this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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According to a recent review, 100% of the people falsely arrested via facial recognition findings have been black.
The technology needs to be legally banned from law enforcement applications, because law enforcement is not making a good faith effort to use the technology.
We should ban patrol automation software too. They utilize historical arrest data to help automatically create patrol routes. Guess which neighborhoods have a history of disproportionate policing.
The problems with the approaches that tend to get used should be the cause of absolute outrage. They’re ones that should get anyone laughed off of any college campus.
The problem is that they lend a semblance of scientific justification to confirm the biases of both police departments and many voters. Politicians look to statisticians and scientists to tell them why they’re right, not why they’re wrong.
That’s why it’s so important for these kinds of issues to make the front pages.
It's great how statistics can be used to basically support anything the author wants them to. Identifying initial biases in the data is super important just as verifying the statistics independently.
100% !?
I think that facial recognition software is a bit biased.
Developer, here. Working as intended.
*issue resolved
Works on my machine
This is a Systemic Bias; in this case Systemic racism.
The outcome a product or service disproportionately targets Black people. It wasn’t designed to do it, so it’s not overt racism, it just worked out that way.
Camera systems inherently have a harder time with dark skin. That’s a fact. However it’s been found time and time again that these systems are predominantly created by and tested on light skin individuals. So the bias is built into the flawed creation. You can see this in Hollywood where lighting has only recently been set up to highlight dark skin with majority black casts and show runners in shows like Atlanta and Insecure.
I’m speaking generally, not about this system specifically. It is probably like every other camera based system that struggles with dark skin over light skin. Even things like automatic sink sensors in public bathrooms have failed in this way https://gizmodo.com/why-cant-this-soap-dispenser-identify-dark-skin-1797931773
The outcome of the bad technology and policing is disproportionately effecting dark skinned people. That’s where it becomes systemic racism. No one decided to design a system to arrest more blacks people. The outcome of various factors ended that way however. Sometimes it’s just a consequence of nature, but most of the time there are clear reasons like lack of representation in design and testing that would have found the problems earlier.
Arrests more innocent black or darker skinned people is what I meant.
I’m not overusing the term, you’re conflating two types of racism, and need to understand the context in order to understand what others are speaking about. If you just assume everyone is talking about overt racism all the time, you’re going to jump to the wrong conclusions and probably think people are being dramatic or ridiculous half the time.
Anyone in the photography industry will tell you yes
A similar thing has happened here in the Netherlands. Algorithms have been used to detect fraud, but had a discriminatory bias and accused thousands of parents of child benefits fraud. Those parents came in huge financial problems as they had to back back the allowances, many even got their children taken away and to this day haven't gotten them back.
The Third Rutte Cabinet did resign over this scandal, but many of those politicians came back at another position, including prime minister Rutte, because that's somehow allowed.
Wikipedia (English): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scandal