China's Surveillance Plans Include 600 Million CCTV Cameras Nationwide, And Pervasive Facial Recognition

from the I-saw-what-you-did-there,-and-know-who-you-are dept

Two of the recurrent themes here on Techdirt recently are China's ever-widening surveillance of its citizens, and the rise of increasingly powerful facial recognition systems. Those two areas are brought together in a fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal that explores China's plans to roll out facial recognition systems on a massive scale. That's made a lot easier by the pre-existing centralized image database of citizens, all of whom must have a government-issued photo ID by the age of 16, together with billions more photos found on social networks, to which the Chinese government presumably has ready access.

As for the CCTV side of things, the article quotes industry research figures according to which China already has 176 million surveillance cameras in public and private hands, and is forecast to add another 450 million by 2020. If those figures are to be believed, that would mean around 600 million CCTV cameras by that date -- around one for every three people in China. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Facial-recognition cameras are being used in China for routine activities such as gaining entrance to a workplace, withdrawing cash from an ATM and unlocking a smartphone. A KFC restaurant in Beijing is scanning customer faces, then making menu suggestions based on gender and age estimates. One popular park in the capital has deployed it to fight toilet-paper theft in restrooms, using face-scanning dispensers that limit each person to one 2-foot length of paper every nine minutes.

Other existing uses include on a running track to check that people aren't taking shortcuts, and in churches, mosques and temples, where CCTV cameras are deployed in conjunction with facial recognition to keep tabs on exactly who is engaging in these activities, which are regarded with suspicion by the authorities. Future possibilities are also explored by the article. Inevitably, police use of facial recognition systems figures prominently here:

Still to come: a police car with a roof-mounted camera able to scan in all directions at once and identify wanted lawbreakers. Researchers at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Sichuan province have developed a working prototype. "We’ve tested it at up to 120 kilometers per hour," said Yin Guangqiang, head of the university's security-technology lab.

If the prospect of being recognized by a police car hurtling past you at high speed isn't exciting enough, you can look forward to being spotted by a squadron of facial-recognition drones that a Chinese company is working on. The bad news is that this is still "a little ways into the future", but we can be pretty sure that once it is possible, China will be among the first to deploy it as part of its ever-more pervasive high-tech surveillance system, with facial recognition playing a central role.

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Filed Under: cctv, china, facial recognition, privacy, surveillance

If A Phone's Facial Recognition Security Can Be Defeated By A Picture Of A Face, What Good Is It?

from the a-thousand-logins dept

No technology is perfect and facial recognition software is obviously no exception. But whereas law enforcement groups use this flawed technology in too many instances, device manufacturers are beginning to ship out security features that rely on facial recognition software almost ubiquitously. Many might look at this modern technology and imagine defeating it and logging into another person's phone would resemble some kind of Mission Impossible style convolution. Sadly, as proven again recently with the release of Samsung's Galaxy S8, defeating the security feature is laughably simple.

With the public's first exposure to the Galaxy S8 happening a few days ago, it was only a matter of time until one of these biometric solutions had some holes poked in it.

One of those holes is that Galaxy S8's face recognition can be tricked with a photo. At least this is what a video from Spanish Periscope user Marcianophone purports. About 6 minutes into the 40-minute Spanish-language video, you can see the attendee take a selfie with his personal phone, then point it at the Galaxy S8, which is trained to unlock with his face. It only takes a few minutes of fiddling before the Galaxy S8 gives in and unlocks with just a picture, moving from the "secure" lock screen right to the home screen. Once the user dials in his technique, he shows the trick is easily repeatable.

This trick actually goes back quite a ways to earlier versions of the Android OS. Google had attempted to defeat this workaround by requiring users to blink during the facial recognition scan. That was almost immediately defeated by phone-breakers having to have two pictures instead of one, including one with the persons eyes closed and then switching between pictures during the scan. If you aren't laughing as you're picturing this in your head, your sense of humor is broken, because it's fairly hilarious.

