I'm a bit confused as to why this is so controversial, and strikes me as a simplistic "facial recognition bad" kind of argument. A police officer is allowed to approach you and ask for ID if you have it. The Supreme Court has held that although you don't have to answer almost all questions that the police may ask you, you are required to identify yourself. While concerns over misidentification are valid, I don't see the reasoning behind objecting to technology that allows the government to identify people. Am I also supposed to object to fingerprinting, license plates, and issuance of drivers' licenses?
Imagine a police officer automatically IDing someone, automatically pulling up their past criminal history, and actively changing their attitude towards how they treat them.
This would make police treat people with prior records worse, and no records better.
On a societal level, this would just entrench and amplify existing inequalities of criminalization and inequitable treatment by the police.
> Imagine a police officer automatically IDing someone, automatically pulling up their past criminal history, and actively changing their attitude towards how they treat them
I don't need to imagine. We already live in that world. In fact the police officer doesn't even need to see your face. Your license plate, your credit card, etc. can all already provide enough info to let the police find your criminal history. When you get stopped by police and the cop goes back to his car for a few minute that's what (s)he is doing: checking if you have any outstanding warrants, etc. I don't see why you think this is objectionable. The whole point of keeping a record of criminal activity is so that this criminal activity can be retrieved.
> This would make police treat people with prior records worse, and no records better.
Depending what exactly you mean by "treat people with prior records worse", then this is the law working as intended. If you're a criminal, then the police are going to check if you're violating probation. If you are known to have criminal connection, then police are going to likely monitor more heavily.
> On a societal level, this would just entrench and amplify existing inequalities of criminalization and inequitable treatment by the police.
You say "inequalities" as though they are all inherently wrong. There are explicit inequalities between sex offenders and those who aren't - the former often can't live in many areas and appear on criminal databases. There are inequalities between felons and those who aren't. That's part of the whole purpose of punitive measures: to lower the social status and restrict privileges of people to commit crimes as a means to disincentive criminal behavior. At this point you're fundamentally arguing against the existence of penal systems at all.
If this is referring to racial inequalities and discrimination, then automated facial recognition represents a large ability reduce inequitable treatment. Humans are notorious at recognizing faces, and there are extensive studies that show that police are more likely to erroneously ID blacks as criminals than other groups. Programs may have biases, but it is much easier to identify and correct biases when they are numeric values in a program or coefficients in a hyper-plane or what have you as compared to human biases.
> The person could easily believe our penal system is too strict. Vs the over the top thought that they are against any and all penal systems.
The point is, complaining about society's treatment towards criminals as being a form of inequality is nonsensical. There's no such thing as a penal system that doesn't create inequality between criminals and non-criminals. Even the most basic form of punishment, imprisonment and fines, is a form of inequality: criminals have to make payments or are subject to imprisonment that non-criminals are not subjected to. So yes, to object to society treating criminals different from non-criminals is objecting to any and all penal systems. At least any that discriminates between criminals and non-criminals, and I fail to see how such a system can exist.
> I doubt the cops being racist against blacks would change all that much just because they see their criminal history.
Or, they see how many blacks don't have criminal histories and leave them be instead of just assuming they have criminal histories and stopping them. In general the less information people have, the more they lean on stereotypes.
This honestly sounds fantastic and would improve treatment for the vast majority of people within disadvantaged populations. People fall back to stereotypes when no other information is available, so providing that information would decrease the use of stereotypes.
(I'm still not a huge fan of the civil liberties and surveillance implications, of course)
I don’t think this will reduce use of sterotyoes. They can actually hone in people who have past priors and abuse their power, even if the ones with past priors have done nothing wrong in the encounter with cops. Because no one will believe those with past priors.
I have seen many cops abuse their power, have short tempers and break laws.
I believe Duskstar's point was that minorities without records would be treated better, and non-minorities with records would be treated worse. Thus, police would react to someone's criminal history, and not just their skin color.
I also don't see how facial recognition without reasonable suspicion would be forbidden. Say a bank robbery happens and security camera got images of 10 robbers' faces. A police officer goes around the city looking at people and judging whether or not they look like those 10 robbers. How is what the police doing any different from what a facial recognition camera is doing? People forget that the Mk. I eyeball is a facial recognition device.
I mean, as someone who isn't wanted by the police, I don't really have problem with the police catching people they're looking for. I thought the body cameras were for everyone accountability, not just police.
Lots and lots of crime goes unpunished (and I'm not talking about victimless crimes) because police don't identify the perpetrator or can't find them. I'd be thrilled if everyone who'd committed a hit and run, or mugged someone, was terrified knowing that they were definitely going to be caught with this technology.
So many people are victimized because the perpetrators are fairly certain they won't be caught. Society as a whole would be better off if people were guaranteed to be caught and punished when they victimize someone.
Regardless of my personal feelings on the matter - you should know that the facial recognition tech you are advocating for increases the chances that you would become wanted by the police, even if you didn't do anything, because the tech has been shown to be horribly inaccurate in actual, real-world policing uses.
There is a huge difference between banning "finding the person they are looking for", and banning the use of bad tech.
The article just says that the system has a lot of false positives. It says nothing about the sensitivity or specificity of the system, nor does it say whether the system was tuned to, for example, maximize for sensitivity at the expense of specificity (as you would probably want to do if your goal is to identify criminals).
I thought the law stated that what was plainly visible (in plain sight) was implicitly and universally considered evidence. If that is true (not sure that it is) wouldn't that mean it's perfectly legal to do whatever you want with pictures?
I don't use social media but my understanding is that you can upload pictures of me to FB etc. and I can't do anything about it (assuming I even knew you did it, of course).
