San Francisco is first US city to ban facial recognition

[Doctor Amadeus]

That’s cute people are going to use it anyways. Especially private companies they’ll just have employees that work security sign a NDA.

[TEHPALLYTANK]

Are they less biased than the current identification measures, such as eye-witness accounts?

What? The camera footage still exists, the difference is in whether or not facial identification software is used instead of having humans review the footage.

[Pooti]

What? The camera footage still exists, the difference is in whether or not facial identification software is used instead of having humans review the footage.

It is a tool to view things with, no more than the camera footage. It would be silly to sentence someone for a crime based on it due to it being fallible, but it would be equally silly to not use a tool at our disposal to help narrow down persons of interest. my point being, it would likely track down WAY more legitimate suspects than it points towards the wrong ones.

The best thing to do would be for BOTH a human and a computer reviewing the footage.

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Idk if I would ban it, it could be a useful tool to help catch criminals. Obviously b/c of its inaccuracies it should be backed up with other evidence or used as a starting point for investigation.

Of course it would not be used like say, DNA evidence. It would be invaluable for helping to point to possible suspects though. People seem worried that they will be imprisoned because a computer said they committed a crime. It is simply an investigative tool and not a source of evidence. The video footage is the evidence. The tool only helps to point out who the people in said video footage MIGHT be.

[PC2]

Yeah, being much less likely to register as a false positive is so discriminatory. /s

As far as I know these facial recognition systems can't take into account the rate of false positive or false negatives. All they can do is train on more data to reduce the error rate.

It also ignores the point; that these systems are subject to bias and are therefore not justifiable due to how intrusive they are.

The bias doesn't come in at the level of security cameras and algorithms and IT workers. It would have to be a result of differences in society that exist independant of the facial recognition system.

[Sting]

I don't care why they did it, great move all the same.