However, the dirtiest thing is to use all kind useless evidence and intimidation techniques to scare otherwise innocent people into taking plea deals. This whole guilty plea saga is a disgrace to the justice system.
Recordings of interrogations that feature them also show that they tend to come along with other appeals to ethos ("this is doctor so-and-so...") and hand-wavey forms of intimidation like touting their "seriousness" or "efficacy".
Anything that requires a person to "interpret" its output is likely not very deterministic, and so likely not very reliable for establishing... anything. This is akin to palm reading or graphology.
Unfortunately, revealing to the police in such a situation exactly how foolish they look by getting behind such a device isn't exactly advisable either!
That's not the only place where they can be used, and cause damage.
Video evidence of me entering the store, using the atm, and immediately leaving the store? That was not evidence to them because I failed the polygraph.
I take an exceedingly dim view of any police department that uses a polygraph in any capacity. They've been proven time and time and time again to be worthless as a tool, but police still use them. The rough equivalent is using tarot cards as a tool for solving crimes.
Eye Witness Testimony for example, aside from the fact the people are terrible at recall anyway and High Stress causes memory problems above and beyond the normal memory issues of the human mind, it is very very very easy to manipulate a victim either directly or indirectly to identify the "target" no necessarily the actual criminal
police "drug" dogs are another one, it is more or less a blank check to probable cause for a search.
Then there is one people never even question because it is the foundation of the legal system, the good old finger print... It always amazes me that with DNA it is always probabilistic, "1 in 4 billion people will have this same DNA" but with Finger Prints is an absolute, Match no match.. Call me crazy but I don't think that position is scientifically valid
They don't even need to do that. They can just lie to you. "Hey, your buddy just totally ratted you out in the other room, you better tell us your side of it if you don't want to take the rap for everything"
They can tell you to just say you were there, and they'll go easy on you. You lie and say you were there, now they have evidence that can actually lock you up, even if you are a random person off the street.
For example, in this case police threatened to arrest the mans wife if he didn’t confess to killing his child (a new trial was ordered): https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2014/02/20/police-can-lie...
But they went on to say it was still acceptable to lie to suspects... I imagine this murky area of the law will eventually say that police cannot lie to suspects. The Central Park Five is mentioned in that article and is a blatant example of police lying to coerce testimony and then putting innocent children in prison.
in any other context these tactics themselves would be illegal, and i am firm believer that you can not enforce the law by breaking, and that the police should NEVER how the power to do things the public can not
It is not clear to me that a prosecutor's office which has demonstrated that it is not interested in justice, would have cared about the color of skin in the beginning. They're after low-hanging fruit and maybe establishing facial recognition as 'proof enough'. A poor, white ex-con who can't afford a lawyer might just take a plea deal. I think the point of possible divergence is when the guy lawyer-ed up.
Hanlon's razor is hinted at in the later discussion, i.e.
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" (at least, both the words incompetence and malice appear under discussion)
But, I prefer to apply a different rule-of-thumb:
"incompetence is strongly equivalent to malice"
https://nypost.com/2017/12/21/chinese-users-claim-iphone-x-f...
Dunno what the technical reason is, but if there was one, I bet it went something like this:
v1: sales 'engineer' says: "Our FR product works great on light skin but terribly on darker skin so we've largely disabled that" and made zero sales.
On v2 (version2 or vendor2), they just dialed up the acceptable false positive rate, said "ya, it works on everyone, no problem!" and sold sold sold!
Edit: I'm placing this higher up in the thread for more visibility, but, for those interested, here are some tips for photographing people with darker skin tones: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/discover/article/10-tips-for...
If that were true, that would just mean photography-based systems are currently not good enough to work across any population that includes dark skinned people. Society should not, and cannot collectively wrings hands and say "Oh, well, it's really because of the photons" and go ahead make use of a provably unjust technology.
Thankfully, modern phone cameras can take great high dynamic range photos as well as low-light/night pictures - I'm confident to say capturing dark-skin is a much easier bar to clear (dynamic range can be much smaller if you only care for a person's face). The fact that good-enough technology is not used (or mandated), and the solutions providers & their clients decide on cheap(er) sensors with exposures that only work well with light skin tones... well, that tells a story by itself, doesn't it?
The technology to photograph is biased to better capture white skinned people.
It even says so in the very article you link to:
“A lot of [the design of film and motion technology] was conceived with the idea of the best representation of white people.”
Improve the technology!
I also resent your implication that I meant anything other than that. I never claimed it was the fault of black people, or that there was anything any individual black person could do about it. I think you should check your bias here.
There is a deeply prevailing western misconception that systems that work for white people should also work for everyone else. When it invariably doesn't, it's always the fault of the minority. Funny how that is.
This is less true in digital photography, given the level of control over post processing one has. However, the end result is the same: it take more effort to produce a faithful photo of a black person than a white person, for reasons completely out of the control of either the photographer or the subject.
That is all that is meant by the statement I made. Indeed, it is literally the entire content of the statement I made. I would defy you to quote where I blamed black people, or even implied there was even anything any black person could do about this unfortunate reality.
