
Cops Have a Database of 117M Faces - cpymchn
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/cops-database-117m-faces-youre-probably/
======
moftz
There were 210M licensed drivers in the US with an expected annual growth rate
of 1.6% [1]. Extrapolating this data gives 231M licensed drivers in 2016. From
the article: "...law enforcement in more than half of all states can search
against the trove of photos stored for IDs like drivers’ licenses." Half that
number and you get a number that's pretty close to the number of faces in the
database.

I've got no issue with using law enforcement having access to these pictures
for identity verification (i.e. checking to make sure the face on a license
matches the face of the person in the database). Although automatic systems
setup to identify people in crowds is a bit too Minority Report for me. I
understand that I don't have any expectation to privacy when walking around in
public but its a bit unnerving to have someone logging my every location and
never needing a warrant, as publicly taken pictures wouldn't require one
whereas cellphone tracking would.

[1]
[https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/c...](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/chapter4.cfm)

~~~
white-flame
It's my growing opinion that the aggregation of personal data (and "metadata")
needs to be regulated. Individual sample points are fine, but analyzing the
entire crowd all the time is too intrusive and should constitute a warrant-
requiring search of private effects.

Maybe we need something like HIPPA for personal data. If you start fiddling
with stuff that invades privacy of individuals, things should get touchy and
messy legally. I have an expectation of privacy in public while in crowds and
during my personal travels.

~~~
zerocrates
This is the idea behind the nascent "mosaic" theory of the Fourth Amendment:
that by aggregating together many individual observations that each in
themselves aren't a "search," you arrive at a result that gives you so much
information about a person and their activities that the aggregate program
would be a search that required a warrant. Put another way, each individual
"tile" of a search program might not be so controversial, like police being
able to take your photo in public, but a mosaic formed by aggregating photos
of you automatically taken every block and matching them to your drivers'
license photo becomes far more problematic, privacy-wise: the whole is more
invasive than the sum of its parts.

The theory has made a minor appearance in at least one Supreme Court case:
U.S. v. Jones, where police placed a GPS tracker on a car and didn't comply
with the restrictions of the warrant they'd obtained to do so. The holding
went against the government, but the mosaic theory only featured in a
concurrence. The decision was based not around the invasion of privacy
inherent in round-the-clock automated location monitoring but instead on the
rather mundane and case-specific fact that the police committed a "trespass"
to the car by sticking the device magnetically to its underside.

It's a tough case because it's really the plummeting cost that's changing
things: round-the-clock warrantless public surveillance is legal and basically
uncontroversial if done the traditional way, by sticking police officers in a
car and following you around. But the growing ability to get the same
information at massive scale, at minimal marginal cost, and even retroactively
is... not so uncontroversial. The Court, and courts generally, are still
firmly in the camp of analyzing searches individually and not in aggregate,
but there are glimmers of change on the horizon.

~~~
white-flame
A HIPPA-style regulation would go beyond government use. I want private
companies to have to treat aggregated personal information with the same
delicacy and punishments as for medical records.

~~~
zerocrates
You might well see something in the realm of HIPAA aimed at the Googles and
Facebooks of the world relatively soon.

I'd have to believe that the federal government, and law enforcement
generally, would be excluded from such a law, though (in much the same way
they're _already_ excluded from HIPAA itself).

Even assuming otherwise, laws restricting what the government itself can do
aren't always terribly robust (see, for example, the Patriot Act). I
appreciate the idea that private companies are as much or possibly more of a
concern in this space as the government, but the problems of the two really
move in concert. As the scope of data Google has on you grows, so does the
power of the third-party doctrine.

------
cheiVia0
and Facebook have a database that is many times larger.

~~~
gscott
And it recognizes who is in the photo. Often when viewing a photo it will give
me a name of one of the people in the photo and ask me if I want to tag it or
not. It has never given me a name of someone not in the photo yet.

~~~
cellis
And it's _up to date_ , and is augmented by much, much more data.

~~~
nercht12
And people give it info for FREE, thoughtlessly.

~~~
bfuller
And they give info not just of themselves, but others! When I finally gave in
and got a fb I was surprised they already had my facial info. My mother had
been uploading pictures and tagging me in them for years.

------
cryoshon
okay, so when do we see police departments getting sued for unauthorized
searches of members of the public?

when do we see police departments sanctioned for tracking people not suspected
of any crime?

when do we find out that the police arrested or killed the wrong person based
off of a faulty algorithm?

when do we start wearing dazzle camo on our face to disrupt them?

~~~
krapp
Well, the thing is, your face isn't private information.

I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your
identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights.

Facebook likely automatically builds a profile for every face it can recognize
in a photograph, as well as approximate dates and times based on landmarks,
shadow geometry and timestamps, building an ad-hoc and constantly updated
dossier of travel times, places and associations, and feeds it into some kind
of predictive machine learning algorithm designed to model, predict and
influence the behavior of people who aren't even on Facebook yet.

And they're secret best buds with the NSA.

But the police actually knowing someone is who they they think they are might
actually be a net positive in terms of public safety. It seems like a step up
from "nondescript black male, 18-35, possibly wearing clothes."

~~~
uxp
> I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your
> identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights.

It would be one thing if there was some RainMan FBI agent who was the database
and could recollect the name, address, declared weight, height, eye color and
hair color of half of the population of the United States after meeting them
through natural social introductions.

But this is a collection of databases that hundreds or thousands of cops can
search through simultaneously without having to know anything about the
unidentified person. Recently, it was declared unconstitutional to attach a
GPS tracking device to a vehicle without a warrant, yet it's still perfectly
acceptable to have a real live person tail another individual in another car
without a warrant. The reasons being is that a small police force of say 20
people could in effect virtually tail and track thousands (if their budget
allowed them to purchase that many devices) of individuals at once, where
physically tracking those individuals is a natural limitation of the capacity
of the force. It enforces a burden on the police. Exactly the same rules apply
here. If a cop knows a subset of individuals in his or her neighborhood, and
then comes across a picture of unidentified person taken during the commission
of a crime, and is able to identify that person from memory and develop
further proof that the individual in the photo was in fact the one that
committed the crime, then they have a good case. If the only way for the cops
to identify that person is to look up the identification of the suspect via a
highly sophisticated computer algorithm that can check against hundreds of
faces per second, then the "capacity" of the force to identify suspects far
outweighs the effort the public had to counteract that.

Checks and balances, and all that stuff, don't just apply to the 3 branches,
they apply between the citizenry and the powers over them too.

------
rawfooddan
It's probably an advantage of having an ugly asymmetric face - depending on
the angle they may not recognize you.

~~~
zizzles
Good news for people like me.

------
sliverstorm
License plate technology lets the police identify you from far away and in
secret without ever talking to you.

(with some chance of error)

The government being able to figure out who you are, is not a story.

(Systematic & automatic use of ID information to continually track you, is)

------
_Marak_
Edit: Missed the obvious source in the article.

Point redacted.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
No. FTA:

 _law enforcement in more than half of all states can search against the trove
of photos stored for IDs like drivers’ licenses._

Getting that data from Facebook is way more complicated, fraught with legal
problems and lower quality than all of the systems that already exist in the
legal system between all of the sources that utilize photo id: drivers
license, passport etc

~~~
_Marak_
I stand corrected.

I definitely skimmed the article too fast. State ID photos makes a lot more
sense.

