> “We have these photos. It makes sense,” Chief Shea said in the interview.<p>ah, yeah, outstanding argument - looking forward to seeing it applied to all other electronic data ever produced, no matter how old they are
This reminds me of when I was a little kid, maybe 2nd grade, and our class took a field trip to the police station. We all had our fingerprints taken. At the time, it just seemed like a fun activity to show us a little bit about how police work is done.
I know that this might be an unpopular opinion, but if privacy really is dead, why don't we just make this data public? I know there's significant risks, but I feel like it's a better step forward than having this technology developed and deployed in secret.
On a related note, I was recently disgusted by Bunk1 [0], a SaaS for summer camps that allows parents to stay connected with their children, as it highlights "Facial Recognition" as one of its features on its homepage.<p>A friend's child is in a camp that unfortunately uses them, and "invited me" so that I could send a letter to the child (which is a useful feature). The URL of the child's photo is:<p><a href="https://.../trained_face/image/...jpg" rel="nofollow">https://.../trained_face/image/...jpg</a><p>---<p>"Facial Recognition<p>When parents upload a photo of their camper, our facial recognition software scans each photo posted by camp and notifies parents when photos of their camper are available. Family members can easily see their camper in action without hunting through the camp’s entire gallery."<p>[0] <a href="https://bunk1.com/" rel="nofollow">https://bunk1.com/</a>
The whole problem is how do you selectively use facial recognition? It's not like there's a human judging whether the camera took a photo of someone underage, and somehow classify it by hands. The system is probably deployed by 90% software engineer and NONE of them probably even saw 0.01% of the actual database outside of the few example they used to debug. Those images will never be visited again unless there's a specific need to see them.
Honestly, I have no problem with a database of public images showing/tracking people's public actions. It used to be in a small town you knew who was good and bad by their actions. With the population explosion, the only way we have a practical means to return to that is with facial recognition databases.
>The New York Police Department has been loading thousands of arrest photos of children and teenagers into a facial recognition database despite evidence the technology has a higher risk of false matches in younger faces.<p>They already have the photos from arrest records. They already have footage from security cameras, etc. I don't see a problem in using computer algorithms to try to find possible matches between these two data sets. We do this for fingerprints and DNA all the time, matching data that was collected during an arrest to that from a crime scene.<p>Frankly, I do not have a problem with this, and actually think the police would be derelict in their duty if they were not doing this.
I wonder how this affects their system. If you have 10 years of a changing facial profile on someone, is their algorithm smart enough to drop older items? Or do you, in your 20s, look like your ten year old brother?
Facial recognition helps catch criminals.<p>Young people can be criminals too. And if the police catch them while still juvenile, they might have more of a chance to turn their life around.<p>Young people can also go missing, and facial recognition of security cams could help find them.<p>I honestly can't see any reason why children shouldn't be included like everyone else.<p>It goes without saying that a conviction should never depend on computer matching, and that safeguards need to be in place to prevent abuse and limit to legitimate law-enforcement purposes.<p>But trying to locate suspects or victims in the first place? Children are no less important here than adults.