Brave New World of Facial Recognition


Facial recognition algorithms have been in vogue for a while. Smartphones use your face as your password to unlock it. Which means they must be pretty accurate, right? Not really. Across the board, tests reveal that the western AI’s face recognition accuracy is better for whites than blacks, and within each race, better for males than for females. Similar algorithms developed in Asia are better at identifying Asians than whites.

The algorithms aren’t “intentionally biased”. Usually, Big Data algorithms get better the more data you throw at them. But given the demographics of the West and Asia, there’ll always be more data of certain groups than others; so it’s hard to see how this can be fixed.

Who cares, you may be thinking, locking phones with good old passwords isn’t that much effort. Aha, but these algorithms are increasingly being used by law enforcement agencies all over the world, where the cost of mis-recognition can be high.

In not-so-free countries, the dangers are even higher. The Chinese police, for example, have sunglasses with built-in facial recognition. This is even “better” than the ubiquitous CCTV cameras:
“One challenge for facial recognition software is that it struggles when running on CCTV cameras, because the picture is blurry and by the time a target is identified they might already have moved on.”
Whereas, with the sunglasses, one gets “instant and (much more) accurate feedback”. If you already have an idea of who your suspects are, pre-load their images for comparison and the sunglasses work even faster.

All this leads to an arms race between prey and predator. If the state can have such sunglasses, here’s one weapon in the arsenal of those being tracked. Chinese scientists found that “shining hat-brim-mounted infrared LEDs on the user's face” can fool the facial recognition software. (Since it’s infrared, a human user wouldn’t notice anything unusual). If you were thinking, “In your face, surveillance state”, you might want to reconsider. Because the tool even allows you to “specify which face the categorizer should "see"”. Put differently, I could frame you by making my face with the LED’s shining on it look like your face.

As the saying goes, everything can be weaponized.

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarApril 9, 2018 at 11:22 AM

    I take the last line first here, "As the saying goes, everything can be weaponized".

    "Why does it have to be that way" is what many pacifists may ask. Foolishly of course!

    Not only everything can be, and in the end actually gets, weaponized. Because there will always be people who take advantage of situations to favor themselves. Strangely, in order to defend oneself against such unreasonable or unfair onslaughts, one also needs to weaponize anything and everything. Oh, oh - this then becomes the inevitable: "as much as we need food, we need weapons!" :-(

    I think in the end, it is Obelix (of the Asterix comics) who deserves to have the last say, "These humans are crazy!" :-)

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