{"id":10792,"date":"2024-01-24T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-24T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10792"},"modified":"2024-02-15T08:03:45","modified_gmt":"2024-02-15T13:03:45","slug":"i-saw-you-or-maybe-i-didnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10792","title":{"rendered":"I Saw You!–or Maybe I Didn’t"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Unease about the growing use of facial recognition technology has clustered around some by now well-known difficulties: inaccurate results when non-white individuals are involved; inadequate training of personnel who \u201cread\u201d the results; adoption of privacy-invading systems without public knowledge or input; inadequate monitoring of accuracy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite these concerns, use of this technology is expanding in law enforcement, border control, airport screening, even business, including retail. Remember Rite Aid?<\/a> How\u2019s it really being used? What are the benefits as well as the unintended consequences? These questions create a fertile arena for authors of crime fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Properly implemented, facial-recognition could help make policing more efficient. It has been used to identify a number of the January 6 rioters, whose participation was then verified by other evidence (their own Facebook posts, often). The UK, whose cities are blanketed with camera surveillance, nevertheless still values the human element<\/a>\u2014a cadre of super-recognizers who \u201cnever forget a human face.\u201d That would not be me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, an identification facilitated by the facial recognition technology sometimes trumps other evidence gathered in more traditional ways. The arrestee\u2019s alibi, for example. No matter how sophisticated the technology becomes, it remains true that a person cannot be in two places at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Police departments say the technology is used only to generate leads, and people should not be charged with a crime until there is corroborating evidence. In practice, though, the algorithm\u2019s output often doesn\u2019t mark the beginning of an investigation, but its end. That perception was borne out by a Washington Post<\/em> story yesterday about. A Texas man has filed a lawsuit against Macy\u2019s (and others) claiming overconfidence in the technology led to his arrest by the Houston police. While in custody, he was sexually assaulted. This is one of a half-dozen ongoing wrongful arrest cases are around the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the U.S., a growing number of state and local law enforcement agencies have available to them the faces of nearly half the adult population. These photos come from various sources\u2014including billions scraped from social media, as well as government-issued I.D. cards, mug shots, driver\u2019s licenses, etc. (In which case I don\u2019t need to worry, because my driver\u2019s license photo looks nothing like me! Though probably it matches up with the eighty or so \u201cnodal points\u201d that define a particular face.) The Georgetown University Law Center\u2019s project on privacy and technology calls this vast database \u201cthe perpetual line-up<\/a>.\u201d And you\u2019re likely in it, no matter how law-abiding you are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe you\u2019re thinking, \u201cSo what? I\u2019m not a criminal. This doesn\u2019t affect me.\u201d At least not until there\u2019s a misidentification. Crime fiction writers should have a field day with this one. It\u2019s one thing in a traffic stop or arrest situation to attempt to verify someone\u2019s identity; it\u2019s quite another to use the database for a fishing expedition after-the-fact. And fish will be caught, possibly using grainy, out-of-focus, out-of-date, candid selfies, to create a list of possible matches. Facebook for a while identified individuals in the photos on our news feeds. My friend\u2019s wife was consistently identified as me. I didn\u2019t think we look at all alike, but the algorithm did, so I understand the reality of misidentifying people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Police departments in several major American cities are experimenting with street surveillance cameras that can continuously scan the faces of people in real time. More than a whiff of China here<\/a>. The People\u2019s Daily<\/em> has reported that China\u2019s facial recognition system needs only one second to scan the faces of its 1.4 billion people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Warrants aren\u2019t required for a search of facial databases. The investigations aren\u2019t necessarily limited to serious crimes. Defendants may never be told that it was an algorithm, not a human witness, that identified them. People who don\u2019t trust the justice system, may prefer to take a plea deal and never have their case tried in court and face a potentially longer sentence. This means the true rate of false positive identifications is unknowable. All these aspects of the technology and its implementation, good and bad, lend themselves to situations crime writers can exploit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Graphic by Mike MacKenzie (<\/em>www.vpnsrus.com<\/em><\/a>) under Creative Commons license 2.0 Generic.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unease about the growing use of facial recognition technology has clustered around some by now well-known difficulties: inaccurate results when non-white individuals are involved; inadequate training of personnel who \u201cread\u201d the results; adoption of privacy-invading systems without public knowledge or … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Facial recognition technology--the good, the bad, and the inspiration for crime writers. Think you're not in the databases? Probably you are.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,632,35,186,29],"tags":[2149,571],"class_list":["post-10792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-police","category-real-life","category-technology","category-writing","tag-facial-recogition","tag-privacy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2O4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10794,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10792\/revisions\/10794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}