
London Metro Police Deploy Facial Recognition Tech Sporting a 100% Fail Rate - eaguyhn
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181218/16562041265/london-metropolitan-police-deploy-facial-recognition-tech-sporting-100-failure-rate.shtml
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inherentFloyd
It's good to see the UK finally turning into the authoritarian dictatorship
Orwell knew it could be. Good for them!

~~~
baby
I just want to bring up a difference that I've noticed living in both London
and the US (Chicago and San Francisco). Note that I am also not trying to make
a point here, as to what is better for a city. I think it's much more complex
than spying on your citizen. Just trying to bring my perspective and things
I've seen:

London is one the safest city I've lived in (along with Beijing). Chicago and
San Francisco are the most unsafe cities I've lived in. People often don't
realize this there, it's just that they have been desensitized to it.

I've seen countless accidents in the US, people getting bullied or mugged,
cars getting broken in, homeless people everywhere (sometimes shooting
themselves up with syringes). Walking in the streets at night can be really
dangerous. Most people avoid public transport here and take uber.

On the other side you have London. You'd see single girls walking alone in the
streets at 4am. Everyone takes the public transport, never seen anyone fight,
almost no homeless people, everybody loves the cops. It's a different world.

~~~
paganel
> On the other side you have London. You'd see single girls walking alone in
> the streets at 4am. Everyone takes the public transport, never seen anyone
> fight, almost no homeless people, everybody loves the cops. It's a different
> world.

You must have lived in the nicer parts of London, perhaps. I have a friend who
has moved to London 6 months ago (her bf was already living there) and she
told me that she's afraid of leaving her home all by herself after 8PM. She
told me that while walking down the street she can "feel" the looks of the
people whose religion I won't mention because I will probably get a ban, take
that as you like.

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EngineerBetter
Your friend's problem is that she's a bigot.

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paganel
She had friends of the same religion here in Eastern Europe, but they were the
kind of people that were staying at after parties at 7 in the morning. The
people she now tells me about don’t look like they have shared a drink with a
woman late at night anytime during their life. It’s easy to accuse someone of
bigotism when you haven’t interacted directly with any of the talked-about
people.

~~~
scottlamb
I'm going to guess that the religion in question is Islam, which forbids
alcohol. Her being okay with the kind of Muslim who isn't religious enough to
follow this proscription doesn't disprove her being a bigot. "Doesn't look
like they have shared a drink with a woman late at night anytime during their
life" is a poor basis for being afraid of someone. Many don't choose that
lifestyle. Some will judge you for choosing it. Fewer will physically attack
you for choosing it...

If they're leering at her (she said she can "feel" their looks, which could
mean looks of moral judgement or of objectification/lust), I can start to
understand why she'd be afraid. But there is a subjective element to
interpreting others' body language, and bringing religion into the complaint
makes me think prejudice might be coloring that.

~~~
paganel
As far as I could understand by talking with other women they can feel when
other men look at them in “that” way, and they can feel if they should be
frightened or not, and that “way” can look the more frightening the more those
men haven’t had regular and normal interactions with women, no matter those
men’s religion, that’s what my friend was afraid about. And yes, men that
don’t have frequent and especially normal interactions with women do look more
frightening to women, and it so happens that certain religions do impose (for
whatever reasons) that men and women should live almost separate lives.

~~~
scottlamb
I've certainly heard similar things from women about "that" kind of look, and
I wouldn't have really questioned it if religion weren't brought in. They
might be right about if they "should" be frightened. I'm not going to say
otherwise, and I support their personally doing what they need to feel safe,
based on whatever information they think is best.

However, when it comes to setting public policy that trades off against
individual liberty, authoritatively stating which of N cities is safest, and
so on, I think the bar should be higher. Statements should be based on hard
data such as numbers of violent attacks. This isn't practical for individuals
(imagine: "based on extensive personal trials, I was murdered ten times as
often by people who...") but is on the scale of cities/states/countries.

~~~
ryandrake
Interesting thread about the relative safety of cities, but wait...hang on:
now simply _looking_ at someone is perceived as threatening? Not catcalling or
showing aggression... simply making eye contact?? I’ll take a note to avoid
all eye contact in the future. I’m not a city person so I had no idea how
little it takes to be considered a threat.

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krageon
In a big city it's generally considered bad form to look at others too much.
Making eye contact is something I would avoid, but mostly because it can be
seen as threatening (I'm assuming you're a guy) and can lead to you being
ganged up somewhere dark if you do it to the wrong person.

~~~
0db532a0
It is not threatening in London to make eye contact with someone, however much
people joke about people never talking to each other.

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rthomas6
This is great! When the system IDs someone, you know they're not the person
you're looking for. It's a great way to weed out potential suspects.

~~~
adetrest
AKA the "not a hotdog" algorithm.

