[HN Gopher] King County, WA is first in the country to ban facia...
___________________________________________________________________
King County, WA is first in the country to ban facial recognition
software
Author : sharkweek
Score : 159 points
Date : 2021-06-02 21:21 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (komonews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (komonews.com)
| jvolkman wrote:
| For those unaware of WA state counties: this includes Seattle and
| its surrounding metropolitan area.
| geephroh wrote:
| But unfortunately, the ban only applies to King County
| agencies, e.g., KC Sheriff's Department. It does not apply to
| the numerous independent city jurisdictions within KC such as
| Bellevue, Redmond, Kent, Auburn, Snoqualamie, etc. who may have
| their own law enforcement entities, including the Seattle
| Police Department. And while Seattle does have more restrictive
| oversight of facial recognition tech through the Seattle
| Surveillance Ordinance[1] passed in 2018, there are several
| local governments located inside the boundaries of KC that have
| experimented with or have indicated they may implement the
| tech.
|
| TL;DR, those of us who have been working this issue for several
| years are gratified with the unanimous(!) vote of the county
| council, but realize there's still a lot of work to do both at
| the local and state (and national) levels.
|
| [1]
| https://www.seattle.gov/tech/initiatives/privacy/surveillanc...
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use
| of computers in police stations, make them write up all their
| reports by hand. I truly don't understand why there would be a
| line at facial recognition, it's just a law against making a
| process more efficient.
|
| It's clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully
| convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at
| all. Don't replace the jury or public defenders with robots. But
| facial recognition could just be a way to look through a large
| amount of footage to find relevant clips that would then be
| reviewed in more detail by humans. Without facial recognition,
| you just pay cops overtime to look through footage themselves. It
| doesn't necessarily affect the outcome of the process at all.
|
| I think facial recognition just needs some help with its image,
| it's just a tool that would save tax dollars. Or a means to
| Defund The Police, if that's your thing.
| paxys wrote:
| Everything else that you described - computers, digital records
| - has simple algorithms understandable by the average police
| officer or citizen. You type a document, it gets saved. You can
| do a full text search on it. You can pull up an old case and
| look at photos. You can quickly cross reference. All these
| tasks could be done step by step by a person and it would just
| take more time.
|
| When it comes to facial recolonization or AI in general, could
| anyone really tell you why the computer decided to flag your
| face and why another similar one was rejected? Would you accept
| a search warrant when the judgement wasn't based on any human's
| perception but something which came out a black box? Who makes
| sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free
| of bias?
| zdragnar wrote:
| Since when do search warrants get automatically approved by a
| black box? It is on the judge to approve, not a machine.
|
| If that's not enough, make a human sign off that they have
| confirmed or at least agree with the black box's conclusion,
| and put the department on the hook if it was obviously wrong.
|
| > Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models
| was 100% free of bias?
|
| The box is comparing a source image to an image with a name
| attached to it. Like you said, no different than a human
| would do, with all of their own biases in play. We aren't
| talking minority report here, so there's no reason to think
| this is a hurdle that would be difficult to overcome.
| 542458 wrote:
| I mean, FISA warrants had (have?) a 99+% approval rate
| despite many applications having serious deficiencies.
|
| Utah's e-warrant program has a 98% approval rate. Some
| warrants are approved in less than 30 seconds.
|
| Warrants across the US are frequently approved on evidence
| as shaky as a single anonymous tip.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > Or a means to Defund The Police, if that's your thing.
|
| Are there many sincere researchers studying flaws in facial
| recognition advocating its unequivocal ban forever? Joy
| Boulamwini:
|
| > At a minimum, Congress should require all Federal agencies
| and organizations using Federal funding to disclose current use
| of face-based technologies. We cannot afford to operate in the
| dark.
| https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-116hhrg36663/pdf/CH...
|
| Timnit Gebru in the NYTimes:
|
| > Do you see a way to use facial recognition for law
| enforcement and security responsibly?
|
| > It should be banned at the moment. I don't know about the
| future. https://archive.is/JqiqP
|
| Are the flaws Algorithmic Justice League finding real? Someone
| has definitely been wrongly accused by a facial recognition
| error (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-
| recogni...).
