Retrospective Facial Recognition in Policing: 2021 or 1984?

29

September

2021

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The Metropolitan Police (Met) has new plans of purchasing and implementing retrospective facial recognition (RFR) technology in London (Woodhams, 2021). This technology will enable the MET to process historic photographs from CCTV, social media, and many other sources in order to track down criminal suspects. These plans were made public when the Mayor of London accepted the Mets proposal to increase its surveillance technology (MOPAC, 2021). This proposal showed the Mets plans to have a 4 year, £3 million deal with NEC, a multinational information technology and electronics corporation from Japan.

In the past, similar technologies like Live Facial Recognition (LFR) have seen heavy public criticism. LFR scans the faces of people that walk past a camera and compares these to a database of photos of people who are on a watchlist. Police use of LFR has already been scrutinized to the point where the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for a moratorium on LFR use (Woodhams, 2021).

In order to protect the freedom, privacy of citizens, it is important that the public gains an understanding of both LFR and RFR, and the police’s plans of implementing them. As the complexity of policing technology will continue to increase, I believe that citizens will have a harder time understanding these technologies and the implications of their use. 

One interesting implication of RFR that I would like to shed light on with this article involves data consent. As mentioned previously, RFR uses historic photographs. In the past, when these photos were taken, citizens did not agree for them to be used in future RFR police investigations. At the time, many citizens did not even know that such use of these photographs could be a possibility in the future. This raises my question to the readers of this article. Should the police be allowed to use photographs you consented to in the past, for new purposes without new consent? Is the police acting in an immoral way?

References:

Woodhams, Samuel. (2021). London is buying heaps of facial recognition tech. Wired, Condé Nast Britain 2021. Retrieved from: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/met-police-facial-recognition-new

MOPAC. (2021). Retrospective Facial Recognition System. The Mayor’s Office for Policing And Crime. Retrieved from: https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/pcd_1008_retrospective_facial_recognition_system.pdf

Featured photo from:

Macon, K. (2021). London Police to rollout “Retrospective Facial Recognition,” scanning old footage with new invasive face recognition tech. Reclaim The Net. Retrieved from: https://reclaimthenet.org/london-police-to-rollout-retrospective-facial-recognition/

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Facial recognition: from great new technology to even larger concerns

24

September

2020

No ratings yet. Facial recognition technology has been around since the mid-1960s and has seen tremendous growth over the years. Applications can be found anywhere; tagging photos on social media, biometric locks, surveillance; the list is endless. While many of these may seem harmless and appear to facilitate efficiency for everyday tasks, scepticism on the technology has gained a greater foothold in past years. As the technology is achieving greater accuracy, privacy is becoming an increased concern. Some governments have set up permanent surveillance systems, collecting incredible amounts of data on citizens. While these systems are often claimed to provide safety on the streets, many are concerned about potential other uses of the data collected.

Worldwide, only a very limited number of countries have nation-wide bans in place: Belgium and Luxembourg. All other countries have no to very limited regulations regarding facial technology that should perhaps be reassessed. With America experiencing most of the uproar against the technology, action groups gained their first victory in 2019; San Francisco was the first American city to ban the private use of facial recognition technology. Now, a year and around ten additional city-wide bans later, the overall paradigm seems to be shifting even further.  Recently, Portland was the first city in the US to completely ban facial recognition technology for both private and governmental use. This seems to have sparked more discussion on the regulations that should be in place regarding the technology.

Studies have found concerning indications of the effects of facial recognition in everyday settings. For example, Andrejevic & Selwyn (2019) present social challenges facial recognition can have in schools. It is found that upon integration of the technology, the nature of schools can become oppressive, authoritarian and divisive. Additionally, the technology is being mass deployed in law enforcement, without any scientific evidence that suspects can be better identified. In fact, it is imposing stronger biases on law enforcement as the technology fosters a false sense of security. These are only some of the examples that have been found now that facial technology is being integrated.

Based on these reasons, I would personally urge all governments to strongly consider limiting the use of facial recognition technology on a large scale. While it is constantly developing and admittedly convenient in many scenarios, the actual scientific benefits for many applications are yet to be proven. Additionally, many risks have been identified that, while perhaps contained, for now, could start showing its effects at any time.

