Trawling faces

bob sterman · Post by **bob sterman** » Thu Dec 21, 2023 8:15 am

Police to be able to run face recognition searches on 50m driving licence holders
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ce-holders

What could possibly go wrong?

TechScape: ‘Are you kidding, carjacking?’ – The problem with facial recognition in policing
https://www.theguardian.com/newsletters ... -people-ai

Very concerning is the idea that erroneous automated matches with the database - and witness line-up evidence using faces matched from the database - might be treated as independent sources of evidence. As if the witness adds weight to the database match.

AI algorithms and humans may make their assessments of facial similarity based on similar dimensions of variation. So when an AI tool picks the wrong person from a database (e.g. to match with CCTV) of course the witnesses are going to say it looks like the perpetrator! Because it does look like the perpetrator - it's just not the perpetrator.