Edit: Incidentally, literally everything I've said here about the difficulties of faithfully photographing people applies to darker skinned people of any ethnicity, such as Indians or Afro-Arab people. None of this is racist in the sense that it implies anyone is lesser than anyone else, just that that's the way current technology works.
No it's not.
Shadows are harder to notice on black skin for example.
And it's important to improve the tech and try to make it work fine for everyone
But then you'll need to first realize that by default the tech is sometimes going to be broken for a group of people.
Otherwise how can you be aware about that there's a problem to solve.
And, just to continue the anecdote where the camera turned my friend green, y'all know it's not like anybody said "Hey, $FRINEDS_NAME, can you just be less black, or something?" In fact, what we did was all laugh together (including our friend, the subject of the photo), joke a little, and, IIRC, take a digital portrait.
Or, maybe the fact that there are relatively few black people in tech means that the developers of these algorithms don't even notice that there's a bias to correct for, whether it's in the input or not.
uncannily ? The images aren't exactly high-res, but that's definitely two different guys. The first two photos (color one at the top and b/w mugshot pair) are the same guy, but it should hopefully be obvious that the guy in the drivers license photo is someone else. Especially to the police, since we're comparing low-res scans while the feds may have had a larger copy potentially in-hand when looking at the guy they arrested.
You may just be looking at the wrong photos from the article - in which case yes, that guy looks uncannily like himself!
The subtleties of the human face that change from person to person are things like cheekbone position, jawline, head shape, eye shape/size/placement, etc. They're what enable someone to "recognize" you in a human-to-human context, sometimes even with a facemask on. They're part of how you distinguish yourself in the mirror from other humans also.
However, if a significant portion of one race is indistinguishable for a given observer, they haven't done enough observation. Certainly not enough to arrest someone based on their "observations". A relative inability to identify facial subtleties in member of other races is a known phenomenon and has been studied - incidentally making it the perfect candidate for law enforcement training. Seems that wasn't the case here in TFA, unfortunately.
For reference, I am a different race from these guys, and my SO is a different one still, but I don't think it takes a particularly keen observer to distinguish between the two mens' faces.
If the police make an arrest based on facial recognition alone they have essentially given up doing police work and are just following suggestions that a computer makes. If that's what society chooses to use for justice then fire all the police officers and employ some minimum wage workers to do the job instead.
Those two men truly do look a lot alike, unlike the two men referenced in the article. Even so, there's no way looking like someone should imply anything at all. After all, I bear somewhat of a resemblance to a "moderately well known, but only a real fan would recognize him on the street"-level actor, and I'd really hate to get picked up if he decided to go off and do some cocaine or something.
I would hope police are better at this sort of thing then me.
Also i would hope better quality images would be used, these are terrible quality.
Are you sure you’re not comparing the wrong photos? I’m confident if you saw these two men stand side-by-side, you would not say that they look uncannily alike, unless you’re visually impaired.
I agree with someone else’s comments about the importance of observation. My brother and I worked at the same startup. I was full-time. He was an intern. After several weeks, another intern was some how confused and thought my brother and I were the exact same person. I mean sure, siblings do look alike. But some how she didn’t notice that one of us has light brown skin and the other has dark brown skin, one of us is a whole 3 inches shorter, one of us is a whole 40 pounds heavier, one of us wore glasses and the other didn’t, one of us has a full head of hair while the other one is balding in several spots with a receding hairline, etc you already see where I’m going with this. Yet for 3 whole weeks, she came to work M-F and thought we were the same person? It was an open office environment and we all sat in one large room.
<INSERT REASONABLE STATEMENT ABOUT TIMNIT GEBRU AND THE IMPORTANCE OF ETHICAL AI BUT GET DOWNVOTED TO OBLIVION>
Please don't post like this comment here, though. It only hurts and makes things even worse.
The thing that helps is to share some of what you know and some of your experience, so others can learn. A small minority of commenters is going to react badly, repeat stock objections, downvote etc., and respond with flamebait. But most of those comments will eventually get downvoted, flagged, and/or moderated. That's the best we can hope for on a public forum where anyone can easily create an account.
More importantly, the rest of us are genuinely interested. If you would please follow the site guidelines by ignoring the flamebait (other than to flag or downvote it, and email us at [email protected] in egregious cases), and by sharing information with curious readers when you're so inclined, we'd be grateful.
However, I don’t agree with you that it’s a small minority doing these things. I’ve been reading (and commenting) on HN daily since 2010 (under different accounts), so it’s very difficult for me to accept what you’re saying as fact.
Also, did you see my other comment about how I feel about the guidelines lol? (It might have been on a different article.) No offense, but I’ve seen your replies on other articles where you ask people to follow the guidelines and my immediate response is always something like “But why? What this person said makes sense.” For example, the whole “don’t tell people they didn’t read the article” rule...
I don’t mind being flamed by the “small minority” of racist and sexist commenters here. I’m used to it. I’m also used to people expecting me to “behave” myself.
Anyway, based on facts, Timnit Gebru is right. Jeff Dean lied (possibly unintentionally) through omission. Megan Kochalia should be fired.
