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."

Comments

The UK has had years of results

[AHuxley]

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.

Re:The UK has had years of results

[Hognoxious]

Who edited "Brave New World" for you? He must have been very good - and extremely tired.

Minority Report was right...

[DrTJ]

... 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?

Re:Minority Report was right...

[dcw3]

We just watched a show on AI that claimed Israeli Defense Forces and Homeland Security were using a product that predicts the likelihood of someone being suspicious. This isn't really face recognition, from say a database, but more of a recognition of how people appear when they're likely to be up to something. Think of it as, um, profiling.

They also mentioned a study that could predict if someone was gay with ~80% reliability for males, and ~75% for females, saying that the AI learned from using photos on gay dating sites.

Minority Report can't be that far away.

Re:False positives

[ShanghaiBill]

Whatever happened Blackstone's "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"

That is theory. In practice, we have always been willing to tolerate false positives in our justice system. When the Innocence Project first started using DNA evidence to reinvestigate old cases, they found about 10% of convicts couldn't possibly have committed the crimes. Many of them were convicted solely on the basis of coerced confessions. 10% is the floor on the false positive rate. The real percentage of innocents in prison is likely even higher.

Because the children are in the control

[aepervius]

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.

Re:False positives

[voss]

A false positive in BOLO is tolerable a false positive in arrest is not. At the time of arrest some human needs to have verified the match.

If they were serious

[reboot246]

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.

Re:False positives

[HiThere]

His phraseology was incorrect, but his explicit intended meaning was probably " In practice, our governments have always been willing to tolerate false positives in our justice system, and most people were willing to accept this."

It's an unfortunate fact of human nature that most people are usually willing to accept accusation by an authority as the equivalent of guilt...unless they feel personally involved.

Re:False positives

[HiThere]

There's two problems with that:
1) Police all over the world have a record of making their job easier by taking the most convenient suspect and getting them convicted. They seem to generally prefer to have honest evidence, but they sure don't require it.

2) The system as reported isn't even good enough for your idealized use case. I'm assuming that it's the same system that was reported a couple of days ago where a representative of the company that sells it was saying it wasn't good enough for this use case.