Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face—and Tried to Run Facial Recognition on It (www.wired.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For facial recognition experts and privacy advocates, the East Bay detective’s request, while dystopian, was also entirely predictable. It emphasizes the ways that, without oversight, law enforcement is able to mix and match technologies in unintended ways, using untested algorithms to single out suspects based on unknowable criteria.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Next thing you know this will be the new expert witness pseudoscience.

[–] agent_flounder 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Propublica did an article on that.

https://www.propublica.org/article/understanding-junk-science-forensics-criminal-justice

E.g.

The reliability of bloodstain-pattern analysis has never been definitively proven or quantified, but largely due to the testimony of criminalist Herbert MacDonell, it was steadily admitted in court after court around the country in the 1970s and ’80s. MacDonell spent his career teaching weeklong “institutes” in bloodstain-pattern analysis at police departments around the country, training hundreds of officers who, in turn, trained hundreds more.

...

In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain-pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.” More than a decade later, few peer-reviewed studies exist, and research that might determine the accuracy of analysts’ findings is close to nonexistent.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Remember this article when you end up on a jury.

[–] agent_flounder 4 points 5 months ago

Or sitting behind the defense table.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Beat me to the punch, I was saying just as much, considering the history of forensic science in general. It won't be long before they're producing bogus "research" to justify it at a new investigative method.