[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.