• @CeeBee
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    1 year ago

    You’re talking about something else entirely. The ACLU’s argument is “these systems are so bad we can’t rely on them” and your argument is “law enforcement may not have them configured correctly”.

    One of those is factually false.

    That being said, every FR system is built differently, and have their own advantages and considerations. But from what I’ve seen in the news over the past few years is almost always a policy and procedure failure. At some point between using a photo of such low quality that it shouldn’t be used to the verifying officer looking at the source photo and recognizing the current suspect are different people, something broke down.

    I’m actually astonished at how bad the average person is at comparing photos of people. Just look up the conspiracy nonsense these flat earthers go on about regarding the Challenger accident. They are convinced that each person that died are actually still alive and living under a new name. Then they show their evidence and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Sure, these people are similar enough that they could fit a verbal description, but when you actually compare features it’s so easy to see they’re all different people and can’t be the same.

    I know it’s like that with some cops, because I know some people in emergency services that have been taking FR courses. They told me that so many departments (fire, police, 911 dispatch, forensics, etc) are being trained on it. And not for the software, it’s for physically identifying people. With this tech and these false arrests I guess it’s come to light that some people, cops or not, lack the fundamental ability to see minor but critical differences in facial anatomy.

    Ultimately, whatever a computer system says, a person is making the final decision to arrest these people. This is where the issue lies.

    Edit: I guess downvotes mean “I don’t like that you’re right” here also. I worked in the FR field for almost a decade. I’m familiar with the topic.