I'm not asking you to "behave yourself". I don't look at your comments that way at all. I'm asking you to treat HN as a community that you're part of.
I think you're underestimating the good faith in readers here. It is an unfortunate consequence of HN's non-siloed structure (i.e. there's no filtering or selection of who one's subscribed to—just one big room) that bad actors, even when they are a small minority, create an overwhelming and shocking experience of the community being that way. It is not objectively true. Actually the opposite is true: this community is, for a place that includes millions of people, actually relatively functional. (Note that word 'relatively'. Obviously it's still dysfunctional. The question is how do we nudge it into less dysfunction.) I've written about this here if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.
Re making things worse: there are, unfortunately, many ways to make HN worse. I'm not saying you're doing all of them, just one of them. You posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25565642 5 times—that's obviously not cool, regardless of how badly you were provoked. When I say that, it is in no way a defense of bad actors. I'm just trying to prevent this place from degenerating deeper into hell, or at least to slow hell down a bit.
So like I said, I don’t mind calling out racist and sexist people on HN. You should try it some time. I already told you what you could do to nudge this community in the right direction. But again, I already said PG wouldn’t allow this.
Is there any data to back up your claim about this “small minority”? If I run a sentiment analysis on the most “charged” posts, will the analysis indicate that there’s a “small minority” of racist and sexist people on HN?
Sure, no one’s going to be racist or sexist on the millionth hate post about Electron or AMP. I understand that. Is that all you’re saying?
Have you seen how toxic the Blind app community is? There’s an overlap between that community and this one. Maybe it’s just the exact same “small minority” everywhere... (Sarcasm)
FWIW, to be clear, it’s not that I lack faith in only HN readers. My ideas/truths about the world extend past this community. HN comments are just a symptom of something much larger: a diseased system being upheld by people who just want to see the good in everyone and vomit rainbows.
You're completely welcome here as long as you want to participate as a community member and use the site in the intended spirit—which, by the way, has nothing to do with "behaving oneself", "just seeing the good in everyone", or "vomiting rainbows". It has to do simply with wanting an online discussion forum that's actually interesting, that has some value for curiosity, as opposed to melting down into a circle of hell. Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25565642 are not interesting and encourage worse from others. This is the way that internet communities poison themselves. We're trying to stave that off, at least for a while (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). The internet call-out culture where people shame and abuse each other is not sustainable here.
I haven't seen Blind, only a few mentions here and there. When you say "there's an overlap between that community and this one", you're assuming your conclusion. I don't see any reason to believe there's much overlap.
If you want your ideas about how to "nudge this community in the right direction" to be taken seriously, one thing you shouldn't be doing is posting in a way that is utterly destructive of the community. That can't possibly be the right direction. Places like this are fragile and we need to work together to prevent this one from becoming hell. Scorched earth is not interesting, and if HN turns into that, what good does it do anyone, or the world? It's bad enough that racism, sexism, and other bad things appear here—indeed it's awful, and it's also inevitable, because anything that exists in society is going to show up in a large, open internet forum like HN. If you think we don't care about that, you couldn't be more wrong. But that doesn't make it good to burn the commons to the ground, which is unfortunately what most of your recent posts point towards.
I'm not sure why you bring up PG, but he hasn't had anything to do with operating HN for many years.
You’re also disregarding the fact that I left several non-trollish comments on that post. It’s ok to call people out.
You’re just like the rest of them.
Anywho this is a prime example of why you need humans that aren't involved in a situation to be in the loop to augment the facial-recognition algorithms. Enable them to view clean, high-res, zoom-able versions of the source images and then have them make the final call. Heck, if you're worried about bias, assign the task to a panel of people from various ethnicities, or maybe just to people of the same ethnicity as the involved person.
Btw, I'm not saying they look the same. I'm saying at a casual glance or quick look, or grainy-surveillance footage level, they do look strikingly similar.
Another factor though we may not be considering in general regarding facial-recognition is identity theft. I've dealt with that sort of thing before, and if you're not careful the government might get really confused as to who the "actual" person is, and who was the one that stole the identity is. Again, not the case here, but it is something that police need to consider.
I've learned that each phenotype has to be weighed differently than the people you grew up around the most. Completely different phenotypes and patterns often times.
But I really wonder if the same officers that dealt with the suspect also questioned the innocent victim in this case - it seems like this wouldn't be the case (and gross negligence on their part) - those people should've been able to tell them apart (instead of solely relying on the picture they got from the license). I think this is what the judge wanted instead of just the facial recognition "evidence" (which eventually led to the charges being dropped) - something like, oh I don't know, the fingerprints from the abandoned vehicle? Basic investigative work, perhaps?
Like I said - either the officers that dealt with the suspect didn’t deal with/look at the victim, or else they’re blind (or trying to meet a quota).
All I know is that I'm highly skeptical that this white guy would suffer the same fate, even if I were to have a similar criminal record. Facial recognition seems to be the polygraph for a new century. But unlike a polygraph, it mostly false positives only for dark-skinned people. While I'm not quite ready to allow my cynicism to let me think it is an intentional feature, I question how many are demanding a fix.