
Dubai detectives to get Google Glass - matthijs_
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/02/us-emirates-dubai-google-police-idUSKCN0HR0W320141002
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bluerobotcat
Talk about bad PR for Google Glass. Already, the article has been amended with
the notice '(This version of the story has been corrected to change headline
to show recognition database software developed by police not Google)'. I
don't imagine Google will be advertising this use case if they ever do a
keynote on Glass again.

~~~
zak_mc_kracken
On the contrary, I think this shows that despite the strong backlash that
Google Glass has been receiving, we are beginning to find legitimate use cases
where such technology will soon become indispensable.

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nitrogen
Violating privacy has _always_ been the complaint against Glass. This is a
long-anticipated example thereof, not a new and "indispensable" application.

The idea of a wearable HUD is cool, but I don't see how any implementation can
ever by trustworthy to non-wearers.

~~~
zak_mc_kracken
There is no added invasion of privacy here, just automating face recognition.

In effect, you seem to be opposed to replacing brain processing with computer
processing, which is squarely on the wrong side of history.

This is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Banning it is a stopgap,
we just need to start working on regulating it and defining the boundaries of
such practices.

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aric
Dubai's laws are atrocious. It's trivial to become implicated. Severe
imprisonment of citizens and unwitting travelers alike is the primary reason
to stay out and not support Dubai's economy. Only an illusion of legal
modernity exists through _wealth_. Google Glass with facial recognition is an
excellent fit.

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stfu
Fortunately this is happening in an undemocratic country and not coming with
the typical terrorism / save-the-children propaganda. I hope we soon can hear
about the benefits Google glas will have for example on enforcing Dubai's
stand on homosexuality:

 _In keeping with traditional Islamic morality, both Federal and Emirate law
prohibit homosexuality and cross-dressing with punishment ranging from long
prison sentences, deportation, for foreigners, and the death penalty._ (1)

(1)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Dubai](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Dubai)

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jonalmeida
I've mentioned this before else where, but Dubai doesn't need this because
crime is so low compared to most countries that the only reason it may be used
is solely for publicity. In majority parts of the city, you can still walk
around at night and not be as worried as you would in other cities.

Hence, it makes me want to throw out the idea of how effective this facial
recognition really is. If your sole reason is marketing, you won't care much
for effective use of said tech.

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hnriot
"crime" is low, mainly because you can get months in jail for kissing in
public, and as for women, well, that's probably best avoided, since they (the
Dubai state) have a really backward view of women and what they should or
shouldn't do.

~~~
jonalmeida
I'm aware of the situation/culture having lived there the majority of my life.

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saulrh
Good. Scream as much as you want about facial recognition software; it doesn't
give them any capabilities they didn't already have and if they do _anything_
with it it will eventually mess up and they will be eviscerated in court. What
I'm more interested in is that all of these officers are now wearing cameras
and sending an always-on video stream to home base. It's a trivial step to
demand that that stream be saved.

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avn2109
>> "... sending an always-on video stream to home base."

The trouble is, so long as the cops have the ability to switch off the
camera/pull the battery/cover the lens, we lose all the benefits of wearable
video for police.

Before beating up Rodney King 2.0, they just flip the switch. Then in court,
"The officers' cameras had a technical malfunction at the time and there is no
video of the incident."

But if they want evidence of you doing/saying something incriminating, you bet
your boots those cameras are rolling.

This is actually an interesting systems design problem, wherein the users are
adversarial but in total control of the hardware.

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wwweston
Two things could make a difference here:

1) Reverse burden of proof for charges against officers where footage is
missing.

2) Tie payroll for the entire department to the availability of footage during
a given pay period. Missing footage? Missing paychecks.

~~~
pstuart
Not directly related to OP, but should be part of this reform: pay for
"malpractice" insurance from their retirement fund.

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danellis
How would this even work? Glass with the camera on has a battery life of about
an hour. They could power it externally, but then it gets too hot, slows down
and gives a warning message. Add in the CPU load of facial recognition and I
just don't think Glass is up to the job.

