“When British police used facial recognition cameras to monitor crowds arriving for a soccer match in Wales, some fans protested by covering their faces,” reports the Associated Press.
“In a sign of the technology’s divisiveness, even the head of a neighboring police force said he opposed it.”
The South Wales police deployed vans equipped with the technology outside Cardiff stadium this week as part of a long-running trial in which officers scanned people in real time and detained anyone blacklisted from attending for past misbehavior… The real-time surveillance being tested in Britain is among the more aggressive uses of facial recognition in Western democracies and raises questions about how the technology will enter people’s daily lives. Authorities and companies are eager to use it, but activists warn it threatens human rights….
If the system flags up someone passing by, officers stop that person to investigate further, according to the force’s website. Rights groups say this kind of monitoring raises worries about privacy, consent, algorithmic accuracy, and questions about about how faces are added to watchlists… The North Wales police commissioner, Arfon Jones, said using facial recognition to take pictures of soccer fans was a “fishing expedition.” He also raised concerns about false positives….
“In laboratory conditions it’s really effective,” said University of Essex professor Pete Fussey. He monitored the London police trials, which also used NEC’s system, and found a different outcome on the streets. He co-authored a report last year that said only eight of its 42 matches were correct. The London program has since been suspended. “The police tended to trust the algorithm most of the time, so if they trust the computational decision-making yet that decision-making is wrong, that raises all sorts of questions” about the accountability of the machine, he said.
The article reports that 19,000 faces were scanned at a Spice Girls concert in May, and identified 15 people on a watchlist. Six of them were arrested.
Nine others had been identified incorrectly.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot