A big biometric security company in the UK, Facewatch, is in hot water after their facial recognition system caused a major snafu - the system wrongly identified a 19-year-old girl as a shoplifter.

  • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    I have an identical twin. This stuff is going to cause so many issues even if it worked perfectly.

    • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      If it works anything like Apple’s Face ID twins don’t actually map all that similar. In the general population the probability of matching mapping of the underlying facial structure is approximately 1:1,000,000. It is slightly higher for identical twins and then higher again for prepubescent identical twins.

      • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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        3 months ago

        Meaning, 8’000 potential false positives per user globally. About 300 in US, 80 in Germany, 7 in Switzerland.

        Might be enough for Iceland.

        • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Yeah, which is a really good number and allows for near complete elimination of false matches along this vector.

          • 4am@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            I promise bro it’ll only starve like 400 people please bro I need this

            • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              No you misunderstood. That is a reduction in commonality by a literal factor of one million. Any secondary verification point is sufficient to reduce the false positive rate to effectively zero.

              • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Which means the face recognition was never necessary. It’s a way for companies to build a database that will eventually get exploited. 100% guarantee.

              • AwesomeLowlander@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                3 months ago

                secondary verification point

                Like, running a card sized piece of plastic across a reader?

                It’d be nice if they were implementing this to combat credit card fraud or something similar, but that’s not how this is being deployed.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        Yeah, people with totally different facial structures get identified as the same person all the time with the “AI” facial recognition, especially if your darker skinned. Luckily (or unluckily) I’m white as can be.

        I’m assuming Apple’s software is a purpose built algorithm that detects facial features and compares them, rather than the black box AI where you feed in data and it returns a result. Thats the smart way to do it, but it takes more effort.

      • 4am@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        And yet this woman was mistaken for a 19-year-old 🤔

        • Telodzrum@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Shitty implementation doesn’t mean shitty concept, you’d think a site full of tech nerds would understand such a basic concept.

          • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 months ago

            Pretty much everyone here agrees that it’s a shitty concept. Doesn’t solve anything and it’s a privacy nightmare.

    • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Ok, some context here from someone who built and worked with this kind tech for a while.

      Twins are no issue. I’m not even joking, we tried for multiple months in a live test environment to get the system to trip over itself, but it just wouldn’t. Each twin was detected perfectly every time. In fact, I myself could only tell them apart by their clothes. They had very different styles.

      The reality with this tech is that, just like everything else, it can’t be perfect (at least not yet). For all the false detections you hear about, there have been millions upon millions of correct ones.

        • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Yes, because like I said, nothing is ever perfect. There can always be a billion little things affecting each and every detection.

          A better statement would be “only one false detection out of 10 million”

          • Zron@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            You want to know a better system?

            What if each person had some kind of physical passkey that linked them to their money, and they used that to pay for food?

            We could even have a bunch of security put around this passkey that makes it’s really easy to disable it if it gets lost or stolen.

            As for shoplifting, what if we had some kind of societal system that levied punishments against people by providing a place where the victim and accused can show evidence for and against the infraction, and an impartial pool of people decides if they need to be punished or not.

          • fishpen0@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Another way to look at that is ~810 people having an issue with a different 810 people every single day assuming only one scan per day. That’s 891,000 people having a huge fucking problem at least once every single year.

            I have this problem with my face in the TSA pre and passport system and every time I fly it gets worse because their confidence it is correct keeps going up and their trust in my actual fucking ID keeps going down

            • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              I have this problem with my face in the TSA pre and passport system

              Interesting. Can you elaborate on this?

              Edit: downvotes for asking an honest question. People are dumb

      • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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        3 months ago

        it can’t be perfect (at least not yet).

        Or ever, because it locks you out after a drunken night otherwise.

        • CeeBee@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Or ever because there is no such thing as 100% in reality. You can only add more digits at the end of your accuracy, but it will never reach 100.

      • boatswain@infosec.pub
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        3 months ago

        In fact, I myself could only tell them apart by their clothes. They had very different styles.

        This makes it sound like you only tried one particular set of twins–unless there were multiple sets, and in each set the two had very different styles? I’m no statistician, but a single set doesn’t seem statistically significant.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        This tech (AI detection) or purpose built facial recognition algorithms?