Less funny is the obvious question: why bother with this stuff at all if it's so easily defeated? Samsung, to its credit, doesn't allow facial recognition to authorize Samsung purchases. If it's not good enough for that, why should it be good enough to serve as a locking mechanism for the phone at all? Other locks, including other biometric locks, perform far better. Maybe it would be best to table this security feature until it's, you know, secure.

Filed Under: facial recognition, galaxy s8, security
Companies: samsung

FBI Facial Recognition Expert Helps Denver PD Arrest Wrong Man Twice For The Same Crime

from the all-hail-our-future-biometric-overlords dept

Never let it be said law enforcement won't get their man. Even if it's the wrong man. And even if they do it twice.

This was Denver native Steven Talley's first experience with the local PD.

It was just after sundown when a man knocked on Steve Talley’s door in south Denver. The man claimed to have hit Talley’s silver Jeep Cherokee and asked him to assess the damage. So Talley, wearing boxers and a tank top, went outside to take a look.

Seconds later, he was knocked to the pavement outside his house. Flash bang grenades detonated, temporarily blinding and deafening him. Three men dressed in black jackets, goggles, and helmets repeatedly hit him with batons and the butts of their guns. He remembers one of the men telling him, “So you like to fuck with my brothers in blue!” while another stood on his face and cracked two of his teeth. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he remembers shouting. “You guys are crazy.”

Talley was driven to a Denver detention center, where he was booked for two bank robberies — the first on May 14 and the second on September 5, 2014, 10 days before his arrest — and for assaulting an officer during the second robbery.

Surveillance camera footage from the robbed banks had been circulated. Acquaintances and Talley's estranged ex-wife asserted that the man shown was Talley. Using these statements, the Denver PD moved forward with its particularly brutal arrest, one that left Talley with multiple injuries.

In the months that followed, a series of medical exams revealed that Talley had sustained several injuries on the night of his arrest, including a broken sternum, several broken teeth, four ruptured disks, blood clots in his right leg, nerve damage in his right ankle, and a possibly fractured penis.

Talley was held for two months until recordings made by his employer showed he was at his desk on sales calls during the time the May robbery took place. He was released and charges were dropped. But investigators still didn't have the right suspect in custody. So they turned the footage over to the FBI, which put one of its facial recognition experts on the case.

The detective assigned to Talley’s case, Jeffery Hart, had requested that an FBI facial examiner manually compare stills from the banks’ grainy surveillance videos to several pictures of Talley — a tall, broad-shouldered white man with short blond hair, mild blue eyes, and a square jaw.

The FBI analysis concluded that Talley’s face did not match the May robber’s, but that he and the September robber shared multiple corresponding characteristics, including the shape of the head, chin, jaw line, mole marks, and ear features. “The questioned individual depicted” in the September images, the report concluded, “appears to be Talley.”

"Appears." That was enough to justify putting Talley through this whole nightmarish experience again. Talley was arrested again, under the new law enforcement theory that the robberies had been committed by two different men, both of whom resembled Talley enough to have him arrested twice.

This time, the case fell apart almost immediately.

The FBI’s facial analysis was further called into question in court, when the prosecution’s star witness directly contradicted its conclusions. When Bonita Shipp — the sole witness to the September 5 robbery, who had previously identified Talley based on Hart’s photographic line-up — took the stand, she testified that Talley was not the same man who threatened her and robbed her station.

According to the internal bank form tellers fill out after each robbery, Shipp originally described the suspect as 6 feet, 175 pounds, with a slender build. But the man who stood before her, she noted, did not fit this description. Talley stood just under 6 feet 4 inches and weighed between 230 and 250 pounds. He did not, in her opinion, appear to be a slender man.

[I]n the cross-examination with the prosecutor, Shipp said that she had not previously told anybody about the robber’s hands. “When he reached his hands over the counter,” she told the DA, “I could see through his surgical gloves, and I could — he had like marks on his hands.”

The markings were moles and freckles, which she believed she would recognize if presented again with the robber’s hands. At the hearing, Talley offered to show Shipp his hands, and she examined them. “It’s not him,” she told the courtroom. “It’s not the guy who robbed me.” The prosecutor, Shipp recalled, went slack-jawed.

