Facial Recognition Software Can't Actually Prove Your Identity
It turns out that facial recognition software can't be counted on to prove anyone's identity. The technology came to the fore in the wake of the events that took place at the Capitol building this Wednesday, with Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz claiming that the persons who stormed the proceedings were from Antifa.
Gaetz simply claimed that there was "some pretty compelling evidence from a facial recognition company," and it's believed his statement was based on a now-deleted Washington Times article that was eventually debunked.
Despite the article's removal, people picked the contents up and ran with it, although that's not how facial recognition systems were meant to work in any case. While it's considered to be a solid enough start for investigations, it isn't used all that often.
Of course, television and movies paint a different picture, with facial recognition software thought to be extremely reliable. In the real world, however, experts hardly consider it to be foolproof.
Facial recognition can check pictures or frames against a database after building a face based on the data fed into a template, yet the results aren't treated as conclusive.
“The main thing to realize is that facial recognition is not perfect,” Marios Savvides, professor of artificial intelligence and director of Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab Biometrics Center, says (via Popular Science).
“There’s a top match that might be 89 percent, then another at 85 percent and down the line.” It doesn’t provide law enforcement - or whoever is performing the research - with a definitive match and they don’t treat it as such.
“It could be 20, 50, or the top 100 matches. It depends on variables like the severity of the crime. For a high-profile case like the Boston Marathon case, they would search in the hundreds.”
An example lies in the arrest of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, who was arrested by Detroit police last year only to become the first known American wrongfully arrested on the back of a flawed facial recognition match.
" To my knowledge, it has never been introduced as evidence in a court anywhere in the country,” executive director of the Policing Project and adjunct professor at NYU Law, Farhang Heydari, points out. “Right now, facial recognition is considered too unreliable to be used as evidence anywhere.”
from TheRichest - Feed https://ift.tt/35oIldY
Post a Comment