Thinking about facial recognition tech, which strikes me as pervasively incompetent/dysfunctional, with this question in mind: why doesn’t it matter to the people that implement it that it doesn’t work most of the time? Like, it’s not catching who it’s supposedly supposed to catch but it doesn’t matter to anybody using this stuff?
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Haven’t read the article, but wanted to share a disturbing anecdote.
I have photos of my abuse with the Child Protective Services of at least four states. During a time when databases were not being synced across state lines.
The premise of this article is a personal nightmare. No one “caught” what was happening to me because we switched schools/homes/cities/states every six months.
I had the embarrassing experience of being asked to leave class, at multiple schools, to stand in the hall like a criminal at lineup, taking mugshots of black eyes and bruises on parts of my body, which weren’t allowed to be filmed privately because you don’t want a kid behind closed doors lifting their shirt to show bruises…
So yeah, the “information age” didn’t come fast enough for me, and now threatens us all. Great scenario.
I’m so fucking bitter. But that doesn’t get us anywhere. Time to regulate reality; not the best response, but perhaps the only one we have.
In case it isn’t obvious: victims are people, and should not be used to train our technology overlords.
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I think there are a couple of driving forces here. One is data sets.
Google, Amazon and Apple (and Microsoft?) were in massive arm races for years to collect voice data to train their algorythms on large sets of samples. Google even launched a free 411 phone services for 3-4 years in part just to sample people’s phonemes into their proprietary data silo.
By building these large proprietary data sets and experimenting on them while voice recognition was largely useless compared to today; not only were they able to build their much better products just a few years later, but they were able to do so with all their databases owned by them effectively leaving a steep hill to climb for competition.
I think we are somewhere in the middle of this process when it comes to face recognition.
And signs are pointing to being at the beginnings of this with DNA analysis.
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Oh and one of the second factors is perception drives a lot here.
The mention of new technology with safety / law enforcement / security implications is kind of a quick panacea for administrative types who wont ever both to look at the pros and cons of something.
In my limited exposure to this as a state employee. People buy into a lot of security technologies not because their actually score high in terms of utility, but because tech decision made by security or administration is often fear based.
Their rarely asking the question what technology is appropriate. Their often asking “if bad thing X happens which COULD have been prevented by this technology we chose not to have, will I get in trouble/be responsible?”
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My take, based on somewhat less dangerous technologies, is because tech often doesn’t work, and you’re strongly disincentivized from calling it out or working too hard on anything that execs aren’t hyped on (which is hardly ever accuracy, even in this case I’m sure). You may very well even be fired for that. And that’s deeply demoralizing so people usually just check out and like lol yeah of course it doesn’t work and everything is terrible but I have no control over it and neither do you. Of course, they may be able to gain control over it through organizing, but that takes a huge amount of sustained effort even if people realize it’s a possibility.
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I’m convinced that facial recognition tech and associated databases are one of those technical “innovations” that we need to collectively refuse and just abandon.
I think similar thoughts about nuclear technology. If we can collectively fundamentally change the system of power in this country and/or others, what the fuck are we going to do about the world’s nuclear arsenals and the people who have been paid for decades to keep their fingers on the buttons? Along with redistributing power we are going to have to grapple somehow with getting rid of nuclear weaponry and tech, making some kind of collective decision to walk away from it and never touch it.
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