The reliance on facial recognition proved much more fallible than was asserted in court. The similarity between the faces -- as determined by the FBI's expert -- was based on little more than what one forensic scientist called "voodoo witchcraft."

No threshold currently exists for the number of points of similarity necessary to constitute a match. Even when agencies like the FBI do institute classification guidelines, subjective comparisons have been shown to differ greatly from examiner to examiner. And the appearance of differences, or similarities, between faces can often depend on photographic conditions outside of the examiner’s control, such as perspective, lighting, image quality, and camera angle.

And yet, the FBI and many other law enforcement agencies believe facial recognition software -- utilizing massive databases -- will do a better job than their own experts, which aren't exactly setting the forensic science world on fire. If anything, the move to software will only guarantee replicable errors, rather than a significant decrease in false positives. And whatever the software decides will still need to be translated by a human and presented by an expert in court, where claims of "certainty" have long been overstated.

Talley's case is one of the more dramatic outcomes of reliance on forensic techniques too inconclusive to truly be called "science." The continued push towards more reliance on experts' subjectivity and massive biometric databases ensures Talley's case won't remain an anomaly. In this incident, the only thing that's been proven is that law enforcement has the means and methods to arrest the wrong guy twice for the same crime.

Filed Under: face recognition, facial recognition, fbi, steven talley

Germany Interior Minister Pushing For Deployment Of Facial Recognition Software In Public Areas

from the StasiTV dept

Facial recognition software is the wave of the future present. The FBI -- acting without a required Privacy Impact Assessment -- rolled out its system in 2014, finding that a 20% false hit rate was good enough for government (surveillance) work.

Following in the footsteps of Facebook, governments slanting towards the authoritarian side (that's you, Russia!) have deployed facial recognition software to help ensure its citizens are stripped of their anonymity.

Other governments not so seemingly bent on obedience to the state have done the same. UK law enforcement has quietly built a huge facial recognition database and Brazil experimented with police equipment that would turn officers into Robocops -- providing real-time facial recognition to cops via some sort of Google Glass-ish headgear. If what we know about facial recognition software's accuracy rates holds true, the goggles will, indeed, do nothing.

Germany has maintained an arm's-length relationship with its troublesome past. The Stasi and Gestapo's lingering specters still haunt current legislators, occasionally prompting them to curb domestic surveillance efforts. Concerns for the privacy of its citizens has also sometimes resulted in the government making angry noises at tech companies it feels are overstepping their boundaries.

Four years ago, it demanded Facebook destroy data on German citizens in its facial recognition database. Judging from the current push by German officials, it could just be thata the government didn't want any competition.

Speaking to the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, [Interior Minister] Thomas de Maiziere said internet software was able to determine whether people shown in photographs were celebrities or politicians.

"I would like to use this kind of facial recognition technology in video cameras at airports and train stations. Then, if a suspect appears and is recognised, it will show up in the system," he told the paper.

This move towards a more Stasi-esque surveillance system is, of course, prompted by recent terrorist attacks in Germany. Nothing propels bad legislation and lowers the price on domestic surveillance real estate more efficiently than tragedies -- especially those "claimed" after-the-fact by members of the Islamic State.

For those more concerned with lonely baggage, the government is all over that, too.

He said a similar system was already being tested for unattended luggage, which the camera reports after a certain number of minutes.

The lesson here is never forget where you set down your duffel bag -- unless you like watching it being detonated by security teams from a safe distance.

As for the dystopian future awaiting Germans as their government does all it can to help the terrorists win, the Interior Minister offers this shrug of a statement:

"We will have to get used to increased security measures, such as longer queues, stricter checks or personal entry cards. This is tedious, uncomfortable and costs time but I don't think it's a limitation of personal freedom," he said.

Longer lines and more "papers, please" -- just the sort of thing that will push memories of Nazi Germany and the Berlin Wall into the background.

