Police In China Are Scanning Travelers With Facial Recognition Glasses (engadget.com) 87
Baron_Yam shares a report from Engadget: Police in China are now sporting glasses equipped with facial recognition devices and they're using them to scan train riders and plane passengers for individuals who may be trying to avoid law enforcement or are using fake IDs. So far, police have caught seven people connected to major criminal cases and 26 who were using false IDs while traveling, according to People's Daily. The Wall Street Journal reports that Beijing-based LLVision Technology Co. developed the devices. The company produces wearable video cameras as well and while it sells those to anyone, it's vetting buyers for its facial recognition devices. And, for now, it isn't selling them to consumers. LLVision says that in tests, the system was able to pick out individuals from a database of 10,000 people and it could do so in 100 milliseconds. However, CEO Wu Fei told the Wall Street Journal that in the real world, accuracy would probably drop due to "environmental noise." Additionally, aside from being portable, another difference between these devices and typical facial recognition systems is that the database used for comparing images is contained in a hand-held device rather than the cloud."
Glassholes! (Score:4, Funny)
Police in China are now the new Glassholes.
Fake news (Score:2, Funny)
Fake news. We all know that all Chinese look the same.
Re:Glassholes! (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I don't have an issue per se with police (or surveillance cameras) being equiped with face recognition software, or with roadside cameras equipped with ANR. The issue I have with these is their use cases, and the way the extracted data is used. And those uses always get expanded once the tech is in place. Police can be flagged automatically about criminals under an arrest warrant? Great. But the same tech can be used to grab people with outstanding parking tickets, or people critical of the government, or even completely innocent people who happen to be near a crime scene. ANR can be used to flag stolen vehicles... great. But it can also be used to track every citizen across the highway network, and you can be sure politicans will come up with good reasons for doing so.
We (some countries) already have decent privacy guidelines, and decent checks and audits in place on the way such sensitive data is used. But what we don't have is a check on use cases. We're not going to stop invasive technology like this, but we can push for much stricter rules on how it can be applied. Potential benefits should always be weighed against the right to privacy and potential harm to innocents, and those potential benefits should be tested; if they aren't realised, the use case should be invalidated. And negligence or misuse should be treated as a criminal case.
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As someone who has trouble remembering names I'd also like something like this.
The Chinese state is much more open about watching people, and markets it as being for their benefit and protection. For example, as you drive through junctions in China you often see a flash of light, which is the LED flash bulb illuminating your face so that the camera can photograph it. In the UK we have the same system but they use ambient lighting and paint the cameras grey so you don't notice them, and certainly don't adver
Re:Glassholes! (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone else who has trouble remembering names, I would rather continue struggling through the several seconds of social disjointedness before having every personal interaction recorded, and probably then uploaded and stored.
I find it disturbing that of innovations imagined in the last few decades of science fiction, many of the technologies presently developing the fastest are those that benefit the surveillance state.
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...before having every personal interaction recorded...
It doesn't need to record anything. It's such a shame that so many companies use cameras and microphones to record things that they shouldn't. Now we are afraid of what should be perfectly reasonable technology.
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Who said anything about recording and uploading? I just want local facial recognition of people in my personal, encrypted database.
You know, like how my brain has locally stored memories that allow me to recognize people, only with more reliable retrieval of the associated name.
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Almost nothing is done locally anymore, even though so much of what is shipped off to "the cloud" was able to be handled by the processors available twenty years ago.
If some company sells a product that does anything at all for you, they'll design it such that they can slurp up as much personal information as possible.
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What you don't realize is that the NSA is about a decade ahead of what the general public can get its hands on regarding surveillance. If you are worried now, you are late to the party.
Let's say, "If you are worried now" is broken up into two inclusive subsets:
Are you worried now for the first time ever?, and
Are you worried now once again? would comprise, right at with rounding, 100% of participants. That's as inclusive as Drew Barrymore attending her "friend's" wedding at a Grunge concert.
