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A comment on Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of Congress with Mugshots. Parent comment

Re:Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of C... by notyourwork on Thursday July 26, 2018 @11:40AM (#17618320)
Threshold is a configuration property no different than a dynamo read capacity. Misconfigured properties don’t work the way you expect. I don’t see how documentation can be expected to give black and white guidance to what this threshold should be set to without having more understanding of your use case.
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Re:Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of C... by dragonwriter on Thursday July 26, 2018 @12:39PM (#17618775)
> I don’t see how documentation can be expected to give black and white guidance to what this threshold should be set to without having more understanding of your use case.

It can say exactly what the Amazon response to the Verge dismissing the ACLU test should, and, in fact, it should say that if Amazon really does have such critical, specific domain-specific recommended settings, rather than it being something made up off the cuff to mitigate bad press.

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Re:Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of C... by Kalium on Thursday July 26, 2018 @12:54PM (#17618910)
You're unquestionably correct. Amazon should spell out in clear, simple, easily accessible language what level of certainty is appropriate for what type of application, giving concrete examples at every point.

With that said, it's possible that no amount of clear guidance would have mattered here. The ACLU isn't exactly asking for better docs.

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Re:Amazon’s Face Recognition Falsely Matched 28 Members of C... by Kalium on Thursday July 26, 2018 @12:41PM (#17618789)
If you're someone with minimal understanding of the use and deployment of technologies, who knows only of this technology as something used to detect faces, then it's a glaring oversight.

If you're a researcher making a deliberate choice to use the defaults to simulate a random police officer with no real understanding of their tools, then say as much. And compare with more cautious results.

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