[Jaepa]

Those are the 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘀𝘁 possible uses for this.

To illustrate lets imagine a really really good system that had a 0% false negative rate¹ , and a 0.000001%² false positive rate. If we were to sample the entire country looking the the FBI's most wanted we would end up with ~3290 matches, 3280 of which are going to be other people³.

Considering high value of the individual the chances of harassment or wrongful arrest (or worst) is pretty high.

1: In reality the false negative and false positive rate are going to be directly inversely related. The more you decrease the false positive rate the higher your false negative rate is.

2: That is 1 in 1 million

3: In this ideal situation it is assuming there is an even distribution. At this point computer vision is significantly worst for false positives for people of color.

[blensor]

I am not advocating for large scale facial recognition, but your argument holds true for basically any measure law enforcement has to apply to locate missing people.

How big is the false positive rate with tips received by phone? Law enforcement probably has to deal with much more wrong clues on a daily basis than to double check an image that was flagged by an automated system. And if even a human inspection can't tell the difference between the missing person and an image of the missing person then it's definitely worth checking out.

[ALittleLight]

It's definitely a problem if you use the face recognition as your only criteria - but if it alerted security to pay more attention to someone or to double check their documents?

Even with the false positive rate it's much more likely an individual identified by the system is a target than a random individual.

[oarsinsync]

> > To illustrate lets imagine a really really good system that had a 0% false negative rate¹ , and a 0.000001%² false positive rate. If we were to sample the entire country looking the the FBI's most wanted we would end up with ~3290 matches, 3280 of which are going to be other people³.

> It's definitely a problem if you use the face recognition as your only criteria - but if it alerted security to pay more attention to someone or to double check their documents?

Where do you imagine this is happening? If its in an environment where papers are expected as standard (e.g. an airport), sure, this is relatively benign. If it's when you're walking through a mall and now you're being stopped and searched, how is that not bordering on harassment?

> Even with the false positive rate it's much more likely an individual identified by the system is a target than a random individual.

Much more likely than without the system, sure. Chances of it being a random individual and not the target? 99.6% (using the math above of 3280 innocents to 3290 people identified).

If a system had a failure rate of 99.6% when harassing people, I don't think I'd describe that as 'much more likely' to be a target than an innocent random.

[junipertea]

Wouldn't it be the same as a police officer having a board of wanted people on his desk and (mistakenly) thought a person in a mall to be one of those? He'd check their papers (sorry, I'm European) due to his hunch and decide?

I believe there is no better way to identify wanted criminals at scale, do we want to comb the streets with policemen and "harass" 10x more people in hoes of finding them?

It's not a death penalty to be checked and bothering additional 3200 people in the whole country is a ok tradeoff to find wanted person in my opinion.

It feels like you want to cripple the way police looks for criminals because they don't act very kind towards suspects. Maybe police is the problem and not surveillance?

[zxcmx]

The reality is that police mostly catch “wanted” criminals during traffic stops or at their homes, or at the homes of known associates. Or when they get arrested for other crimes. People have a way of turning up.

How would this face camera thing even work? Like, a camera identifies so-and-so and a police car rushes out immediately? That’s not really how police do stuff.

[ALittleLight]

If a system identified individual has a 0.4% chance of being on the FBI most wanted, then that is 'much more likely' than an individual picked at random who has a likelihood of 1 in 30 million.

[dzhiurgis]

Your (USA) police forces are crooked. They swat people on a first signal they've received.

Instead they should attempt to verify first and try to approach people in civilised manner, not shoot their pets...

[kittiepryde]

That's a minority of police forces. There are a lot of police that truly care about doing the right things. The media covers corrupt police commonly and caring police rarely.

[dzhiurgis]

But you don't see such news come out from UK, AU, NZ or most of europe.

[auiya]

This is still better than the current paradigm of LEOs stopping and frisking anyone who "matches the description". That phrase has basically turned into carte blanche to harass anyone they want with plausible deniability. With facial recognition at least now there's one more constraint they'd have to operate under for probably cause, right?

[Jaepa]

That's true only if this somehow replaces the current paradigm. New technology generally supplements existing methodologies rather than replacing it.

[edanm]

While valid, your criticism is with the actual ability/execution of the technology, not the concept. Imagine we get it to a 100% match or, more realistically, use it in a way that makes more sense than just flagging someone and ruining their life forever (not to mention being biased). Would you still be opposed to the technology? If so, your opposition has nothing to do with the above argument.

[oarsinsync]

This may or may not be valid, but I'm not aware of any advanced technology that is 100% accurate that exists today.

Rather than the hypothetical of 'is this ok if we have 100% accuracy', how about 'is 100% accuracy ever likely to be possible?'

If it's not, then the previous question is about as relevant as 'if unicorns existed, would you want one?' (and yes, I would!)

[edanm]

I agree, which is why I wrote "or, realistically, use it in a way..." etc.

[oarsinsync]

> or, more realistically, use it in a way that makes more sense than just flagging someone and ruining their life forever

I think that's less realistic than developing 100% accurate algorithms, but now we're into anthropology instead of technology...

[Jaepa]

> Would you still be opposed to the technology? If so, your opposition has nothing to do with the above argument.

That's kind of a denying the antecedent propositional fallacy.