Facial recognition tech booms despite accuracy concerns. Police arrests surge while airports and restaurants trial facial payments and passport-free travel.

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.

  • CeeBee@lemmy.worldEnglish
    616·
    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.worldEnglish
        35·
        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.worldEnglish
          6·
          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.worldEnglish
          1·
          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.worldEnglish
            1·
            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.deEnglish
      121·
      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.worldEnglish
        51·
        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.pubEnglish
      6·
      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.zipEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

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