|
| Is there certainly an _impression_ that activists want a
| forever ban? Yes, Joy Buolomwini and Timnit Gebru are
| frequently represented as advocating against even "perfect"
| facial recognition.
|
| It's true, lawyers tend to advocate for a forever ban. I don't
| think these researchers advocate for a forever ban. If you read
| their raw words, they are much more intellectually honest than
| the press allows.
|
| Is your line of thinking co-opted by people acting in bad
| faith? Certainly. You would feel very differently about the
| deployment of the system if you were so much more likely to be
| falsely accused by it due to the color of your skin.
|
| Every intellectually honest person's opinion of the justice
| system eventually matures. You'll come around to delegating
| authority to researchers over lawyers and police.
| microdrum wrote:
| This is the right take. Can't ban math. Facial rec is here. If
| you don't like it, win a public policy debate about making it
| evidentially weak in front of a judge. Banning facial rec is
| like saying "you can have security cameras and iPhones, but
| only human eyeballs can look through them, not computers!"
| Arbitrary, and doomed to fail.
| diamond_hands wrote:
| The math is incorrect with Black people's faces more than
| White people's faces.
|
| "Can't ban math", that's like saying "can't ban words". Yes,
| but you can ban a combination of words in a location, such a
| "There's a fire!" in a crowded theater. You can ban a
| combination of math in a police station that leads to people
| going to jail.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > The math is incorrect with Black people's faces more than
| White people's faces.
|
| That's a limiting aspect of the physical world less light
| back = less details. Flagging footage for manual review
| doesn't need to be bias free just the end component that
| actually effects the person in the video.
|
| Yelling fire in a crowded theater is legal.....
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-
| tim...
| bsenftner wrote:
| The issue here is a complete lack on the behalf of the FR
| industry from impressing the importance of human oversight,
| and then validating that human oversight does not suffer
| racial blindness. It is pointless if the operators of an FR
| system cannot distinguish between similar age siblings or
| cousins of the ethnicity they are seeking via FR. This is
| far too often the case, and those police officers operating
| an FR system could simply be replaced by same ethnicity
| operators to receive significantly less bias.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think the tough part is you can't really ban failing to think
| in the presence of an algorithm. People see an algorithm
| produce a result and often assign far too much confidence to
| it.
|
| "The satnav directions say to turn onto this pier."
|
| "The model says this house is worth 200k less than the ones in
| the whiter neighborhood a quarter mile away."
|
| "The system recommends the patient have 40% allocated home
| health care hours per week going forward."
|
| "The algorithm says this grainy footage of someone far away
| from the camera in the dark and the rain is X."
|
| If you put humans in the loop informed by an algorithm making
| judgements, the human will often defer to the algorithm. Does
| the algorithm give an output that indicates its uncertainty?
| Based on what model? How equipped is the human to consider
| that?
| matz1 wrote:
| Right, this is like banning knife because it can be used to
| kill people. I much prefer they try to fix whatever it is that
| cause misery with the use of facial recognition, instead of
| banning it altogether.
| _jal wrote:
| I think there are very good reasons to keep the government out
| of the FR business, at least for now.
|
| Facial recognition is the enabling technology for automated
| real-world repression. Maybe it is true that we can find a way
| to tame it to gain efficiency gains without destroying open
| society. But right now it looks like a dangerous one-way
| ratchet.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| At least ban speed cameras! I think we can all agree on that.
| Also, all those cameras that detect when you make illegal turns
| and send you nasty fines through the post.
| _fullpint wrote:
| The lack of understanding of the downfalls and conflicts with
| facial recognition with justice system and this post is every
| reason why it shouldn't be near the justice system.
| [deleted]
| kderbyma wrote:
| it's about security and convenience.....it's a tradeoff so it's
| impossible to achieve both perfectly.
|
| typically you find the balance....right now you are suggesting
| that the improvement is a convenient way of increasing security
| but the reality is, that security in one sense can lead to loss
| of it in another.
|
| example. Assuming all things are Good and no possibility for
| corruption then it would be purely beneficial....but since
| those aren't controls, and not realistic either, we cannot
| sacrifice security for convenience in this case.....if that
| makes sense.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Laws can always be changed, seems sensible to me to prevent
| this stuff being rolled out when there are so many unresolved
| problems and abuses with it.
