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.
Stop giving corporations the power to blacklist us from life itself.
you will sit down and be quiet, all you parasites stifling innovation, the market will solve this, because it is the most rational thing in existence, like trains, oh god how I love trains, I want to be f***ed by trains.
~~Rand
I can see the Invisible Hand of the Free Market, it’s giving me the finger.
Despite concerns about accuracy and potential misuse, facial recognition technology seems poised for a surge in popularity. California-based restaurant CaliExpress by Flippy now allows customers to pay for their meals with a simple scan of their face, showcasing the potential of facial payment technology.
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.
And a lot of these face recognition systems are notoriously bad with dark skin tones.
No they aren’t. This is the narrative that keeps getting repeated over and over. And the citation for it is usually the ACLU’s test on Amazon’s Rekognition system, which was deliberately flawed to produce this exact outcome (people years later still saying the same thing).
The top FR systems have no issues with any skin tones or connections.
There are like a thousand independent studies on this, not just one
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.
And yet this woman was mistaken for a 19-year-old 🤔
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.
You’re perfectly OK with 8000 people worldwide being able to charge you for their meals?
Just go to a restaurant where public figures go and use a photo of their face.
This can’t be true. I was told that if she has nothing to hide she has nothing to worry about!
Even if someone did steal a mars-bar… Banning them from all food-selling establishments seems… Disproportional.
Like if you steal out of necessity, and get caught once, you then just starve?
Obviously not all grocers/chains/restaurants are that networked yet, but are we gonna get to a point where hungry people are turned away at every business that provides food, once they are on “the list”?
get caught once, you then just starve?
Maybe they send you to Australia again?
The world hasn’t changed has it.
This becomes even more ridiculous if you consider that we wasted about 1.05 billion tonnes of food worldwide in 2022 alone. (UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2024 Key Messages)
But no. Supermarkets will miss out on profits if they ban people from their stores who can’t pay.
Seems illogical? Because it is.
it’s like a no-fly list, but for food
it’s like a no-fly list, but for being alive
ftfy
This is a bad situation for her. I am genuinely curious under what standing she is suing. Thinking it through, this seems like a situation where the laws might not have caught up to what is happening. I hope she gets some changes out of this, but I am really curious on the legal mechanics of how that might happen.
Stores in most developed countries, UK included, can refuse service only for legitimate reasons, and they have to do so uniformly based on fair and unbiased rules. If they don’t, they’re at risk of an unlawful discrimination suite.
https://www.milnerslaw.co.uk/can-i-choose-my-customers-the-right-to-refuse-service-in-uk-law
She didn’t do anything that would be considered a “legitimate reason”, and although applied uniformly, it’s difficult to prove that an AI model doesn’t discriminate against protected groups. Especially with so many studies showing the opposite.
I think she has as much standing as anyone to sue for discrimination. There was no legitimate reason to refuse service, AI models famously discriminate against women and minorities, especially when it comes to “lower class” criminal behavior like shoplifting.
I am waiting to follow the case for updates, because while I hope that the outcome pushes back on AI system like this, I am skeptical of current laws to perceive what is happening as protected class discrimination. I presume in the UK the burden for proving fault in the AI lays on the plaintiff, which is at the heart of if the reason is legitimate in the eyes of the law.
This is an example of why “they’re private businesses so they can ban whoever they want for any reason” is problematic.
I’m wondering if maybe there should be a size threshold for full consent on business dealings. Like if you run a small business, you get to kick anyone out for any reason. But if your business is so big that it runs a significant portion of the market, then you would need to adhere to certain standards for how and when you ban someone from doing business with you.
Minority Report vibes…
Even if she were the shoplifter, how would that work? “Sorry mate, you shoplifted when you were 16, now you can never buy food again.”?
Sounds like a VAC ban.
Did the post office let them borrow their tech?
Well, this blows the “if you’ve not done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about” argument out of the water.
the way I like to respond to that:
“ok, pull down your pants and hand me your unlocked phone”
That argument was only ever made by dumb fucks or evil fucks. The article reports about an actual occurrence of one of the problems of such technology that we (people who care about privacy) have warned about from the beginning.
The US killed that argument a long time ago. We shot it in the back and claimed it had a gun.
I didn’t even have “Phrenology makes a comeback” on my apocalypse bingo card for the 2020s.
Now now, thought we had agreed not to use facial recognition, am I going to have to collapse civilization or are you going to behave ? Last warning
How you gonna do it?
Get facial recognition to lay the heat on someone else might be a good start. Gotta game the system to destroy it.
This is why some UK leaders wanted out of EU, to make their own rules with way less regard for civil rights.
It’s the Tory way. Authoritarianism, culture wars, fucking over society’s poorest.
nah i think main thing was a super fragile identity. i mean they have been shit all the time since before EU. when talks between france,germany and uk took place the insisted to take control of EU.
if you live on an island for generations with limited new genetic input…well, thats where you end up.
Nah the core drivers wanted their own little neoliberal haven where they didn’t have to listen to the EU. They’d have been rich either way, but this way they get more power.
I don’t understand the tendency to attribute harmful behaviours of the rich and powerful to these strange, irrational reasons. No, UK leaders didn’t spend millions upon millions on propaganda because they have a fragile identity. They did it because they’ll make money off of it, and will be able to move the legislation towards their own goals.
It’s the same when people say Putin invaded Ukraine because he wants to restore the glory of the Soviet Union. No, he doesn’t care about any of that, he cares about staying in power and becoming more powerful. One of the best ways to do so is to invade other countries, as long as you don’t lose.
It’s the same when people say Putin invaded Ukraine because he wants to restore the glory of the Soviet Union. No, he doesn’t care about any of that, he cares about staying in power and becoming more powerful. One of the best ways to do so is to invade other countries, as long as you don’t lose.
Thank you. I see so many people who don’t get it. I’m happy some people understand it without sending them link to one of few Ekaterina Shulman’s lectures in English.
Thank you for the validation, sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy with how often these things are repeated.
But those lectures do sound interesting - would you mind linking them when you have the time?
This is not the lecture I originally intended to post. Also small correction for 1:00:02 first answer in poll should be translated as “social fainess”.
If you find lecture where she says about “dealing with internal problems by external means” and “dropping concrete slab on nation’s head” - that is one I intended to link, but still searching which one it is.
Can’t wait for something like this get hacked. There’ll be a lot explaining to do.
Still, I think the only way that would result in change is if the hack specifically went after someone powerful like the mayor or one of the richest business owners in town.
Please tell me a lawyer is taking this on pro bono and is about to sue the shit out of Facewatch.
Dang… the UK got China’d.