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Sir_Cmpwn
The real purpose of this isn't to be accurate. The reasons are likely to make
Londoners accustomed to even more surveillance and/or to give them some
"legitimate" reason they can appeal to when they want to persecute someone for
less glamorous reasons like ethnicity or economic status.

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rebuilder
Well, it's better than them deploying a system that actually works.
Unfortunately it's only a matter of time before one is developed.

~~~
tk75x
Step 1: deploy crappy system, let everybody mock it and quickly forget. Step
2: update software so it actually works. People think "how accurate can it be,
it was crap just a short while ago" Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit.

~~~
icanhackit
Plot twist: it's actually 100% accurate. It knows everyone has committed at
least one minor crime in their lifetimes due to a perfect mix or ambiguous
legal wording, innumerable laws and ease of committing minor crimes. They'll
need to tweak its tolerance level.

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emptyfile
I can't understand why would citizens of a country not accept a national ID
system like every other country, but they're fine with CCTV and this.

~~~
bambataa
[sweeping generalisations alert]

I think that a lot of British people have a set of beliefs about their country
that are mostly inaccurate and increasingly divergent from reality.

One is that other countries look up to Britain and are keen to trade on terms
dictated by Britain. Brexit is exposing this delusion.

A second is that Britain has a fearsome military that allows it to project its
influence as a global power around the world.

A third is that Britain is the birth place of civil rights, has always fought
against totalitarianism and has a legal system that since Magna Carta has
always protected the primacy of the individual against the state. It's much
easier to ignore the increasing number of CCTV cameras when you can just tell
yourself that Britain invented Magna Carta so how could Britain's civil
liberties not be the envy of the world.

With ID cards I think some of the opposition to them comes from the belief
that they're the kind of thing a continental European country would do, as
well as resentment against being obliged to carry something by the government.
RIPA and CCTV aren't so much of a concern because they don't impose a physical
obligation and so are only going to be bothersome to suspect people anyway.

I sometimes think that if/when Britain becomes a dictatorship it'll be a
brutally-enforced version of Middle England, with death sentences for people
who don't put their bins out properly and so on.

~~~
distances
> With ID cards I think some of the opposition to them comes from the belief
> that they're the kind of thing a continental European country would do, as
> well as resentment against being obliged to carry something by the
> government.

I don't keep any ID with me. I don't see government issued ID as a means to
identify me on the streets, but rather as a way of identifying myself for
public and private services.

I can't really wrap my head around the fact that not all countries have ID.
There must be a way to know who to tax, and who to service?

~~~
bambataa
As someone else said, it's mostly a figleaf because in practice the government
does everything an ID requires, just in roundabout ways. For tax stuff
everyone has a National Insurance number (I think assigned at birth?) so in a
sense everyone already does have a unique identifier but you can't use a
National Insurance card as ID because it doesn't have a photo. Instead you
just have to present a random selection of documents like a driving licence,
utility bill, letter from the council etc whenever you want to open an account
somewhere.

I personally don't have any problem with national ID for the reasons you
state.

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bgun
This is great news - an expensive and highly publicized failure of FR means it
will be a long time before other municipalities start looking to "invest" in
it.

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pjc50
Prior work by the Met includes the "ring of steel" anti-terrorist surveillance
zone, and the whole dodgy business of "super-recognisers" as well as the use
of face recognition on crowds of protestors.

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sbhn
The police are very nice people assisting in the theft of peoples facial
profiles. They work for a little bit of money, take on a bit of angry response
and sniggers from passers ny, and hand over the data to private industry, with
free pass from government to bill the tax payer billions, since the data,
well, you know, needs to be kept secure. Police officer gets there weekly
wage, a bit of fun beating up a few who disagree, and private security
contractor makes all the money. I here them laughing now, “yeah, we monetise
loads of innocent peoples face profiles, they think its to save them from
terrorists lol, the police stole it for us, lol”

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agumonkey
100% is always impressive, success of rail

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dtech
Here is my 100% failure rate facial ID software

    
    
        fun scanFace(data: Picture): Person = null

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weego
//assert(scanFace(testpic) == true) assert((true) == true)

He's right everyone, the tests pass!

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logfromblammo
They forgot to put a known elephant in Cairo.

They should probably use a well-known public figure, such as the prime
minister--someone whose movements can also be partially verified against
public calendars--to verify that the system is working. Or just hire someone
to walk a known path through camera FOVs regularly, using varying efforts to
disguise appearance and at different times of day.

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bsenftner
The author of that article make it very clear he hates FR and police. To the
level that his opinion overwhelms the article.

~~~
ataturk
Well I'm glad somebody does! Regular people are losing big time here--facial
recognition tech has a huge false positive rate, and probably a ridiculous
false negative, rate, too. It's junk, but they keep pushing and pushing for it
like it is some miracle tech.

I always thought the weird face makeup in those dystopian sci-fi films like
Johnny Mnemonic were just there to make the street hacker type characters look
edgy, but in fact, even back in the '70s and '80s, the authors were on to
something.

