[btasker]

Easy answer: yes it'd be better.

TFA says that it has a failure rate of 1:33,000. That's a "do not ship" rating for almost anything else.

> immediately stopping you the only thing you have to do is pull out your ID?

Someone I know was detained on the side of the M25 for an hour sorting things out after being pulled over.

He presented the police with his ID and they decided it was a fake. His name was almost identical to someone who was wanted - his middle name and date-of-birth were different.

The Police said that was common on fake IDs - just change a few small bits of information - and that they'd have to take him to the station where he could sort it.

The only reason he didn't get taken in in the end is because the description of the wanted person noted that he had tattoos on his chest. On the side of the M25, at night, the only thing that stopped my mate being hauled into a London police station was taking his top off.

Anecdotes don't make data, but the idea that a copper will simply accept ID despite a system saying "this is your guy" is incredibly naive and suggests you've not had to interact with them much.

[Aeolun]

> suggests you've not had to interact with them much.

Or the opposite is true and this has been enough to solve all my police problems? I’ll admit it is not in the UK, but I doubt they have a significantly less professional police force.

> TFA says that it has a failure rate of 1:33,000. That's a "do not ship" rating for almost anything else.

For anything where failure means death, sure. For situations where failure means a minor inconvenience, maybe not so much.

To me, the only relevant point of comparison here is the rate of misidentification by officers while _not_ relying on the face id tech. Because that’s the alternative, not having no arrests or searches at all.

[btasker]

> I’ll admit it is not in the UK, but I doubt they have a significantly less professional police force.

Ah, that explains a point that I'd didn't bother to pull you up on.

Carrying ID is not a routine thing here in the way that it is in some other countries (there have previously been attempts to introduce a national ID but they were staunchly opposed). So, it's not a given that you'll have ID on you to show them.

Drivers probably have their driving license in their wallet, but even that's not guaranteed (because you don't have to have it on you when driving).

The "quality" of police varies by force (and, of course, by officer).

The Met, though, have had some pretty serious issues with misconduct (including sexual assault and murder) and are still working through the processes of identifying personnel who shouldn't be in uniform at all (the Met themselves found there were hundreds of officers who should have been sacked previously).

They're working to fix things (or claim to be), but you probably don't want a force that's been described as "institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic" to be entrusted with something like this.

> For anything where failure means death, sure. For situations where failure means a minor inconvenience, maybe not so much.

I would still say the failure rate is too high given that the outcome of interactions with the Police varies quite significantly (par.

> To me, the only relevant point of comparison here is the rate of misidentification by officers while _not_ relying on the face id tech.

I'd also be interested to know this. But, I don't think it'll go quite the way you expect.

I'd expect there'd be _fewer_ overall stops: coppers simply won't (mis)recognise as broad a range of people. If they're only stopping people they recognise (or based on stuff that's been radioed through), their success rate is probably better

[Aeolun]

> If they're only stopping people they recognise

> institutionally racist, sexist and homophobic

I’m not sure those things go together very well. If they’re bored they’ll just pull ‘random’ people off the street. They might not be at direct risk of arrest, but it’d still waste your time.

That’s half of the reason I need to show my ID all the time :/

Edit: I’m starting to think you might be right, and there’s no direct analogue because police don’t just sit in the middle of the street hoping they’ll see some suspect if they cannot instantly compare with 40k wanted faces. No officer would be able to remember them all.

Question becomes more if it’s worth to have some people misidentified to catch the bad guys.

[flumpcakes]

> TFA says that it has a failure rate of 1:33,000. That's a "do not ship" rating for almost anything else.

I find statements like this interesting, from a risk analysis point of view. In the UK there are breast cancer screening programmes and the risk of a radiation-induced cancer for a woman attending full field digital mammographic screening is between one in 50,000 to 100,000. That puts the rate of inducing cancer vs finding cancer at 1 in 400 to 1 in 800 (because the majority of scan results find no cancer). Should we "not ship" breast cancer screening?

[cess11]

"The Metropolitan Police say that around one in every 33,000 people who walk by its cameras is misidentified.

But the error count is much higher once an someone is actually flagged. One in 40 alerts so far this year has been a false positive."

I think it's a good idea to make it clear what you mean by "failure rate".

[flumpcakes]

One in forty false positives still isn't bad for a system to automatically sift out wanted criminals. That's going to be orders of magnitude better than police stopping people who 'fit a description'.

[isthatafact]

That claimed false positive rate sounds unbelievably low to me. Is there any proof publicly available and verified openly by a third party?

Why I find it hard to believe is that I am imagining having access to a face photo of everyone in the world, and trying to pick a specific close friend from those photos. Given infinite time to find the photo of that one person, I am convinced that I would find tons of false positives that might be that person, and that I would never even be sure I found the correct photo.

I am guessing that there is some serious sampling bias leading to such a low false positive rate (assuming the number is not complete fiction).

According to government (referring to "live facial recognition"): "All deployments are targeted, intelligence-led, time-bound, and geographically limited." https://homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/2023/10/29/police-use-of...

which makes that 1 in 40 number completely irrelevant when discussing false positives from mass deployment in grocery stores or other non-targeted spying.

[Aeolun]

There is zero reason for a police van in the middle of a city to sift through the whole internet. Everyone identified as living in that particular area is fine, and cuts down on a huge number of matches. The government also has a lovely national database of facial ID’s with names, so they don’t even have to rely on shitty internet photos.

[JohnFen]

> One in forty false positives still isn't bad for a system to automatically sift out wanted criminals.

It's an absolutely disastrous false positive rate when the consequences to those who are falsely identified are more than trivial.

[kolinko]

That one in fourth will be banned from using nultiple stores and establishments without due process and without a clear way to clear themselves up.

[cess11]

OK, can you show the numbers you are using?