Backlash grows for police use of facial recognition (The 3:59, Ep. 562)

[MUSIC] Welcome to the 3:59 I'm Ben Fox Rubin.>>Am Iyaz Akhtar.>>On Tuesday, San Francisco became the first US city to ban police use a facial recognition tech. Proponents of the band say the tech offers a slippery slope For mass surveillance while proponents of facial recognition say that it's a useful policing tool, AYAs. Yes. Do you expect more cities to follow suit with San Fransisco? I think the outright ban is a little bit much. So, I don't think cities will do that right away. I did see someone tallk about a moratorium. Maybe they don't use it as As a primary method of identification. Maybe it's a secondary, or maybe it's used in a very light way. But the outright ban, I think, is a little bit much. There must be a different way to regulate something like this. It's also interesting that this is obviously not a federal ban. It's still being used in a variety of other places, right? Yeah, so I was looking at an article about this, and This does apply to San Francisco police and agencies but the San Francisco police does not use this currently. Mm-hm. So nothing is changing there plus facial id tech is available at airports, international airports and ports. But that's federal jurisdiction which means this band has no effect on those areas. Which means that if I went to the airport in San Francisco. San Francisco International Airport, they could use facial recognition. In theory, yeah. It's not like the entire municipality. Right. And everything in it. You're the Presidio, which is Federal, you can't use this. So, some additional Additional information about this. The Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology which has been looking into facial recognition technology for quite some time came out with a study today, this morning, saying police are using flawed data to run facial recognition searches. Those include using artist sketches, editing images to add eyes and lips, And searching for look a likes. So, to me this seems like if people are already a little shaky on the user facial recognition tech, this is obviously another point to say, like, hey maybe this isn't the best thing. It you were an eye witness and you go hey that guy looked like Ben Fox Rubin You should be able to show a picture of Ben Fox Reuben since he's so well known. [LAUGH] Now manbe. Of course. I think one of the cases actually was Woody Harrilson, David Schwimmer look alike. A lot of people like that. So the idea of saying this person looks like another person would be usable in a police sense. The idea that a computer's doing it, and potentially getting it wrong, again, it's that final step. If for some reason the police are deploying, Arresting drones, yeah, I think there's a real problem there. But if there's a person then going this is completely wrong, or this is completely right, at least it should be due process after that. Yeah, the idea that this was proposed in the first place is that facial recognition tech is supposed to be More accurate or more credible than the human eye it sometimes or it's able to pick certain things up. Like for instance if you're wearing a different pair of glasses. If you have longer hair, if you dyed your hair, there are all sorts of different ways to maybe mess with the human eye, which facial recognition Tech is expected to be able to just kind of sift through. Unfortunately with this study. It seems that, You know, hey, maybe they're messing around with it a little too much. Next up, want to switch to a different subject. We are happy to report that no, Facebook is certainly not listening to your conversations. You're not that important CNET I actually tested out this urban legend. I was forced to talk into my phone for about a week and a half. Trying to get advertisements about chainsaws and no I didn't get any advertisements about chainsaws. We found no evidence that this is actually real. Yeah, I love the article about this. The point that this would be crazy illegal. Let's not forget that. Crazy illegal. Forget the idea that, yeah, this would be creepy. It would cost Facebook trillions of dollars and ruining their model entirely that if they've been breaking the law however amount of time. That would be just amazingly bad for Facebook when it comes to the press. So if they're crazy enough to do it then yeah they They should be. It's a glace for it. It's a good a point that you mention that this would actually cost the company a lot of money and there would in fact be some sort of footprint to show that Facebook is digesting that information. That it's actually gobbling Up audio recordings from 2 billion of its users, or even several hundred million of those users, there would be some sort of data process that we would be able to notice, and unfortunately security researchers haven't found That is the accuracy aspect of these ads. I think that's what makes people scared. But it's the links to your friends searches that you're you're looking for so your friends are looking for friends of friends that kind of weird amazing profile like me created all this data On top of that just reminds me when I was gonna buy a car, all of a sudden I was thinking about buying a Honda Accord they were everywhere, didn't mean that they weren't there all the time I just didn't notice them as much, so I wonder if there's a psychological element of, I was just talking about cookies and now was asked for cookies but you might have not noticed it before cuz you were thinking about pizza Yeah and it's a good point. Alfred in his story talked about the fact that Facebook doesn't actually have to listen to you, it already has a ton of data about you already. But anyway if you want to read more about these stories check them out on CNET. I'm Ben Fox [UNKNOWN]. I'm not [UNKNOWN]. Jeez, Alright you threw me off. Thanks for listening.