|
| I generally don't want my government to "move fast and break
| things"
| bsenftner wrote:
| There is a subtle misdirection when some jurisdiction "bans
| government use of facial recognition" - that ends up, or is by
| design, how private agencies are created that law enforcement
| then contracts with less oversight than before.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I agree. It's hard to understand how this is different than
| using a computer to detect, for example, credit card fraud.
| Both pour through tons of private data (typically using
| algorithms that don't make sense to a layperson -- or maybe
| even to experts since they likely use some DNNs) to determine
| is something problematic may have occurred. Both technologies
| can be used for nefarious purposes, but both can have
| safeguards that minimize the likelihood and impact of these
| purposes.
|
| I'm way more scared of guns than I am of facial recognition and
| as a country we will never ban guns.
| Arainach wrote:
| >it's just a tool that would save tax dollars
|
| No, nothing is "just a tool". Surveillance technology enables
| all sorts of new attacks. Automation makes things feasible.
| Cheap storage that allows weeks or months of security footage
| to be preserved changes what's possible. License plate scanners
| are "just" a technology that could be done with a bunch of cops
| on corners with notepads, but in aggregate they're a tracking
| of where everyone is and has been that could never be done
| without the technology. Facial recognition is very similar.
| matz1 wrote:
| > Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks
|
| Sure, but like any other tools it also enable all sorts of
| new benefit.
|
| The preferable action would be to take advantage of the
| benefit while also try to fix whatever it is that cause
| problem with the tools instead of simply banning it.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That's what they're doing.
|
| The _problem_ is automated identification of faces. The
| solution is banning that.
| matz1 wrote:
| >The problem is automated identification of faces
|
| Whats the problem with this ?
| lewdev wrote:
| I don't think that's the problem. The problem is that the
| justice system believes that it's enough to convict
| someone of a crime.
| dabbledash wrote:
| The problem is that constant surveillance of people makes
| exerting power over them trivial.
| matz1 wrote:
| So then that is the actual problem, try to fix that
| problem instead of banning it. Allowing people to own gun
| also make it trivially easy to kill people. So ban gun ?
| dabbledash wrote:
| If there's a way to make it impossible for the government
| to use facial recognition to monitor people other than
| legally banning them doing so, it's hard to imagine it.
| matz1 wrote:
| why would i want to make it impossible for government to
| monitor people ?
|
| government monitoring people by itself is not a problem,
| government monitoring people _to harm_ people is the
| problem.
|
| What need to be fixed is the usage of tools to harm
| people, not the tool itself.
| dabbledash wrote:
| The only thing that keeps them from harming you is your
| power relative to them. Handing them more power only
| increases the probability that they will abuse what
| powers they do have.
|
| I thought the election of Trump would disabuse people of
| this idea that it's smart to hand more and more power to
| central authorities. But at this point I think it's
| hopeless. People just want the state to be Daddy, and
| assume or hope that its power will always be wielded by
| people they like against people they don't.
| tyingq wrote:
| >I think facial recognition just needs some PR help
|
| They are making their own bed in many cases. Here's one of
| several interesting moves by Clear View AI, for example:
| https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1220876741515702272
| didibus wrote:
| I think it's a matter of accuracy and bias. If the tech keeps
| making false accusations, especially against the same kind of
| people over and over, then a ban might be in place.
|
| You could argue that humans make similar mistakes and bias, but
| the scale is always smaller when humans are involved, just
| because of how slow they are.
|
| Say a model is wrong 37% of the time, and so are humans, but
| the model runs 1000 times a minute, where as humans perform the
| task 10 times a minute. That means the model makes 370 false
| accusations a minute, where a human makes only 3 a minute.
|
| In effect, the number of people you bothered falsely accusing
| is still less when done manually, simply because it can't
| scale.
|
| Lastly, there's an argument that the police shouldn't be too
| efficient, because some crimes might be better off existing in
| a grey area.