Sure, it's always some people's first go-round with surveillance-a-phobia.. hey, are you calling me, Some People?
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Oh well (Score:2)
Google and Facebook are already doing it with my own phone!
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And they're possibly sharing the facial recognition data with the Chinese government... AIn't that wonderful.
I worry more about the American government. China has no extradition treaty and doesn't give a shit about the other side of the world whereas America has shown itself not to give a shit about foreigners rights, including extra-judiciary murders and leveraging extradition treaties.
China leads the way (Score:3, Interesting)
Once again the fearful USA is left behind by the boldness of China in adopting and utilizing advanced technology. Under globalism, those who do not keep up are destined to be left behind in the dust. There is also a significant first-mover advantage as whoever adopts these technologies first realizes a distinct advantage over the timid ones who wait too long. The American response has been one of avoidance and evasion. Why? Because Americans seem to fear that if they stare at reality squarely, they will find reality staring back in a most discomforting way.
A lot of smart people are starting to argue in favor of the China Model. [foreignpolicy.com] It avoids the pitfalls of American dumbocracy, of which the hazards are only too clear after the results 2016 election. Political meritocracy has a lot of upside, in fact a better word for it might be "vertical democratic meritocracy". Democracy works well at the lower levels of government. But, in a huge country, as you go up the political chain of command, the issues become more complex and mistakes become more costly. Thereâ(TM)s a need to institutionalize a system to select and promote leaders with superior qualities. China has it, and America is trying with all its might to pretend globalism doesn't exist and it can still get by with its antiquated system. Democracy on the bottom, experimentation in the middle, and meritocracy on top is a good way of thinking about how to govern a large country.
Re:China leads the way (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: China leads the way (Score:1)
You obviously have no idea how the Chinese work:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_China
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China
You rise by who you know and who can buy off, nothing more.
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Political meritocracy is where a change of rulers causes the old clan running the show to become immediately unmeritorious and scheduled for re-education, the latter conveniently maxes out their remaining years among the quick as they are destined to be unmeritorious during this time.
Re:China leads the way (Score:4, Informative)
The US voted and the election was won. Every state had its vote counted.
Give a good speech, have a good candidate and win the states needed.
Re "China has" Communism that gave the world the Cultural Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re "promote leaders with superior qualities."? China was filling its university system with students who did not pass entrance exams. It's not "superior qualities" when the only question is about been loyal to the Communist party.
So now China has to use facial recognition glasses to track people who would spread freedom and democracy.
Re:China leads the way (Score:4, Insightful)
Furthermore, the fatal flaw in the Chinese system is the inability to peacefully change leaders, governments, and laws. The current US president's tenure and his party's hold of much of governmental power will eventually end regardless of how much that president and party attempt to hold onto power. The US system allows the election of "undesirable" leaders but also provides a way to get rid of those undesirables. In the Chinese system, the undesirables never leave. The Chinese Communist Party has an unbreakable grip on the country. It remains to be seen if the current Chinese president will yield power at the traditional end of his terms or if he will adopt the Putin model of government.
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That would make a powerful fictional action movie script.
A bad corporation was having local law enforcement problems in one state.
Some network alternations at a city and state level.
Photograph every city and state investigator.
Feed that altered data back into a federal facial recognition system as local sovereign citizens.
Interesting times.... (Score:2)
They have way too high of a false positive rate, but odds are the higher ups will pull a coverup to hid that and claim great success instead.
As to a portable version with much less processing power, it's just begging to be less accurate.
Of course there will also be false negatives that will let wanted criminals get away, unless they're caught by the normal methods, but I'm more worried about the innocents that will be jailed.
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Face recognition just isn't good enough yet for that kind of risk.
They have way too high of a false positive rate, but odds are the higher ups will pull a coverup to hid that and claim great success instead.
As to a portable version with much less processing power, it's just begging to be less accurate.
Of course there will also be false negatives that will let wanted criminals get away, unless they're caught by the normal methods, but I'm more worried about the innocents that will be jailed.
