I think you’re starting from the wrong place in your analysis. The first question we should be asking is why we would want this technology at all. The potential for bias is a moot point if we as a society decide that we don’t want this kind of government surveillance.
Even if the systems were perfectly fair and not the least bit biased and were operated by a perfect utopian police force I still wouldn’t want facial recognition. I’ve yet to hear a potential benefit of this sort of software that would justify the huge cost to citizen privacy.
Just because we can train computers to recognize faces doesn’t mean that we should.
>I’ve yet to hear a potential benefit of this sort of software that would justify the huge cost to citizen privacy. //
It makes it easy to find suspects and narrow down suspect lists. Meaning far fewer police are needed to catch a greater proportion of known criminals.
Most people consider that a huge benefit.
Let's say you have a db of all faces in country of 60M people. You have a photo/video of a person committing a crime, robbery. False positive rate is 1:100,000. Your search returns 600 people; address match finds 60 with connections to the locality; 5 of those have records, one for robbery. You'd at least sit a person down for an hour to review the matches, consider the records, list people for interview.
According to UK ONS stats, those adults released from prison, in Jan-Mar 2018, had a reoffending rate of 65%.
It seems just tracking known offenders would find the perpetrator in many cases if visual recognition is possible.
Yeah, I fully agree. While I do not want government to have this surveillance I was curious about the problem with the tech itself. As in why was it being biased.
Even if the systems were perfectly fair and not the least bit biased and were operated by a perfect utopian police force I still wouldn’t want facial recognition. I’ve yet to hear a potential benefit of this sort of software that would justify the huge cost to citizen privacy.
Just because we can train computers to recognize faces doesn’t mean that we should.