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

518 points · 305 comments · ilamont

  1. blitzar · · focus · HN ↗
    16 deployments for 6 months at rail stations - they must have been off 99% of the time to only scan 500k faces.

    For scale 500k people is 2 days of Liverpool Street Stations daily average

    1. mrweasel · · focus · HN ↗
      A lot of those are going to be the same people day in and day out, the article says 500k faces, not people. You also have to filter out those people where the cameras aren't getting an image good enough to scan.

      The article doesn't say, and I haven't seen the cameras, but it's not like you're getting every single person parsing through those stations.

      But, yes, the numbers seems low.

      1. matteason · · focus · HN ↗
        BTP say [0] that "the images and biometric data of those who don’t cause an alert are automatically and immediately deleted." - if that's true, they shouldn't be able to tell that it's the same faces being scanned multiple times so it has to be 500k total scans rather than, say, 500k unique faces across 2 million scans

        [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.btp.police.uk&#x2F;police-forces&#x2F;british-transport-police&#x2F;areas&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;about-us&#x2F;facial-recognition-technology&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.btp.police.uk&#x2F;police-forces&#x2F;british-transport-po...

        1. cortesoft · · focus · HN ↗
          You could still delete while maintaining the ability to tell if a face has been seen before, by using some fingerprinting + one way hash function
          1. Rumudiez · · focus · HN ↗
            that’s not deleting the data then. making people play Only Connect to parse out weasel phrases is akin to lying by omission. they say the same thing at US airports which is why I still opt out of the face scan at security. of course they keep hashes of the image and its features otherwise what’s the point
            1. cortesoft · · focus · HN ↗
              It is deleting data, but you are right that it isn&#x27;t all the data
              1. Borealid · · focus · HN ↗
                The sentence says &quot;the [...] data [...] are automatically and immediately deleted&quot;. It does not say &quot;some of the data are automatically deleted&quot;. It would be a staight lie to delete some, but not all, of the data and then issue the statement that &quot;the data are deleted&quot;. This is not an ambiguous case or weasel-wording: it is an unambiguous falsehood.

                If you have two coins and you spend one, you cannot truthfully say &quot;I spent the coins&quot;. The definite article &quot;the&quot; means all of something you have in this usage, not a single member of a class of something you have. It would be true to say &quot;I spent a coin&quot; or &quot;I spent some of the coins&quot;.

                1. autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
                  The sentence says &quot;...the images and biometric data...are automatically and immediately deleted&quot;. It doesn&#x27;t say that the information they learned by using the images and biometric data that they collected, such as your name, location, the timestamp etc is being deleted. Who you are and where you were at what time isn&#x27;t an image and isn&#x27;t your biometric data.
                  1. Borealid · · focus · HN ↗
                    The data necessary to determine a face had previously been seen are biometric data.
                    1. no-name-here · · focus · HN ↗
                      If the name&#x2F;address is already in the “already seen” list, wouldn’t that be enough to determine the face had already been seen? Or are you saying the name&#x2F;address should be considered biometric data?
                      1. Borealid · · focus · HN ↗
                        We have no reason to believe a given face is linked to a person&#x27;s name by this system.
                2. cortesoft · · focus · HN ↗
                  It isn’t exactly like coins, because data is both singular and plural.
                  1. Borealid · · focus · HN ↗
                    If we&#x27;re going to be precise, the word &quot;data&quot; is plural and its singular is &quot;datum&quot;. But treating it as a substance noun does not change the argument I made in any way - &quot;I gave away the water&quot; does not mean &quot;I gave away some of the water (and kept some for myself)&quot;.
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