Filed Under: facial recognition, germany, surveillance

FBI's Facial Recognition Database Still Huge, Still Inaccurate, And DOJ Shows Zero Interest In Improving It

from the ALL-YOUR-FACE-ARE-BELONG-TO-US dept

The FBI's biometric database continues to grow. Its Next Generation Identification system (NGI) is grabbing everything it can from multiple sources, compiling millions of records containing faces, tattoos, fingerprints, etc. from a blend of criminal and non-criminal databases. It went live in 2014, but without being accompanied by the Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) it promised to deliver back in 2012.

Lawsuits and pressure from legislators finally forced the FBI to comply with government requirements. That doesn't mean the FBI has fully complied, not even two years past the rollout. And it has no interest in doing so in the future. It's currently fighting to have its massive database exempted from federal privacy laws.

Much of the information we have about the FBI's NGI database has come from outside sources. The EFF and EPIC have forced documentation out of the agency's hands via FOIA lawsuits. And now, the Government Accountability Office (in an investigation prompted by Sen. Al Franken) is turning over more information to the public with its review of the system.

What the GAO found is more bad news. The FBI is all about collecting data. It has little interest in ensuring the data is accurate or even usable.

The FBI’s system searches not just its own database, but also photo databases maintained by seven participating states, the US Department of State – which issues passports – and the US Department of Defense, shared among federal law enforcement agencies and the participating agencies, though access on the state level is obtained through the FBI.

This is only part of the NGI. To amass the 411 million photos it has collected to this point, the FBI dumps in the contents of a national criminal database.

[T]he GAO report found a much larger program, run by the criminal justice information services division of the FBI (CJIS), called Facial Analysis, Comparison and Evaluation, or Face, which “conducts face recognition searches on NGI-IPS and can access external partners’ face recognition systems to support FBI active investigations”.

The multiple inputs -- which allow criminal and non-criminal biometric data to intermingle -- still return an alarmingly high number of false positives. According to data obtained by EPIC, the facial recognition portion shows an error rate of 15-20% in the top 50 results returned from searches. That was the error rate in 2010. We can assume the hit rate has improved since then, but we have no way of knowing what the current error rate is because the FBI is uninterested in policing the accuracy of its database.

From the GAO report [PDF]:

Prior to deploying NGI-IPS, the FBI conducted limited testing to evaluate whether face recognition searches returned matches to persons in the database (the detection rate) within a candidate list of 50, but has not assessed how often errors occur. FBI officials stated that they do not know, and have not tested, the detection rate for candidate list sizes smaller than 50, which users sometimes request from the FBI… Additionally, the FBI has not taken steps to determine whether the face recognition systems used by external partners, such as states and federal agencies, are sufficiently accurate for use by FACE Services to support FBI investigations

The GAO report also points out the FBI has been severely delinquent in its obligations to the public. Reports it was supposed to deliver prior to rollout have only just recently appeared, including one release apparently prompted by the GAO's assessment of the NGI program.

NGI-IPS has been in place since 2011, but DOJ did not publish a System of Records Notice (SORN) that addresses the FBI's use of face recognition capabilities, as required by law, until May 5, 2016, after completion of GAO's review. The timely publishing of a SORN would improve the public's understanding of how NGI uses and protects personal information.

The GAO has made six recommendations to the agency, three of which are being disputed by the DOJ. According to the DOJ, the reason for the mandatory reports being delivered after-the-fact doesn't need to be examined because the FBI "has established practices that protect privacy and civil liberties beyond the requirements of the law." This sounds like the FBI has "nothing to hide," which is at odds with the lack of responsiveness by the agency to demands for updated PIAs and SORNs over the last eight years.

The DOJ also disagrees that it should have to audit the facial recognition database's "hit rate," something that was only 80-85% accurate five years ago. (In fact, the FBI's specifications consider 85% accuracy to be acceptable when returning lists of possible suspects.) The DOJ claims the database can never return a false positive because it apparently has enough manpower and resources to chase down every bogus lead.

In its response, DOJ stated that because searches of NGI-IPS produce a gallery of likely candidates to be used as investigative leads instead of for positive identification, NGI-IPS cannot produce false positives and there is no false positive rate for the system.