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karmicthreat
You don't need to harvest a constant 20 fps. Every 30 seconds take a frame
capture. Do a Haar transform to crop out candidate faces and upload to server
that does the heavy recognition lifting.

~~~
danellis
I guess it depends what their use case is. In 30 seconds, a lot of people have
walked past you unrecorded.

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gus_massa
I'd like to ignore the privacy aspect. I want to discuss the false positive
problem.

Is the technology reliable to have a low false positive rate? Probably face
recognition is good enough to classify the photograph of your friends in
Facebook, and the friends of your friends. It has to choose a person in a set
of ~100.

What happens when someone is falsely identified? Is the suspect released after
a ID check or he is moved to the police station to a full check?

Can this be a proxy for racial profiling? There was a horror story about a
face recognition software that didn't detect someone with black skin. This can
have the reverse problem.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4DT3tQqgRM)

~~~
natch
In Dubai, I'd be concerned about TRUE positives. The more perfect the
identification of someone who committed a supposed "crime" as deemed so by
Dubai's ludicrous standards, the worse this is.

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lovelearning
It sounds sophisticated to a layman, but I have doubts over its practicality.

For example, how will the system overcome image noise introduced by
traditional dressing, such as the keffiyeh and hijab? I'm no expert, but have
played around with haar face detection, and eigen/fisher face recognition. My
experience was that factors like face position, facial adornments (caps,
spectacles, moustaches, etc) and ambient lighting had significant effects on
accuracy.

There was also the reported failure of face recognition in the Boston marathon
bombing investigation [1].

[1]: [http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/04/23/facial-
recognitio...](http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/04/23/facial-recognition-
identify-boston-bombing-suspects/)

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kurtle
Source: lived in Dubai for 2.5 years.

This is a combination of Dubai's two greatest past times: spectacle and
surveillance, so naturally they will implement this as quickly as possible,
paying top dollar to contractors to make it work.

I'm sorry if this sounds jaded, but I lived this for 2.5 years, running
projects whose sole purpose was pomp and circumstance for various Emiratis who
have virtually unlimited (debt funded) budgets.

To all those saying it won't work because {{technical reason}} you're probably
right, but it won't stop them from overpaying to do so.

Some more examples of this:

* They have a road toll system called Salik, which is like EZ Pass gone amuck. There are numerous tolls and each give the police the ability to track any car to a small area. So ther is very little auto crime.

* There are speed cameras about every 10km, which residents speed up and speed down to "obey" the speed limit. So to whomever was talking about high speed chases: they don't happen. They just wait for the criminal to stop, know exactly where he is, and then apprehend him.

* Most projects I worked on had a whole component about being "the best", "the biggest", "the tallest" where we would have to show why {{costly technology}} is the best in the world. There was no definition of "the best" beyond just claiming something.

* In my apartment building, there were cameras from outside my door to the carpark in the basement. And they were regularly watched. I know this because the door man would make it a habit of hitting the elevator button for me when I was about a meter away from the elevator, having seen me from CC cameras far below

* To those talking about how burqas and hijabs will make this technology impossible: most folks there don't wear traditional, national dress. 87% of the country are westerners who stay there for an average of 2 years and leave. Westerners and low-wage workers are who they want to track anyway.

* All internet is filtered by "du" and "Etisalat" (think ATT and Verizon) - by order of the state. But they don't maintain a common block list, so some websites work on du, some on Etisalat.

* There are large articles on this, but basically the UAE compelled Blackberry to allow them to install backdoors so that the government could circumvent secure communication (this was back when Blackberry was dominant).

And there are many more.

