incredible win for policing. Now tracking implications on the other hand are quite severe, but then that is actually helped for privacy advocates by a system which may confuse you with 49 other people.
... an officer looks at the match and dismisses it.
Where exactly is the harm in that?
Sure one might discuss if CCTVs everywhere and facial recognition are desirable, but the fraction of "false positives" is no valid argument in that discussion, since all positives are checked a second time by a human. The automated system serves as a first filter, meaning less comparisons by humans are necessary so the whole system becomes more efficient. A more interesting number are false negatives, but about those we know nothing.
To all those who now are opposed to the software because it generates so many false positives: Ask yourself if you'd really prefer an improved software that has a much higher accuracy. If not, then the high number of false positives is not really an argument in favor of what you want.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
They'd have to be to take care of a moron like you.
Meanwhile Trump is still in office doing great things for this nation. Next up is another Conservative Justice for the Supreme Court.
Ingsoc
Thirty fours years late
but worth the wait.
Have you noticed how easy it is to bias the reader just by the order you say things in? Take this quote from the summary.
A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
But a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
Now let's reverse the two paragraphs and move the word "but", which tells us the second quote rebuts the first one.
A Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards.
But a policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
Funny how that leaves you thinking something totally different. Now let's try to write it in a more evenhanded way that doesn't tell the reader who is right.
Commenters disagreed on the legality and privacy implications of the technology. A policy officer from the National Council for Civil Liberties called the technology "lawless," adding "the use of this technology in a public place is not compatible with privacy, and has a chilling effect on society."
On the other hand, a Home Office minister said the technology was vital for protecting people from terrorism, though "we must ensure that privacy is respected. This strategy makes clear that we will grasp the opportunities that technology brings while remaining committed to strengthening safeguards."
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Yeah, but at least those guns don't make it able to actually commit crime as badly. America needs to forcibly disarm all civilians. There is no reason for any sicko to have an assault weapon that leave the children in harms way. No. Reason.
Of course, a terrorist would never think of wearing a disguise. No, never.