The GAO understandably disagrees. Accuracy is important, especially if the FBI is going to put innocent people under investigation… or overlook potentially dangerous suspects.

Without actual assessments of the results from its state and federal partners, the FBI is making decisions to enter into agreements based on assumptions that the search results may provide valuable investigative leads. In addition, we disagree with DOJ’s assertion that manual review of automated search results is sufficient. Even with a manual review process, the FBI could miss investigative leads if a partner does not have a sufficiently accurate system.

The DOJ apparently still feels a 20% chance of putting the wrong person under investigation is still acceptable. And it still believes that it's so far ahead of the privacy curve that it doesn't need to apprise the public of the potential privacy implications of its massive biometric database. The information forced out of its hands by litigants and outside agencies shows the FBI is far more interested in collection than dissemination -- that it should be able to take all it wants from the public without having to hand out anything in return.

Filed Under: accuracy, doj, facial recognition, fbi, next generation identification, ngi, privacy

Israeli Company Claims Its Software Can Look At Your Face And Determine If You're A Terrorist Or Murderer

from the no-it-can't dept

There is a regular experience I have that I assume is common for anyone that operates within the technology industry: I will often hear non-technical people make claims about a specific kind of technology that are wildly overstated. To clarify, I am technically proficient in the barest sense, mostly meaning that I have enough of an understanding of the underlying process by which things work that I can explain them, but not implement them. To those without even that barest understanding, I can understand how technology can simply seem like magic. That can open the doors for others who know better to try to take advantage of this.

Enter into the conversation Israeli startup company Faception, which claims its facial recognition software can look at your features and then determine if you're a terrorist, pedophile, or criminal.

An Israeli start-up says it can take one look at a person's face and realize character traits that are undetectable to the human eye. Faception said it's already signed a contract with a homeland security agency to help identify terrorists. The company said its technology also can be used to identify everything from great poker players to extroverts, pedophiles, geniuses and white collar-criminals.

"We understand the human much better than other humans understand each other," said Faception chief executive Shai Gilboa. "Our personality is determined by our DNA and reflected in our face. It's a kind of signal."

The practice of trying to figure out human tendencies and traits through facial features isn't new. It's been going on for centuries under the term "physiognomy", and its history is long and dubious. The overwhelming general consensus is that it's nonsense, with anecdotal evidence for its successes being more the result of confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecy than anything else. One might remember the man with the mean face who later robbed him at gunpoint, but doesn't think as often about the kind-faced man who bilked him out of his life savings with a confidence scheme. Alternatively, one might decide someone had an untrustworthy face, treat that person badly, and assume confirmation of the original theory when that person reacts negatively to such treatment.

What Faception claims to do is put the job in the hands of software, as though that solves the problem. Except software is both constructed by humans, with all of their biases, and is even programmed in a way to be intelligent like humans, making the whole thing a self-defeating enterprise. Even Gilboa knows that his claims of super-accuracy shouldn't be relied on.

The danger lies in the computer system's imperfections. Because of that, Gilboa envisions governments considering his findings along with other sources to better identify terrorists. Even so, the use of the data is troubling to some.

"The evidence that there is accuracy in these judgments is extremely weak," said Alexander Todorov, a Princeton psychology professor whose research includes facial perception. "Just when we thought that physiognomy ended 100 years ago. Oh, well."

And examples for the methodology of how this type of software will learn to identify traits often leaves much to be desired as well.

There are challenges in trying to use artificial intelligence systems to draw conclusions such as this. A computer that is trained to analyze images will only be as good as the examples it is trained on. If the computer is exposed to a narrow or outdated sample of data, its conclusions will be skewed. Additionally, there's the risk the system will make an accurate prediction, but not necessarily for the right reasons.

Domingos, the University of Washington professor, shared the example of a colleague who trained a computer system to tell the difference between dogs and wolves. Tests proved the system was almost 100 percent accurate. But it turned out the computer was successful because it learned to look for snow in the background of the photos. All of the wolf photos were taken in the snow, whereas the dog pictures weren't.

