I know a lot of people here are talking about the tech and how of course it makes too many false positives. But are we not going to talk about IF this type of thing is even okay? I for one don't think so. Too Orwellian.
Keep in mind that sniffer dogs are used to filter the trials. What's missing in that statistic is the total number of bags the dogs sniffed.
I'm going to make up a number. Keep in mind that I know it's a made up number, but I hope that it will illustrate my point. Let's imagine that 1 out of every 100 bags contains drugs that a sniffer dog can detect. If the dogs have an 80% false positive rate, that means that in 100 bags they will indicate the 1 bag carrying drugs and 4 other bags not carrying drugs.
If that bags carrying drugs (1:100) were correct, and I'm not saying it is, then of 100 bags, 4 bags were searched fruitlessly in order to find the 1 bag with drugs. That means that 4% of bags were searched fruitlessly. That sounds a lot more encouraging for the dogs.
Another way to look at it is to say that when the police get a bag that was indicated by a dog, their chance of finding drugs is 20%. With our 1:100 scenario (still not trying to say it's true) their chance would be 1%. So the chances of finding the drugs increases by a factor of 20 at the cost of inconveniencing 4% of the people.
Of course, I'm being a bit silly. We don't know how many bags the dogs checked so we have no idea how effective the dogs are. However, I suspect that relatively few people carry drugs in their bags (surely less than 1%? Maybe I'm wrong), so this 80% false positive rate sounds pretty effective to me. It potentially disrupts a tiny percentage of people and potentially increases the odds of finding drugs pretty dramatically. Without more information, there is no way to say what's going on, though (which is why I hate newspaper articles like that).
In your scenario, they've searched 100 people with no probable cause (what is a sniffer dog doing, if not a search?), and then done a much more intrusive, stressful, and embarrassing personal search of 5 people, also with no probable cause or presumption of innocence, in order to catch one person.
Being basically accused of a crime and physically searched by men with guns is much more than an "inconvenience" in my opinion.
A system that accuses 4 innocent people of a crime for every guilty person it catches, is in my opinion a broken system that should not be employed.
My opinion of course, you may be happy with a much higher level of police intrusion into your life. Gotta stop those dangerous drug users!
Also keep in mind that police must have reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed in order to conduct a search.
While to me it is obvious that using a trained drug-sniffing dog in a suspicion-less search on unopened bags cannot be used to generate the probable cause required for a human to open the bag and search it manually, for some reason, the judges have so far seen fit to dance around that and come up with legal excuses to allow it anyway.
The problem is not that the dogs are bad at identifying drug bags. The problem is that dogs should not be employed in the first place, unless the cops already have a good reason to search the bags. I.e. they saw a suspected drug/money mule go in with a bag and come out empty-handed, but are having trouble identifying which bag was his. They then have reasonable suspicion to perform the search with the dog, and the dog gives reasonable suspicion to open the bags the dog marked. Just going around with a dog, sniffing every bag that comes within range of that nose, should not be allowed.
The face recognition and license plate scanners are the same to me. They may not technically be a search, but they are still breaching the pseudo-anonymity one enjoys by being out in public. Strangers know you're there, but they don't necessarily know who you are, what you are doing, or where you are going. You are likely unnoticed or quickly forgotten. The cops are using this technology to fight crime, but they end up harassing a lot of innocents in the process. They are essentially using the mechanical assistance to follow everyone, all the time, and remember the details for a long, long time. And that sort of behavior is precisely what prompted the 4th Amendment in the first place. The technology has brought back general warrants, worse than ever, and the cops are concealing or lying about what they are doing with it, because it has been illegal in the US for over 230 years.
Ya know, that conversation already happened, and the "powers that be" chose public safety over personal privacy. I work in facial recognition. You're gonna see it blanket this civilization, completely. We are selling systems to every school district, shopping center, sports stadium, and municipal district nationwide. In the 2nd world it is even more active. The time to debate FR is past.
When was that time, precisely? I don't recall there being a debate about this. Will we just blow through the "time for debates" on every new technology?
It's been building with every school shooting, public gun violence, and high tension political gathering. The conversation takes place at the local level, often at the specific school itself, the specific campus, stadium and shopping district. You see, many of these places are private, so they can do what ever they want to a large degree; and many of the public spaces are patrolled by private security companies, who use the most cost effective method to cover large areas. The police are the end of the line as far as deploying facial recognition.
That's the thing, as the other commenter pointed out: for all practical purpose, there was no "debate" or "conversation" (outside the tech community, and a few wonky policy discussion forums). It has been basically presented as a fait accompli.
The "powers that be" chose public safety over personal privacy.
That may be the rational for (some of) the customers.
But I'm sure you know all too well that the vendors of this technology are (overwhelmingly) motivated by the pursuit of one thing, and one thing only. And it certainly isn't your safety or mine.
The "powers that be" are the collective owners of the franchises at the local mall, putting pressure on the mall security contractor. The "powers that be" are the loss prevention departments at every major retailer. They are also the security at every sports stadium, college campus, and local school district who are strapped for cash, looking to cover large areas in as cost effective a manner as possible. If you are looking for some over arching authority that says "yes we do" or "no we don't" as a society, I think the active adoption of FR by all these smaller private players is and is the end of the discussion.
