TechDirt Exposes Implausible Denial for Police Use of Facial Recognition Software

That's been the same frequent focus for some posts on this blog. Let's take a look at those first as a preamble to yesterday's report by Tim Cushing in https://www.techdirt.com/.

18 May 2019

Should We Worry About What's Next Here In Mesa?

Don't know about you, dear readers, but we've got more than just a few things to get really serious about instead of thinking about how to use the city's logo as a visual tool.
From Fortune Magazine yesterday:
San Francisco Bans Facial-Recognition Tools for Its Police and Other City Departments
By Kartikay Mehrotra and Bloomberg May 14, 2019
(It all started with automated License-Plate Readers) 
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"Concerned that some new surveillance technologies may be too intrusive, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban the use of facial-recognition tools by its police and other municipal departments.

The Board of Supervisors approved the Stop Secret Surveillance ordinance Tuesday, culminating a re-examination of city policy that began with the false arrest of Denise Green in 2014. Green’s Lexus was misidentified as a stolen vehicle by an automated license-plate reader. She was pulled over by police, forced out of the car, and onto her knees at gunpoint by six officers. The city spent $500,000 to settle lawsuits linked to her detention.

Since then, San Francisco officials determined flaws in the license-plate reader were just part of a wider potential for abuse with Big Brother-type surveillance capabilities. With new technologies increasingly making it possible to identify people, places, and objects, the city decided to impose a higher bar for snooping tools. . .

Significant Challenges

The U.S. Department of Justice said the technology is not always accurate and that implementation poses significant challenges to civil rights.

“The potential for misuse of face recognition information may expose agencies participating in such systems to civil liability and negative public perceptions,” according to a December 2017 report on face recognition by the Bureau of Justice Assistance...

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TECHDIRT:

After Years Of Claiming It Doesn't Use Facial Recognition Software, The LAPD Admits It Has Used It 30,000 Times Since 2009

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the we-regret-the-repeated-errors dept

Wed, Oct 7th 2020 3:30am — Tim Cushing

The Los Angeles Police Department apparently loves using facial recognition tech. It doesn't like talking about its love for this tech, though. It told the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology it had nothing to give the Center when it asked for its facial recognition tech documents.

The Los Angeles Police Department has repeatedly announced new face recognition initiatives—including a “smart car” equipped with face recognition and real-time face recognition cameras—yet the agency claimed to have “no records responsive” to our document request.

The LAPD flatly denied using the tech as recently as 2019.

"We actually do not use facial recognition in the Department," Rubenstein told the LA Times in 2019, adding an exception of "a few limited instances" where outside agencies used it during joint investigations.

Here's what the LA Times has discovered, thanks to public records that the LAPD finally decided to stop withholding.

The Los Angeles Police Department has used facial recognition software nearly 30,000 times since 2009, with hundreds of officers running images of suspects from surveillance cameras and other sources against a massive database of mug shots taken by law enforcement.

The new figures, released to The Times, reveal for the first time how commonly facial recognition is used in the department, which for years has provided vague and contradictory information about how and whether it uses the technology.

There's some technically true stuff in the LAPD's obfuscation. The LAPD does not have its own software. This makes it easier to claim it does not use the tech "in the Department." But the Department definitely uses the tech . . .

HERE'S MORE > https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200927/11441345393/after-years-claiming-it-doesnt-use-facial-recognition-software-lapd-admits-it-has-used-it-30000-times-since-2009.shtml

Unmasking the Realities of Facial Recognition

By Jake Laperruque | Filed under analysis | December 05, 2018

What is facial recognition?

Facial recognition is a method of using computer programs to identify individuals based on the features of their faces. Facial recognition systems create a unique “face print” (similar to a fingerprint) based on a pre-identified photo (or set of photos) for an individual. These systems can then rapidly scan an image of an unknown face against all the faceprints in their databases, and provide an identification if there is a match. These databases can contain millions of photos and programs can scan through them to identify a match in less than a second.

Facial recognition is also a looming privacy threat. If cameras were placed near sensitive locations such as houses of worship, political rallies, protests, or doctors’ offices, facial recognition could effortlessly catalog the intimate details of individuals’ lives.

Is this something coming in the future, or is it being used now? . . .

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26 October 2018

China: facial recognition and state control | The Economist

Here in America  same

Published on Oct 24, 2018

China is the world leader in facial recognition technology. Discover how the country is using it to develop a vast hyper-surveillance system able to monitor and target its ethnic minorities, including the Muslim Uighur population.
Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: https://econ.st/2xvTKdy
Improving lives, increasing connectivity across the world, that's the great promise offered by data-driven technology - but in China it also promises greater state control and abuse of power.
This is the next groundbreaking development in data-driven technology, facial recognition. . .

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