Thread

500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive

518 points · 305 comments · ilamont

jwally · 1790684914 · focus · HN ↗
I was thinking about this with flock cameras the other day...what's our actual ROI? Was the world horrible before and these initiatives are going to close a monster crime gap or is this just a giant fishing expedition ... just because?
1. pj_mukh · 1790688931 · focus · HN ↗
  Can we cut to the bone a little bit? The recent crime panics are not about a partner assaulting their live-in partner or a random home burglary. There is no real "ROI" to be had.
  It's purely about the unease of living in chaotic cities, the random stabbings, the shoplifting, the visible homelessness etc. Flock is the stopgap here.
  Partly the "feeling" of chaos is just that, a feeling, driven significantly by algorithmic feeds feeding us every random crime from around the country 24/7. Husband murders wife in a murderous rage? No one hear's about it. Mentally ill man murders a woman on the train in a Tier 2 city, immediate nationwide breaking news.
  The other part though is a real dissolution in how we take care of our mentally ill. Complex topic [1].
  I think complaining about Flock is complaining about the symptom. Today we dogpile on Flock to get it cancelled, tomorrow the public will reach for something else. We have to fix the underlying disease, which is a combination of the two factors above.
  [1]: <a href="https://time.com/6265241/america-care-of-mentally-ill-people/" rel="nofollow">https://time.com/6265241/america-care-of-mentally-ill-people...
  1. nemomarx · 1790689288 · focus · HN ↗
    Some of this stuff does feed into the perception though. Flock provides more footage for media to clip, for example. Or you can look at Ring cameras and people getting worked up about joggers or neighborhood kids because now they get alerts and have neighborhood chat groups, etc.
    BobaFloutist · 1790705790 · focus · HN ↗
    It really ticks me off that Rings cameras are pointed at the sidewalk.
    When questioned about owning them, people like to talk about security, convenience, porch package theft, etc, none of which require the devices to have a field of view extending beyond the property line. And yet, somehow they just conveniently contribute to a police-searchable database of everyone that walks past their house, with no recourse.

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