Police to be given right to use photos from driving license and maybe passport for facial recognition

[cakeorwine]

Police to be able to run face recognition searches on 50m driving licence holders | Facial recognition | The Guardian

Interesting.
The Government has pictures of our faces for passports and driving licenses. A clause in a new criminal justice bill will allow the police to have access to these pictures for matching against facial recognition. Pick an image up with a camera and the police will be able to use these pictures to identify the person.

Assuming the facial recognition technology can be trusted.

OTOH - it's useful for catching suspects.

But OTOH, how many people will end up on a database and watch list for taking part in protests, demonstrations - and who knows where that will end.

Facial recognition is being used to scan crowds for people the police are after.

The EU had proposed similar but dropped it due it being a disproportionate breach of privacy.

I suspect that I might end up on a database because of some of my political views. Probably on it already. Heck, they probably already have my picture from the DVLA anyway.

But do we really give our photos to the Government so they can be used to catch criminals?

if its a machine and just identifies all individuals that were present at x protest then how can any bias be possible ?

What would a hill to die on be?
Listening to voice messages?
Reading everyone's email
Reading WhatsApps
Knowing everyone's logins and passwords?
Taking everyone's DNA sample just in case?

All ways of catching criminals who have done the crimes you have discussed.

I totally understand the reasons why this gets support. It would be a powerful way of catching criminals.

But at what point do we say "Stop"

you do know gchq, and the eg echelon system already do all of this ?

Accuracy,
How do you know it has identified people correctly?
It has an error rate - and that varies depending on many factors.
Computer says it was you.
Do you have to prove it was not you?

@cakeorwine we dont say stop because society needs protection and protecting, various events prove that

Don't we?

@cakeorwine this - so much this and they’ve been able to for far longer than the average person thinks.

say your mi5, you have source data that suggests x person was at the protest, then presuming other public cctv cameras are linked to the database your using, you would then run facial rec in said data base for other camera feeds that showed the target near or at the protest to confirm the persons identity ?

to be honest we were learning to walk and they were already running at superman speed so to speak

People have weird trust in the Police and technology despite there having been plenty of examples of mistakes and wrongdoing. A scary number of people seem to think that accusation is the same as guilt.

But don’t they retain the image for a split second and if not matched, it gets deleted? So what’s the issue…. Unless you’re a criminal and don’t want to get caught

@cakeorwine we should be introducing more checking of any information gleaned form whatever sources. Obtain, robustly challenge it, improve on it.
Improving our legal system and opening up access to it. Not (as we increasingly do have) have a legal system and laws which can work for those with very deep pockets, but not for those who cannot afford even an hour of a solicitors time.
laws and the legal system should be open to all to use and challenge. But information shouldn’t be inaccessible.

this is a prime example of how tech can help save society, and why we need the technology :

@OracleofWurms i know. The genie has been out of the bottle for at least 100 years.

I'm astonished. The police have been using photo-identity with face-recognition for at least 25 years. That battle was lost at least 25 years ago. The thing that has changed is that they may now use it as identity in court.

I'm astonished. The police have been using photo-identity photos with face-recognition software for at least 25 years. The only thing that has changed is that they may now use this in court.

I won't be okay with this until they can show that they are using racially diverse datasets to train their models with

Otherwise facial recognition trained on non diverse datasets has been shown to be less accurate on people from minorities, and given that black people are already disproportionately target by forces such as the Met, are more likely to die in custody or just after being released from custody and spend 70% longer awaiting trial, this will just be another way of discriminating against black people and people of colour.

I mean I probably still wouldn't be okay with it after, but an acknowledgment of the issues surrounding non diverse training datasets would be nice..

I think it is appalling. It’s not about having nothing to hide, it’s about people being tracked for their political views or being wrongly identified and lives being ruined.

Tell that to the people the royal mail sent to prison, the woman who had to give birth in prison and the ones who killed themselves all because people trusted faulty technology...

At the moment people with darker skin tones are more difficult for the algorhythms to identify. So this discriminates against suspects of lighter skin tones.

A slippery slope towards a totalitarian state. Although probably inevitable.

A possibly counter intuitive facet of these biometrics is that the recognition becomes less reliable as the size of the database increases.

This is already happening. Maybe it's in the US? Someone was arrested recently, it was like a movie the way it happened so fast, they walked into a building, I think it was an amphitheater for a concert or something and within moments they were apprehended, all from hidden cameras with facial recognition tech. I was shocked as I didn't know the technology was that advanced or in place! I don't think anyone cares, no one is fighting it, just like AI. but I think it's creepy as fuck. I don't care what the reasoning is, I don't want computers having that level of control.

That's literally the opposite of how it works.

It literally isn’t