Another point of view is that the "powers that be" is you - and me - and everyone else who has a choice to make about whether to work on technologies like these.
Historically speaking, the "if I didn't build X - someone else would have" argument -- well, we all know what that has led to.
You have to be in the conversation first, and then recognize that the conversation takes place at the private security contractor level. They are the people tasked with security of a hotel, shopping district, mall, sports stadium, airport, high school and college campus. They are they people adopting FR far more than the local police. They are also largely private companies, looking to be the most cost effective, and composed of typical security guards, education wise.
And on the flip side, if the purpose is Orwellian chilling effects on some types of behaviour, is the accuracy or false positive rate really going to concern the users of the tech? Consider the Mechanical Hound in Fahrenheit 451.
I think it's a debate worth having. Personally I am heavily in the pro-privacy, limited state power camp on most issues. However, if:
(a) the technology is being deployed in specific environments where there really is a credible threat of criminal behaviour, and
(b) it is being used only as an initial filter prior to normal, lawful police action (or inaction) with normal safeguards, and
(c) the target data set used for comparisons is generated on a lawful and justified basis
then I'm not sure there is anything inherently unethical about this sort of technology. Is it really any different to having police officers at the entrances to a stadium with mugshots of known hooligans who have been identified while discussing trouble-making online ahead of the match?
Whether it is technically capable enough to be useful and cost-effective is a different matter, and it's also a test that might give a different result tomorrow.
Whether it is possible to have sufficient safeguards that a system could reliably meet the standards above is also a different question.
And whether the public would trust that those safeguards existed and have confidence that the standards were being met is another question again.
The data reported in the article shows 0 incidents of wrongful arrest due to false positives. It also implies several hundred cases where the correct people were properly identified by the technology. There is plenty of room for debate about this technology, but so far, just saying "ask the data" doesn't seem to make the point you might have intended.
There's a lot of principles I agree with you here, but I'd still rather not have the surveillance, and here's why
> (a) the technology is being deployed in specific environments where there really is a credible threat of criminal behaviour,
You need to define what credible threat is, pretty exactly. Just a thief? A terrorist? I think we all agree that this would be nice if there was foreknowledge of an imminent attack. BUT I think there still is a danger in setting them up for only that kind of use. We know that if we give police (or anyone really) tools, they will use them (why wouldn't they?). So having the ability uses to more abuse of use. But also as time goes on and people get used to it, the regulations relax.
So in this terrorist scenario I would be okay with bringing in cameras, or hooking into the already existing system, but it would need to tear down and be required to only come out when time is of the essence.
As we say in America, I'd rather a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man be stripped of their freedom.
As we say in America, I'd rather a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man be stripped of their freedom.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that, but I don't like how simple it is.
Anyways, I always wondered if the discretion allowed to police engenders more societal problems than it solves. I imagine this would have a similar effect.
I'll give you that. But that's also why I try to remind people what one of the founding beliefs was. And that your system is always going to fail to some degree, so do you want it to fail safe (innocent go to jail) or fail open (guilty go free)?
I don't really see that it is that bad compared to what happens now. You have people doing it currently with all their subjective biases (such as race and class). Maybe this just makes it cheaper and maybe more effective as the tech matures. Surely accuracy concerns can be addressed by combining multiple data sources (e.g. looks like someone dodgy, is somewhere strange, doing something strange, just the way a police officer would rationalize investigating further).
The fundamental principle of presumption of innocence means you shouldn't go around spying on everyone looking for signs of criminality.
And the idea that the tech is more dispassionate and therefore fairer than humans is a step on the road to hell. I guess you never had an anomalous credit or insurance rating yet. (Notably GDPR has a clause for precisely the ability to review automated decision making where it can have a material effect.)
> And you think the algorithms made by racists aren't racist?
I'd hedge that a little. Because I think there are a lot of people who are just naive and think that using data that is historically racist will result in racist outcomes.
Not saying that the person creating the algo is racist, but for such a harsh accusation you need enough substantial evidence. That, or we dilute the term.
Hm? At this point there's really nothing controversial about "racist data makes racist models" (I'm being flippant in my phrasing, but, more rigorously: "the model will reflect and reify the biases of the person training the model and the data used to train it, and the people who annotate the training data")
But the system in question is scanning a crowd looking for known faces in a database, race only enters it when you are comparing it to the human system of a police officer looking for terrorists at a football game. I get that people object to persistent surveillance but that doesn't seem to be what this system is about. It is looking for certain people at certain events. The way your face gets on the list in the first place is where you should put your concerns...
Well what I was saying, and why I suggested hedging the accusation, is that if someone does, say an AI that determines court sentences then that might cause the AI to be racist even though race was never set as a parameter. Such an AI might have racist behavior because of the naivety of designer[1], not that the designer was themselves racist.
Obviously the designer could make this data set racist on purpose, I was just saying that an AI that judges on race might be due to stupidity and not malice. Hanlon's Razor.
[1]Not realizing that there are other parameters that correlate with race