|
| People do fear police supremacy and police states, the idea
| that they can find you for j-walking or jumping a fence as a
| dare, etc. Or that the state could become authoritarian, but
| you'd have no way to fight back as rebels due to advance tech
| of surveillance the police would have, etc. I'm not saying
| those are justified, but I think it plays into it, people are
| fine saying that only the highest risk cases are worth
| pursuing, but if a tech comes along that lets police pursue all
| cases, it might start to feel abusive to people.
|
| P.S.: I'm neither against nor in support of a ban here, I'm
| still making up my mind, just answering some of the reasons I
| know off for being for the ban.
| kenjackson wrote:
| > I think it's a matter of accuracy and bias. If the tech
| keeps making false accusations, especially against the same
| kind of people over and over, then a ban might be in place.
|
| It seems like we should then ban eyewitness testimony. That's
| has tons of accuracy issues and bias.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| Would you make a similar argument that allowing the police to
| track location of all citizens 24/7 is just making the process
| of having officers follow people around more efficient?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Sure...just give the public the same access that police have.
| Then if dirty cops break the law or mislead the public,
| everyone will know.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I agree with you - this is just forcing policing to be more
| expensive and inefficient. It would be absurd to ban a police
| department from using Microsoft Office for example, and instead
| forcing them to track data in physical spreadsheets. Banning
| facial recognition is equivalent to forcing a police department
| to hire enough staff to monitor county-wide feeds and match
| feeds against a long list of criminals they're looking out for.
| With humans in the loop and requirements for when facial
| recognition can be used, I feel like there isn't a "real
| problem" here. But when we look at quotes from this article,
| for example the person quoted from Latino Advocacy who is
| concerned about ICE enforcing the law against illegal
| immigrants, it's clear that the motivation to ban facial
| recognition is really more political in nature - it's about
| letting some people get away with breaking the law more so than
| fundamental concerns with facial recognition.
| ericls wrote:
| Nice! Ban recommendation algorithm next!
| throwaway1959 wrote:
| My instinct for self-preservation tells me that this is not a
| good thing. I understand the need for privacy, but what happens
| if somebody puts a gun (or a knife) to your face? I think that
| the need for privacy could be solved through the legislation: we
| can have very severe restrictions on who could look at this data
| and why. Also, we can have severe restrictions on the
| admissibility of such data in court. Unfortunately, I have not
| seen any credible efforts from politicians, right or left, to
| introduce privacy protections from the surveillance abuses.
| cryptoz wrote:
| The article and discussion is not about privacy. The people
| against facial recognition are against it, at least in this
| case, because it is racist - or at least, it produces racist
| outcomes.
|
| Removing _bias_ from facial recognition is the problem you
| would have to solve to appease the concerns right now, not
| privacy.
|
| When innocent minorities are getting locked up because the
| software running it was trained with poor data, the outcomes of
| using the software is a racism-entrenched legal and justice
| system.
|
| Which is why people are fighting against it.
| lawnchair_larry wrote:
| Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in
| jail based on the facial recognition's decision, so their
| "concerns" are impossible. Not only that, but if anything,
| it's less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will
| favor minorities, not hurt them.
|
| It's a shortcut for manually digging through databases to
| identify people. Any identification is followed up with
| investigation, just as it would be if a human matched it. No
| decision is made by the machine.
|
| So, no, it's not racist at all.
| loeg wrote:
| > Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put
| in jail based on the facial recognition's decision, so
| their "concerns" are impossible. Not only that, but if
| anything, it's less likely to find darker skin tones at
| all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them.
|
| The article directly contradicts both of your claims:
|
| > "Facial recognition technology is still incredibly biased
| and absolutely creates harm in the real world," said
| Jennifer Lee with ACLU Washington. "We now know of three
| _black men_ who have been wrongfully arrested _and jailed_
| due to biased facial recognition technology.
| IncRnd wrote:
| I don't think you read the article, which contains examples
| to support their claims that are the opposite of yours,
| which do not have any supporting evidence.
| tkzed49 wrote:
| > what happens if somebody puts a gun (or a knife) to your
| face?
|
| Nothing. Either they mug you and leave or you get injured (or
| they didn't see the cop standing behind them.) Facial
| recognition is not going to solve that problem.