As long as positives are treated as "possible" suspects and not "definite criminals" false-positives aren't a problem. Just check their ID and see if they are the right match or not. I can leap to assumptions about how police in various countries might act, but I can't say with any accuracy.
I'm not opposed to police using facial recognition glass to find suspects in a crowd; I am opposed to them (or videos) being used as a log of who went where- if non-criminals are tracked and logged with their movements
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China seems willing to sacrifice innocent people for "societal improvement" or whatever euphemism they're using..
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Kelsey Grammar - that's the school in Little Britain, yeah?
Go to the source. (Score:5, Informative)
Engadget just reposted what Gizmodo wrote which reposted what WSJ and Sixth Tone wrote.
These are the real sources:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/c... [wsj.com]
http://www.sixthtone.com/news/... [sixthtone.com]
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I started with the WSJ article but submitted the Engadget link because the WSJ is paywalled.
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I don't suppose that /. gets a kickback from various favored links(?) Over and over, regardless of the story, they find a link to NYT, Engadget, etc. Almost never is the link to a source.
We are on the way to becoming a Betazoid-like race (Score:2)
The technology will inevitably make it so that people have no privacy or secrets whatsoever. The technology will soon allow every member of the society to know the location and activities or every other member. Everyone will know others' secrets, and then there will be no secrets between the humans, except those in their thoughts.
The next logical step is that we either adopt telepathic theology or evolve to become a race of telepaths, that like in the Star Trek.
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"telepathic theology"...media saturation by Franklin Graham and His Merry Band of Rich White Folk?
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The technology will soon allow every member of the society to know the location and activities or every other member.
No. No it won't. It will allow 'the authorities' and the 1% to know everything about everyone else. This information will not be available to the rest of us.
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Everyone will know others' secrets, and then there will be no secrets between the humans,
I know what you did last summer.
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Some notes for you:
1) Bandwidth is an issue. Live video streaming from every cop wearing these simply is not practical.
2) Power is an issue. Sure, it takes some cycles to do the processing, but in a portable unit you don't need to constantly transmit a high bandwidth stream.
3) Encrypted devices that don't allow direct reading of the database and will lock every 12 hours are possible. And they have a very limited hardware interface, so you'd need someone to steal the device and crack it to get more than a
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Some people want to explore the Universe, other want to rule the Earth.
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Space is amazingly big, so big you wouldn't believe it. And filled with radiation. Get over it, the Universe hates us as evidenced by the cue balls it periodically tries to bean us with.
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Dude, that's racist. On the racism scale of black to white, that's at least Mexican.
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Well, that's one way to keep them off the streets. It's like a social program that the Republicans like.
Prosopagnosia (Score:3)
Can I get one with a reduced database containing just my friends and people I've met a few times? I need the thing to project a HUD onto my retina and tell me who they are and maybe some metadata about what they do and how we met. People don't like it when I walk past them like they don't exist, and I don't realise I'm doing it.
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This exact use would be so awesome for me. I'm OK with faces, but linking them to names is really, really difficult for me unless I know the person very well... which can make business meetings awkward for me.
If it could be made more subtle, I'd love a set of camera/HUD glasses that would remind me of people's names and where I know them from.
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With men outnumbering women by some margin due to China's population policies, I'd be wary that this technology allows lonely police officers to woo girls. Officer sees attractive woman, looks her up online and instantly knows all her secrets from social media. Creepy.
The people feel so safe now (Score:2)
So its true ... (Score:1)
I remember a classic sketch from some old comedy show. Two white guys rob a convenience store. The police ask the Korean shop owner, "Did they have face mask?", Kim says, "no". "Can you identify them?" Kim says, "White guy all look same same"
Computer assisted/enhanced police work (Score:4, Interesting)
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Not surprising (Score:2)
I would expect an authoritarian government to use all the tools at its disposal to run the country efficiently. Its not something I want to see happen in the US, but seems in line with Chinese policies and not particularly evil.