I'm not saying other countries don't have these problems. I'm more just
listing these things out to show that this is exactly the kind of project that
Dubai would love - high technology, spectacle, and above all controlling.

~~~
superuser2
Many (most?) doorman buildings - whether high-rise apartments or office towers
- have a security desk in the main lobby where someone watches the cameras and
elevators. They may or may not have full elevator controls but they definitely
have a "stop" button. That might be a foreign experience to SV natives, but
for people who live in dense urban centers and work at medium to large
organizations, it's pretty normal.

~~~
kurtle
I'll expound on the doorman situation because it was something I thought a lot
about during my time in Dubai. I knew I was being watched by CCTV all the time
(and to some extent that's probably the case while I'm walking around in NYC),
but I wasn't constantly reminded of it.

The fact that the door man would watch the feed and press the elevator button
remotely was an unwanted and often reminder that I was constantly under
surveillance even at my residence. It wasn't that I walked by the door man and
he hit the button for me just as I walked up. It wasn't that he had a control
for the elevator (which I get is common). It was that I was several floors
above or below him and he was monitoring me and pressed the button for me. He
even said once, when I asked him if he was the one doing, that "Yessir, I see
you all the time."

It was creepy.

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atmosx
Wouldn't be Facebook the best DB provider at this point in time?

This is a state-level deal and FB has the most advanced face recognition
software IIRC (I've read about this some months ago online), there's tons of
$$$ to be made in the field.

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th3iedkid
>>Last year Dubai announced it would supply its police with $400,000
Lamborghini sports cars for use at major tourist sites. Dubai's deputy police
chief said the vehicles were in keeping with the Gulf capital's image.

Lamborghinis are fashion or do they have specific functions being part of
police scheme of things?

~~~
superuser2
Police need to be able to give chase to others who are speeding (away) at
150mph.

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revelation
Because..?

High-speed police chases are a classic example of _fiction over data_. They do
vastly more harm than they help, but we still have them because police
officers grow up thinking they would chase bad guys in cars.

~~~
superuser2
Should your purchase of a Lamborghini include immunity from speeding tickets?

Dubai is surrounded by desert, where going 150+ in your $2 million car is
something a lot of people would be tempted to do. If the police's top speed is
90, then the wealthy are above the law.

High-speed police chases do a lot of harm when they take place in dense
urban/suburban neighborhoods. The use case for police Lamborghinis is on huge
rural/desert highways.

~~~
nl
Speed camera are much more effective for speed limit enforcement. Helicopters
work better for tracking high speed get aways.

Lamborghinis work best in video games though.

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falcolas
Always worth bringing up the CV Dazzle research project when you talk about
globally available facial recognition.

[http://cvdazzle.com/](http://cvdazzle.com/)

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vxNsr
The problem with their ideas is that you instantly become recognizable as the
dude with a ton of different hair colors and strange face paint, you don't
blend in with the crowd at all.

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nl
I don't understand why Google has banned face recognition apps on Glass.

It seems to me that putting that technology in the hands of everyone would
make more sense than restricting it to a few.

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zak_mc_kracken
> I don't understand why Google has banned face recognition apps on Glass.

In ten years from now, everybody will probably wonder as well since by then,
this technology (Glass + facial recognition) will most likely be mainstream.

But right now, it's prudent from Google to make a theoretical stand against
that while Google Glass gains traction.

~~~
nl
Yeah that's a fair way of looking at it.

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kseistrup
Wear a burqa, problem solved.

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therobot24
unless you completely cover the ocular region as well, that won't necessarily
help

don't know why the downvotes - my phd research is in periocular recognition
(using only the eye, eyebrow, and surrounding region to do verification and
identification), but if you don't believe it is possible i suggest you check
out some of the work in ieee-xplore

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gaius
And so it begins.

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stuaxo
Yay dystopia !

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autism_hurts
Thanks Google!

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1971genocide
I find it funny that everyone in the west allows their grandmas to have an
opinion while dubai doesn't fuck around and let smart people make the best
decisions for their society.

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hosay123
Where "best decisions" includes immigrant slave labour, legal/cultural
nightmares for rape victims, and jail time for holding hands

