They have repackaged a press release that announced our investments in computer vision and machine learning and have made a huge leap that we have built or are currently building facial recognition into our cameras. This is false.
We believe that AI has the potential to streamline police work and reduce inefficiency. Police officers spend a substantial amount of time (65% according to a Netherlands study) doing administrative tasks like report writing and filling out forms. Our goal is to reduce this wasted time so that officers can spend more time in the street and with their communities.
If this sounds interesting, we're hiring! Come join our team in Seattle and write code that saves lives.
He said I was insane and that this would be extremely hard to implement and it was very improbable that it would ever happen. He basically demoralized me in front of my colleagues.
Needless to say he failed to convince otherwise and I lost all respect for him.
Obviously if they can follow through with a good reason like pointing out a violation of thermodynamics or some inherent mathematical paradox you should take that seriously, but the more reflexive the dismissal the less well-founded it usually turns out to be.
I'm amazed that pervasive face recognition isn't a thing. I figured it would be the killer app for Google Glass, popping up notes about everyone you see. Apple & Facebook could leverage it from the face tagging in Photos & FB. Police could be well-served by a vest-mounted lightweight system giving likely identifications of encountered suspects (or anyone) from mugshots et al. Thing is, all the technology is there waiting for use; it's a killer app just waiting for society to put up with it (just like privacy invasions that were intolerable back when and are normal today).
(I'm not necessarily advocating it, just figuring it's inevitable and ready to explode onto the scene.)
A very apt way of putting it. For a while now I've held the opinion that anonymity (and to some degree privacy, at least the privacy you expect from anonymity) as we know it is a short-lived artifact of our accumulation into larger groups, where it's not possible to know everyone around you and almost everything about them. The farther back you go, the less anonymity there was to the people that you saw every day.
In that respect, what we're seeing is a return to the norm. That doesn't mean it's better, but I'm not sure there's a way to actually prevent it exept on an individual basis, and then only with a lot of work on the part of that individual.
A backdoor for the state to have mic and camera access in all iPhones is very easy to implement.
But people don't want it, so it's not (currently) there.
Clipper chips have been possible for over 20 years, but as a society, we decided that we didn't want them. What people want is more important than what's possible.
And I think it's still quite hard to do for video and real-time though.
The only thing you get in return is that you'll be able to recognize the faces of police officers as well with the same technology.
No, but you can regulate it into regulation. This is why police need a warrant to pick the lock on your front door, or to use a thermal imaging camera on your home.
Facial Detection - This part of image is a face
The article is referring to facial detection and object classification and not, as is mentioned, facial recognition. Also, it would certainly NOT be real time. Computers are still quite poor at this even if they take a super long amount of time and processing power.
Visiting the links presented in the article, you'll find this is possibly not correct. The article may have misrepresented but it does lead to a study that specifically mentions "facial recognition" capabilities on these devices.
"A Market Survey on Body Worn Camera Technologies" from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and sponsored by the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice in November of 2016 found 9 different devices capable of facial recognition[1]. The software itself comes from a handful of startups and technology companies.
They define facial recognition: "Facial recognition features allow the user to identify or verify a person from a digital image or a video frame."
Relevant to Hacker News, this article is timely probably due to the mentioned Dextro being acquired by AXON[2] (owned by TASER) to utilize their software in their body camera[3].
[1] - https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/250381.pdf
[2] - https://medium.com/@dextro_co/dextro-announcement-d21212463b...
The submitter was correct not to use the article's title, because that one was too baity. But it's usually much better to pick alternative language from the article itself—such as a title or representative sentence—than to make up a new title oneself.