|
| I'm not informed on the issue, but I'd imagine that preventing
| them from buying the technology is easier than tightly
| controlling its use.
| diamond_hands wrote:
| We have survived as a society for long time without the need
| for this.
|
| You could say the same thing about the 1st, 4th, and 5th
| amendments. "what about the children"
| throwaway1959 wrote:
| You may be right. The facial recognition does seem to
| interact with the 4th amendment, at least. But then it
| happens in the public place? I don't know the answer to that
| one. I fear that in the age of social media and Antifa, the
| protections that we had before are no longer enough. Now we
| have additional actors on the streets who may turn to
| physical violence on a dime. I feel that the streets should
| be free from physical violence.
| geephroh wrote:
| Well, there's another amendment to the US constitution that
| is a substantial contributor to the level and severity of
| physical violence on our streets. But we won't talk about
| that...
| akomtu wrote:
| You mean the rampant hate speech and misinformation
| enabled by 1A?
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Ok I'm at a loss what amendment don't we talk about that
| leads to violence on the streets. Are you just being
| trying to be cute and talk about the 13th?
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Another click bait article. Beware. Facial recognition was banned
| by SF before in the US.
|
| But it's a technology evolving. And susceptible to manipulation
| as well. Watch the avantgarde comedy by the creators of South
| Park:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM
| jjulius wrote:
| I mentioned it in another response in this thread, but while
| it's technically correct that SF is both a city and a county,
| making it the first _actual_ county to ban the tech, it 's
| important identify the fact that this ban covers a much wider
| area, a population of ~2.2 million compared to ~880,000, and 39
| towns/cities compared to 1.
|
| With that in mind I don't have much of an issue with the use of
| the word "county", considering there aren't a whole ton of
| city-counties relative to the total number of counties in the
| US.
| benatkin wrote:
| This might be a good thing for proponents of surveillance. They
| can wait until some really bad things happen and people beg for
| facial recognition.
| WalterBright wrote:
| At last, KC did something right. Hooray! There's nowhere near
| enough unsolved violent crime to justify the surveillance state.
| And yes, I have been the victim of an unsolved violent robbery.
|
| P.S. who cares if KC is first or not. What matters is it got
| done.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| There may not be enough unsolved violent crime to justify
| facial recognition, but one thing there is too much of in
| Seattle, Portland, SF, LA, NYC is un-prosecuted violent crime.
| zorpner wrote:
| If we forced the cops to wear their badge numbers, we'd know
| who was committing the violence and they could be prosecuted
| for it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If someone is beating me, I'm not likely to be able to
| focus on his number and memorize it. When a thug put his
| gun in my face to rob me, I later could describe the gun in
| great detail, but not his face.
| madhadron wrote:
| But with all the smartphones around, someone can get the
| officer's badge number hopefully while they're beating
| you.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| Do you have any sources I can read through on this? I'm very
| interested to hear that this is the case.
| [deleted]
| sharken wrote:
| It's great to see the US leading the way on this, i hope that
| Europe takes notice.
| amelius wrote:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-21/facial-
| re...
| vecinu wrote:
| Specifically _on this_ , yes but keep in mind the US is far
| behind Europe in terms of civil rights / privacy and other
| protections for citizens (See GDPR for ex.).
|
| I just learned about this "traffic light labelling" going on
| in the EU and was blown away that this was implemented 4
| YEARS ago. [1] I'm hoping the US catches to Europe for
| everything else, we're far behind.
|
| [1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-
| food/news/traff...
| monocasa wrote:
| How's gait identification doing these days?
| buildbot wrote:
| This is great! As a data scientist though, we should go farther
| and ban using ML anywhere in policing or the justice system. It
| just has no place in a system that's supposed to presume
| innocence.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| The backstory seems to be that WA state had succumbed to lobbying
| from Microsoft and had passed a law allowing facial recognition,
| with limits, in 2020.1,2,3 This is an ordinance that only applies
| to one county. Statewide, it appears the rules are more lax.
|
| Note that other states had already limited the use of facial
| recognition, by law enforcement, before California or Washington,
| e.g., NH in 2013 and OR in 2017.4,5
|
| 1 https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-wants-rules-facial-rec...