In that latest example, you see how a particular technology can appear to be almost magical in its accuracy until you get under the hood and see what actually occurred. There's no magic here, just software intelligent enough to separate wolves from dogs in a manner that didn't look at either the wolves or dogs at all. We can't tell if Faception's technology works the same way because, of course, Gilboa's company isn't sharing what's under the hood. Given the history of this practice, however, one feels safe rebutting the company's claim that it can tell if you're a terrorist by looking at your face by simply saying, "No you can't."

And that's not even digging into the question of the ethics of the use of this "technology." Faception claims it has already signed an agreement with an unidentified nation's homeland security organization. Were governments to begin using questionable technology that hasn't been vetted for accuracy and applying law enforcement actions with it, well, then we'd have delved into the kind of PreCrime dystopia typically reserved for bad fiction.

Software isn't magic. It strains the mind to believe that one company could undo centuries of consensus on physiognomy, just like that. Because it almost certainly can't.

Filed Under: criminal, facial recognition, terrorist
Companies: faception

Russia Provides Glimpse Of A Future Where Powerful Facial Recognition Technology Has Abolished Public Anonymity

from the are-we-really-ready-for-that? dept

As hardware and software advance, so facial recognition becomes more accurate and more attractive as a potential solution to various problems. Techdirt first wrote about this area back in 2012, when Facebook had just started experimenting with facial recognition (now we're at the inevitable lawsuit stage). Since then, we've reported on an increasing number of organizations exploring the use of facial recognition, including the FBI, the NSA, Boston police and even the church. But all of those pale in comparison to what is happening in Russia, reported here by the Guardian:

FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability.

It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts. In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks.

One of FindFace's founders, Alexander Kabakov, points out the service could have a big impact on dating:

"If you see someone you like, you can photograph them, find their identity, and then send them a friend request." The interaction doesn't always have to involve the rather creepy opening gambit of clandestine street photography, he added: "It also looks for similar people. So you could just upload a photo of a movie star you like, or your ex, and then find 10 girls who look similar to her and send them messages."

Definitely not creepy at all.

Of course, a 70% hit rate isn't that good: perhaps FindFace isn't really such a threat to public anonymity. The trouble is, the Guardian article reports that the company has performed three million searches on its database of around a billion photographs using just four common-or-garden servers. It's easy to imagine what might be achieved with some serious hardware upgrades, along with tweaks to the software, or with access to even bigger, more complete databases. For example government ones: according to the Guardian, FindFace's founders think the big money will come from selling their system to "law enforcement and retail." Although they've not yet been contacted by Russia's FSB security agency, they say they'd be happy to listen to offers from them. Perhaps comforted by the thought of all that future business coming his way, Kabakov is philosophical about the social implications of his company's technology:

"In today’s world we are surrounded by gadgets. Our phones, televisions, fridges, everything around us is sending real-time information about us. Already we have full data on people's movements, their interests and so on. A person should understand that in the modern world he is under the spotlight of technology. You just have to live with that."

That may well be true. But the question is, are we ready to do so?

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Filed Under: data mining, facial recognition, privacy, russia
Companies: findface

Chip And PIN Meets Facial Recognition: Chipping Away At Privacy, Pinning You Down In A Database

from the are-you-sure-you've-thought-this-through? dept

As part of President Obama's BuySecure initiative, US merchants and the public are being encouraged to adopt the Chip and PIN technology for credit, debit, and other payment cards. As the announcement in October last year noted, these Chip and PIN cards have been used for some years in other parts of the world, notably Europe and Canada. For all the technology's vaunted security, there are inevitably still weaknesses that can be exploited, as with any system. That was true five years ago, and it's still true now, as shown by this story on the BBC Web site about one company's idea for reducing Chip and PIN fraud:

One of the biggest payments processing companies has revealed it is developing a chip-and-pin terminal that includes facial recognition technology.

Worldpay's prototype automatically takes a photo of a shop customer's face the first time they use it and then references the image to verify their identity on subsequent transactions.

The company admits that the system is unlikely to be perfect:

Worldpay is not suggesting that shoppers be blocked from making payments if its computer system failed to make a match.

