Defense of Amazon's Face Recognition Tool Undermined by Only Known Police Client

Re:Defense of Amazon's Face Recognition Tool Undermined by O... by b_tterc_p on Monday February 04, 2019 @09:54AM (#19076774)

Unless the cops aren’t exactly virtuous actors... which they frequently are not. You can’t assume they care if the results are good.

It is another tool to justify police action with a low true positive rate.

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Re:Defense of Amazon's Face Recognition Tool Undermined by O... by pdkl95 on Monday February 04, 2019 @12:11PM (#19078143)

> It is another tool to justify police action

"We were following the AI leads" is the perfect excuse for parallel construction[1] (evidence laundering).

If Rekognition supports limiting the search to the people in a specific town (or other small group), it might be possible to force someone to be somewhere on the list of matches. That would give bad actors the perfect tool for manufacturing "probable cause".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

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Re:Defense of Amazon's Face Recognition Tool Undermined by O... by Spivak on Monday February 04, 2019 @02:50PM (#19079959)

If parallel construction is in your threat model then does the existence of a slightly better face search database really matter?

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Re:Defense of Amazon's Face Recognition Tool Undermined by O... by craftinator on Monday February 04, 2019 @03:22PM (#19080233)

Damn, beat me to it

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Re:Defense of Amazon's Face Recognition Tool Undermined by O... by muttled on Monday February 04, 2019 @01:36PM (#19079190)

I've seen how capricious some can be with their work tools. I dated a girl whose dad ran a background check on everyone she dated without their knowledge or consent. I was 19 at the time and it seemed wrong, but reporting one of the higher up police officers in my town who now knew all my details seemed like a freedom limiting move.

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