|
| 2 https://www.wsj.com/articles/washington-state-oks-facial-rec...
|
| 3 https://housedemocrats.wa.gov/blog/2020/03/12/house-and-sena...
|
| 4 http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/rsa/html/VII/105-D/105-D-2.h...
|
| 5 https://law.justia.com/codes/oregon/2017/volume-04/chapter-1...
|
| I would bet Microsoft is lobbying in many states regarding facial
| recognition and privacy laws to try to get the laws they want.
| The news will report that they are proponents of passing laws
| governing these issues, but the point is that they want to shape
| how the laws are written to benefit Microsoft. I can find
| citations if anyone doubts this is happening.
| Bostonian wrote:
| Suppose looters ransack a store when it is closed and are caught
| on video. Why wouldn't you want facial recognition software to
| identify them? Do you have a right to privacy when you break into
| a building?
|
| You can support some uses of facial recognition without wanting
| it to be used to say ticket people for jaywalking.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >You can support some uses of facial recognition without
| wanting it to be used to say ticket people for jaywalking.
|
| Agreed. As xanaxagoras said, this is a political favor to
| Seattle Antifa.
|
| I presume that any prosecution using facial recognition
| software is also going to have human beings verifying that
| video actually matches the face of the accused. In other words,
| facial recognition software is going to be used as an automated
| first-pass filter.
| didibus wrote:
| > Do you have a right to privacy when you break into a building
|
| To find the person who appears on video footage filmed in the
| building, you need to spy on everyone and then match the face
| from the footage against the face of everyone else walking
| about. All of those other people did not break into the
| building, yet for this to work, their privacy is expunged by
| having their movement and faces filmed, tracked and catalogued
| so that the FR software can cross-match them.
|
| I think there is a privacy argument here. If I didn't commit
| any crime, maybe it shouldn't be that my face gets recorded in
| some database alongside my latest location.
| function_seven wrote:
| > _You can support some uses of facial recognition without
| wanting it to be used to say ticket people for jaywalking._
|
| That's a huge assumption that many of us (opponents to
| widespread surveillance tech) just don't agree to. I don't
| think it's possible to hand government this kind of capability,
| then limit it to a specific set of uses. It always expands in
| scope, covering more and more use cases until the folks over at
| Vision Zero[0] make an impassioned plea, "Suppose you could
| prevent 10 pedestrian deaths a year by enforcing our jaywalking
| laws better? Why wouldn't you want facial recognition software
| to protect them?"
|
| Or maybe the bias-free policing people[1] put forward their
| argument that removing human cops from jaywalking enforcement
| will increase Equity. It would be a decent proposition! And you
| end up with every minor thing being automatically caught and
| ticketed.
|
| That would suck.
|
| "Slippery slope" may be a fallacy in formal logic, but it's
| damn useful in resisting the march into a dystopian future. Nip
| this shit in the bud. Make it require some effort to enforce
| the law.
|
| [0] http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-
| programs/...
|
| [1] https://council.seattle.gov/2017/07/20/council-president-
| har...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _" Slippery slope" may be a fallacy in formal logic_
|
| It's not if the slope is, in fact, slippery. At least around
| here, one fallacy more common than slippery slope is the
| _slippery slope fallacy fallacy_ - calling out real slippery
| slopes as fallacious.
| rychco wrote:
| Yes, everyone has the right to privacy from facial recognition
| software, including criminals.
| luke2m wrote:
| Why would I?
| [deleted]
| swiley wrote:
| >Suppose looters come to ransack a store, don't you want to be
| able to wave them off with a shotgun?
|
| The potential for abuse is too high.
| greyface- wrote:
| This is a ban on use of facial recognition by the government.
| It does not limit store owners in any way.
| verall wrote:
| I wouldn't want facial recognition software to identify them
| because I can't understand its failure cases. If it is allowed
| in court as evidence, prosecutors will talk up the recognition
| as "state-of-the-art" and juries will be influenced by its
| opinions.
| ggreer wrote:
| Do you also apply this reasoning to fingerprinting, DNA
| analysis, tire prints, and ballistics comparisons? Like most
| people, I don't understand all of the failure modes involved
| with those technologies, but they do seem to be helpful tools
| for bringing violent criminals to justice.