Rather, it suggests that tills would display an "authorisation needed" alert, prompting shop staff to request an additional ID, such as a driving licence.

It's only an experimental idea at present, but Worldpay says it could roll it out to the 400,000 retailers that use its system within five years if there's sufficient interest. That would obviously create rather a large collection of facial biometrics, which raises questions of how they would be stored. But don't worry, Worldpay has got that sorted:

The firm says it would store the captured images in a "secure" central database.

Well, that shouldn't be a problem, then -- provided you remember to change your face when that database gets broken into….

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Filed Under: chip and pin, credit cards, facial recognition, payments, privacy
Companies: worldpay

UK Police Carry Out Facial Scans Of 100,000 People Attending Music Festival

from the yes,-we-scan dept

Last year, Techdirt wrote about Boston Police performing a test run of its facial recognition software on those attending a local music festival. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in the UK, land of a million CCTV cameras, the police have taken things even further. As this story in Noisey explains, drawing on a report on the Police Oracle site (registration required):

This weekend's Download Festival will be subjected to strategic facial recognition technology by Leicestershire Police, making those 100,000 plus attendees the first music fans to ever be monitored to this extent at a UK music festival

…

The announcement article on Police Oracle reads, "the strategically placed cameras will scan faces at the Download Festival site in Donington before comparing it with a database of custody images from across Europe."

The ostensible reason for this massive surveillance is to catch people who steal mobile phones, but that really doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The database that the 100,000 faces were matched against was "custody images from across Europe", but it seems improbable that criminals would travel all the way across Europe to this particular music festival in the hope that they might be able to relieve a few spaced-out musicgoers of their phones. Nor was general criminal behavior an issue: apparently, last year there were just 91 arrests with 120,000 people attending. It's more likely that the facial scans were born of a desire to see if the hardware and software were capable of capturing such large numbers and comparing them with the pan-European database. Worryingly, the Download Festival may be just the start:

According to the Police Oracle article previously cited, other festival organisers have expressed widespread interest in technology, pending a successful trial. DC Kevin Walker told the Oracle, "It is one of the first times it has been trialled outside, normally it is done in a controlled environment. There has also been a lot of interest from other festivals and they are saying: 'If it works, can we borrow it?' "

It's easy to see this kind of technology being rolled out ever-more widely. First at other music festivals -- purely for safety reasons, you understand -- and then, once people have started to get used to that, elsewhere too. Eventually, of course, it will become routine to scan everyone, everywhere, all the time, offering a perfect analog complement to the non-stop, pervasive surveillance that we now know takes place in the digital world.

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Filed Under: face scanning, facial recognition, police, surveillance, uk
Companies: download music festival

DailyDirt: Everything Will Recognize You

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Cameras are everywhere. High resolution image sensors are getting really small, and they're not just in smartphones anymore. Some folks used to joke about combining cameras with all kinds of gadgets/appliances, but it's not really a joke anymore. Maybe your toaster doesn't have a camera yet, but there could be a microwave oven or refrigerator with some crazy sensors in your kitchen someday. Big Brother might be an internet of things.

• A blind person's cane instantly broadcasts that the person using it is visually impaired, but a smarter version of a cane could include cameras and software to be able to identify faces from 30 feet away. Developers are already working on prototypes of a "smart cane" that includes GPS and other sensors, but it's not clear if anyone with a visual impairment would actually want to use a fancy digital cane regularly. [url]
• Facial recognition software is scanning a LOT of photos nowadays and getting better (and perhaps creepier) all the time. This kind of vast collection of biometric data could make it a lot harder to remain private in the future (without wearing large brim hats or crazy makeup), but it could also make things more convenient. Have we already traded too much privacy for convenience? [url]
• Iris scanners can identify people from 40 feet away, and researchers have a system that can identify a driver from an eye reflection in a side-view car mirror. Forget about license plate readers... Wear your mirrored sunglasses at all times. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: ai, artificial intelligence, biometrics, blind, camera, facial recognition, internet of things, iot, iris recognition, iris scanner, sensors, visually impaired