What do you think? Should facial recognition be better regulated worldwide? Do the applications outweigh the potential risks?

https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/facial-recognition#:~:text=Facial%20recognition%20technology%20was%20first,intelligence%20agencies%20and%20the%20military.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/29/what-is-facial-recognition-and-how-sinister-is-it

https://www.wired.com/story/portlands-face-recognition-ban-twist-smart-cities/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2020/06/13/facial-recognition-bans-what-do-they-mean-for-ai-artificial-intelligence/#6c6aacca46ee

https://www-nature-com.eur.idm.oclc.org/articles/d41586-019-02514-7

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/facial-recognition-world-map/#:~:text=Belgium%20and%20Luxembourg%20are%20two,use%20of%20facial%20recognition%20technology

Andrejevic, M. & Selwyn, N. (2019). Facial recognition technology in schools: critical questions and concerns. Learning, Media and Technology 45(2), pp. 115-128.

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Your Profile Is Being Scraped

18

September

2020

4.33/5 (3) Facial recognition is gaining interest the last few years, all around the internet and also on this forum, more and more is being written about facial recognition itself, the positive and negative effects and the underlying technologies. Major companies are competing on developing better algorithms and are selling their developed technologies as cloud services. Easy API’s make it possible for every tech savvy person to use those services within minutes. But still the subject of facial recognition is still a lot of theory and less action. Current news items often discussed a few local tests or the implementation of video tracking within law enforcements. The major steps made on facial recognition are made within China, were facial identification or payment becomes more mainstream. But over the last year one company’s name popped up several times, gaining interest of several tech journalist, Clearview AI.

A lot of people nowadays have a certain social media profile, often with a public name, profile picture and some basic information. Of course it would be possible to go to every page and collect user information randomly, but no one every took the time to do this or saw the benefits of doing this, expect the startup Clearview AI.

Scraping is the act of automatically extracting public data of the internet. Every website can be scraped, even all data and texts from this blog for example. Clearview AI, performed these scraping operations on a huge level, they started scraping all the public profiles of Facebook and saved this data in one big database. If your profile picture and name are public on one of your social media accounts, which are probably most of the profiles, it is likely that these are included in the database of Clearview AI.

Would not every law enforcement agency be interested in the possibility of finding a suspect with the help of a few clicks? Robbers, fraudsters or cyber bullies are also people, most of the time with a personal social media account. This is exactly what Clearview AI thought while developing their business model, by scraping all public available data, training huge neural networks and selling it worldwide all bundled in a good looking application to law enforcement agencies. According to a graph of the New York Times, this will bring the number of photos the FBI can search from their own database of 411 million photos to a staggering number of 3 billion photos that are included in the Clearview AI application, all supported by an impressive artifical intelligence model.

This brings up some important questions, do we support facial recognition as a way of law enforcement? Is it legal to scrape information from social networks? Does making your profile public also implies that you give permission for your data to be saved and used for AI training purposes?

Next to the negative sides of web scraping, there are also interesting possibilities of using these methods. You could for example scrape this blog and analyze the word usage or identify trends and topics of interest over time. Web scraping also enables new innovations that aggregate data from multiple sources in creative ways creating information that was not available before.

The New York Times has an article going more into depth in the background of Clearview AI. Click here to read the full article or listen to accompanying podcast if your interested.

I would love to hear your opinion about the subject of web scraping and the usage of facial recognition. If you like to have a more technical background on how to implement web scraping techniques please let me know in the comments.

 

Sources

Hill, K. (2020, January 18). The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

Matsakis, L. (2020, January 27). Scraping the Web Is a Powerful Tool. Clearview AI Abused It. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/clearview-ai-scraping-web/

 

 

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Is facial recognition for pigs going to improve Industrial agriculture?

18

September

2020

5/5 (3) One of the most unsustainable practices of modern civilisation is industrial agriculture. The industrial farming industry is accountable for the abuse of land, animals, and natural resources. Indeed, the animals that are slaughtered for consumption have often had a miserable life in factory farming. They are reduced to objects that represents a certain economic value and the natural needs of animals are often not met. This causes them to exhibit all kinds of stress and unnatural behaviour. 

 

Pig facial recognition: solving the problem of miserable animals

To combat the problem of miserable animals, Chinese tech companies see opportunities in pig facial recognition. This type of facial recognition works the same as human facial recognition. The only difference is that it is recording details of eyes, snouts and bristles of pigs instead of humans. Besides identifying pigs, facial recognition camera can detect the movements of pigs and can monitor if they are eating or becoming lethargic. All this information is stored in an individual file for every pig. These data files also include pigs their age, weight, breed, exercise frequency, and other indicators or its health. Next, the AI platform can then use all of this data to repeatedly keep an eye on the pigs as well as trigger an alarm if it is sceptical about the health of the animal. In this way, early diagnosis can be made.