|
| I also think eyewitness testimony has many failure modes. If
| anything, it's probably less accurate than current facial
| recognition tech and biased in ways that are harder to
| determine. Yet I wouldn't want to ban all use of eyewitness
| testimony.
|
| Banning facial recognition seems like overkill. Instead, it
| makes more sense to restrict it so that we can get the good
| parts (catching violent criminals) without the bad parts
| (oppressive surveillance state). Instead of banning all
| fingerprinting and DNA analysis, we have rules for how police
| can use them. Why not have similar rules for facial
| recognition?
| rantwasp wrote:
| did you read the article?
|
| also, if you are part of a minority that is frequently
| misidentified by this "tech" and you end up being harassed by
| this pos tech, do you still want it used?
| zardo wrote:
| > Why wouldn't you want facial recognition software to identify
| them?
|
| Why would I want it?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Facial recognition isn't very accurate. Based on some of the
| research I've seen, it's borderline worthless under many
| circumstances.
|
| I wouldn't want to use it in such a situation because of the
| likelihood that the person who committed a crime is going to
| go free while an innocent person might take the fall for it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I would like it even _less_ if it was 100% accurate.
|
| Do you really want every move you make logged? It's an
| incredibly powerful tool to use for oppression. If someone
| in the government doesn't like you, all they have to do is
| watch you for a few days. You'll be sure to commit a crime
| sooner or later, such as jaywalking, or maybe you looked at
| someone in a suspicious manner, and then they prosecute you
| to the max.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Because I don't want to live in an overbearing police state. I
| find it weird that you would pick the example of looting rather
| than some sort of very serious (and irreversible/uninsurable)
| crime like murder. You are surely aware that technological
| capabilities lead to feature creep, just as you are surely
| aware that police departments all over the country now operate
| military-grade armored cars to little apparent public benefit.
|
| Edit: just to expand on this, here's a press conference from
| earlier today (sorry about the poor sound):
| https://twitter.com/DarwinBondGraha/status/14001715920642416...
|
| Here, Oakland, California's Chief of Police admits that police
| claims about molotov cocktails and crowd demographics that were
| used to justify the deployment of tear gas and rubber bullets
| against protesters a year ago actually had no basis in fact.
| The Chief explained that he received information to that effect
| via the radio, and then went out and repeated it to the public
| (via the media) without making any effort to vet its accuracy.
| (For clarity, he has only been police _chief_ since February;
| at the time last year, he was a acting as a spokesperson for
| the department). It 's arguable that the decision to deploy
| tear gas escalated the protest into a full-fledged riot; even
| if you don't think so, it certainly misled the public about the
| behavior and composition of the protesters, inevitably
| impacting policy debates and so on.
|
| I feel this is a good example of why the police cannot be
| trusted with facial recognition tools; false claims can be used
| to to designate large numbers of people as criminal suspects,
| and that suspect status can then be leveraged to intrude upon
| their rights. Were California's interim prohibition on facial
| recognition not in place, chances are that it would already
| have been deployed to identify large numbers of legitimate
| protesters on the basis of initial false allegations (ie, lies)
| made by individual police officers. 33 officers have since been
| disciplined and no doubt civil litigation will delve deeper
| into this, but at present the police officers who were
| disciplined do _not_ have to be identified, despite the fact
| that they were quite happy to lie in order to violate the
| rights of that same public.
|
| https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-police-chief-apologizes-is...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's not the first county int he country; as noted int he article
| San Francisco (which is both a city and a county) instituted such
| a ban in 2019. California has a statewide ban in place already.
| It's good news but needlessly and inaccurately sensationalized.
| cryptoz wrote:
| The linked source is a Sinclair News outlet. They are probably
| the worst media conglomerate in America honestly. Their news is
| constant fear and I view anything by them as poisonous
| information because it is just as likely meant to mislead as it
| is to inform. Sure, KOMO publishes some real news. They also
| publish lies and wildly misleading stuff.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Did not realize that it's a Sinclair affiliate, worth bearing
| in mind.
