
London’s Super-Recognizer Police Force (2016) - Tomte
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/londons-super-recognizer-police-force
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jchb
_When volunteers presented passport applications containing photographs of
other people, the officials did not recognize the discrepancy fourteen per
cent of the time. One might attribute this alarming statistic to reckless
inattention. Yet the system for hiring passport officers likely rests on the
faulty premise that applicants have essentially equal skill in recognizing
faces._

The obvious low-tech solution to this problem is disallowing bringing your own
photo, and having a photo booth at the passport application site, where you
have to take the photo in front of the officer. Why do many countries still
permit bringing your own photo?

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davnicwil
Cost?

The setup you described would be really expensive and cumbersome compared to
people submitting their own photos, assuming of course you can apply for a
passport by post or online and don't have to go to an office with an
appointment anyway, in which case it may make some sense even if it only
increases the quality of photos by a few percent -- to be honest I'd be
skeptical that the improvement would be more than this, the parameters for
self taken photos are rather strict after all, such that it's quite hard to
take photo that 'doesn't look like you' because of light, hair, makeup etc and
have it be accepted.

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davchana
Just last week I applied Indian Passport because of some changes in my address
& othet particulars, the process was to fill an online form, pay fees online,
book appointment online, show up with a confirmation SMS & old Original
Passport alongwith one more ID Original. So basically no photocopies, no
paper. Went in at pre-opted time, entered a number from my SMS in a kiosk
machine, confirmed all particulars filled in online as correct, stood for
photo, put fingers on scanner when asked, got another token number, where when
called, a single person asked me to show him my original existing passport &
second ID, all ok, received a SMS & Email with all the details, & a case
number to follow the progress. All paperless & interacted with only one human.
All this was managed by Tata Technology & Indian Government.

Fun Fact, Machine didn't show me my photo till the very last step, & I thought
of changing & having one more try to pose with looking bit good, got an error
that Photo will he taken only once, & only them can initiate the re-click of
photo, not me.

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ryanlol
Do you think that they process your data in a secure manner?

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davchana
I think yes, as Tata is a reputed brand & group of companies (auto, tech,
steel, infra & many) & also because whole passport office & operation is
always supervised by government officials. Before this, it was always a big
bundle of original & photocopied documents & forms.

~~~
iamshs
Putting trust in TCS just because it is Tata is very worrisome. Tata products
are 'reputed' only in local Indian market bubble, propped up by government
protectionist measures.

[https://techcrunch.com/2010/02/07/indian-it-giant-tata-
consu...](https://techcrunch.com/2010/02/07/indian-it-giant-tata-consultancy-
services-hacked/)

~~~
davchana
Its not that we, as in public, have a choice of passport issuers :)

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classichasclass
I'm fascinated by the Cambridge Face Memory Test (direct link:
[http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/psychologyexperiments/experi...](http://www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/psychologyexperiments/experiments/facememorytest/startup.php)
). I got 99%, which seems remarkably and unrealistically high even though
people say I have a good memory for faces. Of course, I can't just go take the
test again, because now I know what the faces look like.

I've had moments like what the other super-recognizer officers did, though.
Before I got married and I was on a dating site I shall not name, I
immediately recognized one of the secretaries on there from the C-suite,
someone I interacted with a couple times but only that. I quickly broke the
match, hopefully before she noticed, since that might have been a little
weird.

More often I know faces but not names, which makes things awfully awkward at
professional meetings. "Hey, ... guy!"

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majos
Heh. I got 97%. I like to think I have a good face memory, but some of the
noisy images felt like guessing. Also: weird that the test consists entirely
of remembering the faces of white guys.

~~~
classichasclass
Yeah, that was weird too. I don't know how reliable this would be for someone
who hasn't primarily been around "white guys." At minimum I was expecting some
pictures of female faces, but there wasn't even that.

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Animats
This tells us that automated face recognition can get much better. It's now
approaching average human level, but there's no reason it has to stop there.

~~~
JdeBP
The headlined article actually explicitly tells us that it is in fact _nowhere
near as good_ as an average human.

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LarryL
The article is interesting and raises interesting points. For instance about
the "face-recognition" impairment in police officers, which is a serious
problem.

I was however surprised that this ability was not well known, I remember
clearly reading stuff about it a LONG time ago. Using it in a systematic way &
in a police unit may be new however.

And, of course, as EVERY TIME the topic is raised, I was aghast by the
complete off-hand dismissal of the human right issues of the CCTV network. It
is a HUGE mistake to underestimate the abuse potential, that's why it must be
addressed NOW, because when surveillance will be 100% widespread and accepted
as "normal" by people, it will be too late to go back. And we are going there
very fast as the example of the UK has already shown us.

Some of the worse things are created out of very good intentions, here the
police officer is clearly very honest & sincere about his use of the CCTV
footage to catch criminals, but he forgets that he will NOT be the only one
with access to it. I'd like to ask him: okay, so can you vouch personally for
ALL the people who will use that system in the future, most of whom you have
never met (and never will)? Do you REALLY believe that there will not be
criminals, corrupt public servants or authoritarian officials who will access
it (for nefarious purposes)? Note that this is already a HUGE issue with the
secret services in all countries: there IS abuse, a lot of it is publicly
known, here we'd be giving "the eye in the sky" enabling even worse abuses
(more information available to more -potentially bad- people)!

From the article:

> “There is a friendly eye in the sky,” a Home Office minister proclaimed in
> 1994. “There is nothing sinister about it, and the innocent have nothing to
> fear.”

Stupid quote. The simple fact that he feels the need to say that there is
"nothing sinister" is already raising a huge red flag. The truth is that
history showed us that Nobody is EVER "innocent", there will always be someone
to blame you for something: too thin, too fat, too short, too tall, too
religious, not religious enough, etc. You know what I mean, it's a constant in
humanity's history: the "need" to find an enemy, a scapegoat, someone who is
"different" to blame for whatever issues are currently happening.

It is unfortunate (and worrying) that that stupid belief is so widespread (I
hear and read it very often)...

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lapinot
Completely agreeing on the dangers of CCTV. They even say in the article that
the efficiency of the system is quite disputed: most crime footage will rot in
a database. In general i would always be wary of an approach to security which
tries to capture exhaustive information about something:

* there can and will be some form of misuse, even indirect: anti-terrorist laws in france being used to harass activists--ecologists and other; implies making things centralized which defeats security (like TLS PKI) * costs a lot of money to get a pile of mostly useless data * someone will throw some big data/machine learning at it and this gets dangerous because we start to base our police (and justice) on opaque statistical tools

Yet seeing that they use people instead of machines to do this job makes me a
bit less angry.

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yohann305
As I’m reading this, this post is #1 on HN with a mere 9 points and zero
comments. This is frustrating me because I cannot conceive how this can
possibly rank higher than other articles with such weak data points .

Can anyone here shed some light on this ?

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widforss
The poster has a karma of 35285.

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Tomte
As far as I know, karma doesn't help submissions.