 

Is it really possible to assess a pig’s wellbeing based on visual cues? Yes, pigs happen to be known to be extremely expressive and can communicate with each other by the use of facial expressions.  As a matter of fact, both SRUC and UWE Bristol their research have already shown that the animals can signal their intentions to other pigs using different facial expressions. There is also evidence of different expressions when they are in pain or under stress.

 

Only in the future?

Pig facial recognition is not just in the future. One of the first Chinese companies to unfold such a system is the start-up Yingzi Technology. Their system works by scanning each pig’s individual face by the use of a smartphone (see the picture below). The animals can still be identified if they are moving in a herd.  Following up, the recorded data then is investigated by a mobile application that uses deep learning algorithms. The organisation suggests that the system can match and update pigs their data profile in only a few seconds.  Moreover,  Yingzi Technology is not the only one that is trying to give pigs a better life,  currently Alibaba is utilising  “Agriculture Brain”. This is an AI platform that employs AI-supported facial and speech recognition (plus other IoT technologies) to help farmers surveil pigs.

 

Screenshot 2020-09-14 at 17.19.02

 

Not all problems are solved by pig facial recognition 

Despite these new technological innovations, it seems unlikely that it solves all the problems of industrial agriculture.  Even if the welfare of farm animals increases with this new technology, our current global food system is still responsible for one-third of global greenhouse emissions and it completely depends on fossil fuels for transportation and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Facial recognition for animals can give some animals a better life, but we really need to come up with something better to ameliorate industrial farming. 

 

The question is, is it even possible to significantly improve the unsustainable practices of industrial agriculture with technology? Or do they just need a completely new business model?

 

Sources:

https://spie.org/news/facial-recognition-spots-happy-pigs?SSO=

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/year-pig-heres-facial-recognition-pigs/#:~:text=Start%2Dup%20Yingzi%20Technology%2C%20one,(see%20the%20picture%20below).

https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/factory-farming-is-killing-the-environment/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-35905-3

https://www.pigprogress.net/Sows/Articles/2019/3/Facial-recognition-for-detecting-pig-emotions-406445E/

 

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Albert Heijn, the Dutch Amazon Go?

24

September

2018

No ratings yet. Today, 24th of September 2018, Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in The Netherlands, enabled cashier- and cash free shopping in two of their stores. With a ‘tap-to-go’ card or Android app their customers can scan the barcodes of the products they would like to buy. After 10 minutes the purchased amount will be withdrawn automatically from their linked bank account. This means the customer doesn’t need to wait in line for a cashier or spend time paying at a self-scan machine, thus will spend less time in the store.

This concept makes all of us think about the Amazon Go concept, but the technique Amazon uses is completely different compared to Albert Heijn’s solution. Amazon Go uses cameras with computer vision to scan which items has been taken from the shelf by which customer. The computer vision system is trained with deep learning technology, which enables the cameras to recognize the distinguishable patterns in products and people. Interestingly enough, the cameras also see when a customer puts a product back on the shelves, whilst not using facial recognition. When I first read about Amazon Go a few years ago, I thought that this futuristic idea would disrupt the retail industry and their industry leaders. Fortunately, I am proud to see that ‘our own’ Albert Heijn responded on time with a different technology, whilst still reaching the goal of consumer convenience.

Now, as a Business Information Management student, it is interesting to see what opportunities come with this way of cashier- and cash free shopping. I will start with the following possibility: if customers scan their products while standing before a shelf, the retailer could better understand customer in-store behaviour and monitor consumer traffic. This enables retailers to not only offer personalized discounts or promotions based on product preference, but even based on in-store behaviour. In the future, they could offer an extra discount for a product you just put back on the shelf or use in-store promotion screens who recognize your tap-to-go card and adjust their promotion to your preferences and the shelf you are standing at.

I am sure that Amazon and Albert Heijn didn’t use the only technologies who could enable cashier-and cash free shopping. Also, I believe that there are way more possibilities enabled by cashier-and cash free shopping. Let me know in the comments which technologies and opportunities you would relate to cashier-and cash free shopping!

Sources:

https://nos.nl/artikel/2251836-zonder-af-te-rekenen-de-supermarkt-uit-ah-begint-met-kassaloos-winkelen.html

https://dzone.com/articles/impact-of-big-data-analytics-in-retail-industry-te

https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/in/Documents/CIP/in-cip-disruptions-in-retail-noexp.pdf

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/amazon-go-seattle-uk-store-how-does-work

https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-go-heres-a-look-at-the-impact-on-human-jobs-retail-innovation-amazons-bottom-line/

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