This shit needs to be heavily regulated, with massive fines for anyone who inconveniences a customer due to a false positive or a staff error such as what happened in this case.
Instructions unclear… the government has now created regulations to further entrench the technology and make sure that the companies providing it have no responsibility or accountability to anyone whatsoever.
If you read the story, you’ll see that it was face recognition by humans that was at fault, not automated face recognition. It would be like if the store had a picture posted in the staff room that said “Do not let this person shop here,” and the staff had thought this shopper was the guy in error.
That’s a bit of a stretch to say the system was not at fault. The system pops up an alert and says he this brown guy should not be in your store and shows a picture of a brown guy, staff go out and find a different brown guy and kick him out of the store. It’s still the system which is the issue, it scanned faces, sent and alert, but wasn’t able to accurately communicate to the staff which specific person they should be worried about. The staff aren’t facial recognition experts, the shitty system led to this issue occuring.
I care about random supermarkets. People need to eat and obtain basic necessities even if some random database with no oversight says they might be dangerous in some way that we don’t get to know about.
Random super markets can license access to their data. I could easily imagine a company like Palantir or Flock leveraging systems like these in their government contracting. Whether or not these things are privately owned by creepy corporations or under the direct control of a government agency feels like a distinction without a difference, either way the infrastructure of totalitarianism is being constructed around us with these technologies.
This shit needs to be heavily regulated, with massive fines for anyone who inconveniences a customer due to a false positive or a staff error such as what happened in this case.
Instructions unclear… the government has now created regulations to further entrench the technology and make sure that the companies providing it have no responsibility or accountability to anyone whatsoever.
If you read the story, you’ll see that it was face recognition by humans that was at fault, not automated face recognition. It would be like if the store had a picture posted in the staff room that said “Do not let this person shop here,” and the staff had thought this shopper was the guy in error.
That’s a bit of a stretch to say the system was not at fault. The system pops up an alert and says he this brown guy should not be in your store and shows a picture of a brown guy, staff go out and find a different brown guy and kick him out of the store. It’s still the system which is the issue, it scanned faces, sent and alert, but wasn’t able to accurately communicate to the staff which specific person they should be worried about. The staff aren’t facial recognition experts, the shitty system led to this issue occuring.
Corey Doctrow calls the humans in this loop reverse centaurs..
Edit: not unicorns
“Idiot Store Staff Mistake Someone For Someone Else” doesn’t get the same clicks.
Honestly don’t care too much about random super markets. This shit gets really fun when governments use it (like eg ICE is doing right now in the US).
I care about random supermarkets. People need to eat and obtain basic necessities even if some random database with no oversight says they might be dangerous in some way that we don’t get to know about.
Random super markets can license access to their data. I could easily imagine a company like Palantir or Flock leveraging systems like these in their government contracting. Whether or not these things are privately owned by creepy corporations or under the direct control of a government agency feels like a distinction without a difference, either way the infrastructure of totalitarianism is being constructed around us with these technologies.
When you’ll notice it, it will be too late.