Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage To Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color (theintercept.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

Three months after the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that Amazon provided facial recognition technology to local law enforcement, a new report by The Intercept says that IBM collaborated with the New York City Police Department to develop a system that allowed officials to search for people by skin color, hair color, gender, age, and various facial features. VentureBeat: The Intercept and the National Institute's nonprofit Investigative Fund, citing "confidential corporate documents" and interviews with engineers involved with the project, write that IBM began developing the analytics platform roughly 10 years ago in partnership with New York's Lower Manhattan Security Initiative counterterrorist center, after an earlier experiment with the city of Chicago. Using "thousands" of photographs from roughly 50 cameras provided by the NYPD, its computer vision system learned from 16,000 points to identify clothing color and other bodily characteristics, in addition to potential threats like unattended packages, people entering off-limits areas, and cars speeding up against the flow of traffic.

4 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Wow by Alypius · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Searching camera feeds based on physical human traits. Quelle horror.

  2. Re:Classic IBM. by gnick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What's immoral about this? I understand the objections to mass surveillance, but what's wrong from analyzing the footage to find what you're looking for?

    --
    He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
  3. Can be used evil. by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While this could be open for abuse, I don't think IBM was trying to be racist in this case, it is just a visual factor to help narrow down a search. Just like how law enforcement will also identify people by the tattoos or scars they may have.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    1. Re:Can be used evil. by ibpooks · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're soft pedaling it. Of course IBM is not being racist, nor are their developers, nor their customers in NYPD. The very implication of it in the title and summary of the OP is a perfect example of the race-baiting, click-baiting business model adopted by the news-entertainment industry which has ruined their credibility.

      It is obvious to anyone that basic physical traits like color and size are essential to locating a person in a crowd, yet they've chosen to make a big deal out of it specifically for the purpose of churning their audience to anger.