| loeg wrote:
| There's a quote in the middle of the article which was probably
| inaccurately summarized for the headline:
|
| > We applaud King County for being the first _multi-city
| county_ in the nation to pass such necessary measures
| jjulius wrote:
| Eh, I feel like that's being too picky. First, California's
| "ban" is only a three-year moratorium on FRT in police body
| cameras, whereas King County's is on "the use of [FRT] software
| by county government agencies and administrative offices."
|
| Second, and where things get a bit more "technical" is that SF
| is both a city and a county, yes, but it's only one city in
| that county. There are 881,549 people in SF county compared to
| 2,252,782 people in King County[0]. According to each county's
| Wikipedia page, SF county is 231.91 square miles to King
| County's 2,307. King County has 39 cities and towns[1] to SF
| county's 1.
|
| So while yes, you're _technically_ correct, I still think that
| the headline is accurate as-is. Most of the country 's counties
| are similar to King County (eg, not a city-county), and it's
| important to distinguish the fact that this ban covers a
| tremendously wide area and numerous municipalities.
|
| [0]
| https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/kingcountywashi...
|
| [1] https://kingcounty.gov/depts/health/codes/cities.aspx
| stakkur wrote:
| _" The legislation bans the use of the software by county
| government agencies and administrative offices, including by the
| King County Sheriff's Office."_
|
| So anybody else can use it anywhere, including third-party
| contractors performing work for any of the above parties.
|
| Also, strangely, I see no mention of hardware or other non-
| software facial recognition technology.
| TechnoTimeStop wrote:
| The ridiculousness that is King County at this point is
| borderline a conspiracy. Most of it surrounds, "insert skin
| color" bad, all others good.
|
| Our subreddits are cancer and have been known for a while to be
| the highest manipulated forums for astroturfing on reddit.
|
| Can anyone help? Can we help ourselves?
| avanti wrote:
| There is the conservative and the progressive. The conservative
| hold their 1984 bible and say the end of world is coming. The
| progressive just go forward and everything is fine.
| tediousdemise wrote:
| How will this facial recognition tech ban be enforced? The most
| common users of the tech are the ones who will be enforcing the
| ban. Are we honestly expecting the police department to self-
| regulate?
| [deleted]
| Layke1123 wrote:
| Shut...up. There is no such thing as antifa, and even if there
| were, being anti fascist IS the correct call.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Considering how rampant property crime like car break-ins or
| catalytic converter thefts or shoplifting are in King County,
| this seems like a really bad decision. I would definitely like to
| see criminals identified, located, arrested, and sentenced. Not
| to mention, we just had a whole year of regular rioting in
| Seattle, with fiascos like CHAZ and daily illegal blockades of
| highways. This technology makes it much more likely that the
| police department can actually enforce the law as it exists on
| the books by identifying and locating these criminals. It also
| makes it much more likely that home surveillance footage from
| law-abiding residents can be put to use.
|
| I do not think this technology is intrusive or invasive as the
| quoted council member claimed. Recording in public spaces is
| completely legal to begin with. And we can always limit the use
| of facial recognition by police departments to cases with either
| a warrant or probable cause, to prevent completely uncontrolled
| surveillance. The allegations of racial biases are also not
| meaningful. In practice, false positives in machine vision
| algorithms are contained by maintaining a human in the loop to
| verify matches. It is trivial to use this technology in a way
| that matches human-levels of accuracy with this layer of safety
| in place.
|
| Banning this kind of technology outright feels like a fear-driven
| decision by luddites. That's a charitable take - a more direct
| perspective is that the politicians and interest groups
| supporting this ban are looking to protect their favored groups,
| which very frankly seems to include criminals.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| What's the point when they can buy the information from private
| companies?
| gnopgnip wrote:
| The CA ban includes the police using facial recognition
| services from private companies as well
| geephroh wrote:
| And the same applies to KC governmental authorities as well.
| theknocker wrote:
| Wow what heroes.
|
| Hey, quick question: Did they also ban Stratfor's gait tracking
| technology that they piloted for years?
| dalbasal wrote:
| Why does this apply only to policing? Is it a matter of
| authority/jurisdiction?
| jjulius wrote:
| It does not apply only to policing. From the article:
|
| >The legislation bans the use of the software by county
| government agencies and administrative offices...
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