In the summer of 2022, with a spike in violent crime hitting New Orleans, the city council voted to allow police to use facial-recognition software to track down suspects — a technology that the mayor, police and businesses supported as an effective, fair tool for identifying criminals quickly.
A year after the system went online, data show that the results have been almost exactly the opposite.
Records obtained and analyzed by POLITICO show that computer facial recognition in New Orleans has low effectiveness, is rarely associated with arrests and is disproportionately used on Black people.
The first facial recognition search under the new policy occurred on October 21, 2022, using surveillance footage to help identify a Black man suspected of a shooting by matching his picture with a database of mugshots. The results: “Unable to match, low quality photo.” Over the next year, the NOPD would see a string of largely similar results.
A review of nearly a year’s worth of New Orleans facial recognition requests shows that the system failed to identify suspects a majority of the time — and that nearly every use of the technology from last October to this August was on a Black person.
Hopefully that last part never happens
Ring doorbells are a death knell for privacy :(
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but the FUSUS camera aggregation system is even worse than Ring.
https://www.fusus.com/security-operations/fusus-security-operations-center-in-the-cloud
But its not nearly as good a pun as ring/death knell
Generally though FUSUS is… not great. They do nothing innovative and every city I know of already has access agreements to commercial property cameras / lots of residential ones. They’re banking on security camera manus or home security systems integrating with them directly, but again that’s just… not going to work well. Georefing a city’s worth of cameras is an constant, arduous and expensive task. Even though they plan to pass the setup costs to the private parties installing the cameras they’re not going to subsidize the actual cost per unit, so the footage will be exactly as fucking worthless as it ever was…
It’s powerful and scary tech, and things like it have been in use for years and years, without much real effect. They’ll still encounter the technical barriers, still encounter the legal barriers, still struggle for broad adoption. Until there’s legislation mandating participation, they’re just yet another vaporware company trying to cash in on the bloated US LE markets.
Edit: besides, we already have Fusion Centers and those are in a true leage of their own. FUSUS only dreams about that kind of integration. They’re the privacy violation equivalent of bringing a howitzer to the siege of rome.
Edit 2: TALEN is another big one right now, worth looking in to. Very worrying, even just because it seems to be very popular with the masses…