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.
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.
Oh boy, I can’t wait to be charged for someone else’s meal because they look just enough like me to trigger a payment.
I have an identical twin. This stuff is going to cause so many issues even if it worked perfectly.
Sudden resurgence of the movie “Face Off”
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.
Meaning, 8’000 potential false positives per user globally. About 300 in US, 80 in Germany, 7 in Switzerland.
Might be enough for Iceland.
Yeah, which is a really good number and allows for near complete elimination of false matches along this vector.
I promise bro it’ll only starve like 400 people please bro I need this
Who’s getting starved because of this technology?
A single mum with no support network who can’t walk into any store without getting physically ejected, maybe?
You’re perfectly OK with 8000 people worldwide being able to charge you for their meals?
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.
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.
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.
And yet this woman was mistaken for a 19-year-old 🤔
Shitty implementation doesn’t mean shitty concept, you’d think a site full of tech nerds would understand such a basic concept.
Pretty much everyone here agrees that it’s a shitty concept. Doesn’t solve anything and it’s a privacy nightmare.
Well I guess we’re lucky that no one on Lemmy has any power in society.
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.
Or ever, because it locks you out after a drunken night otherwise.
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.
Twins are no issue. Random ass person however is. Lol
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”
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.
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
Interesting. Can you elaborate on this?
Edit: downvotes for asking an honest question. People are dumb
And a lot of these face recognition systems are notoriously bad with dark skin tones.