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> What happens with false positives? What's the recourse?

The same recourse when you're false-positived by a witness, I'd assume: get a lawyer. Personally, I'd probably place my trust in facial recognition (possibly not this system specifically, though) over human eye-witness testimony, based on my understanding of human psychology and its vulnerability to incentives.

It's not as dire as it's sometimes painted. MD attempted to apply mass-ticketing with intersection cameras, and it was found to violate the state Constitution because the use of a car in committing a crime didn't imply the owner was behind the wheel at the time.

If the technology is unreliable, we call it out as unreliable. What society is going to need is people well-versed in the ways the tech can fail to be good, not a doom-sayer's disregard of the ways the technology can help.




It's not the same thing as a false positive by an eye witness. Eye witness testimony is well known to be prone to false memories. Hence there needs to be corroborating evidence. I think people are too readily willing to accept a technological identification. I can see a claim being made that the computer is wrong only once in a billion cases without proper justification. There are people today who still think lie detectors are reliable.

I can see a time where the presumption of guilt is assumed simply because the technology says so. Clearly we are not there yet and possibly never will be. I hope that issues will be sorted out before the technology gains widespread use.


Sadly they never seem to learn about it despite the risks being known of treating them as magic wand auto-wins instead of pieces of evidence. From the absolute criminal garbage of bite mark identification junk science, DNA science using tests skimpy enough to false positives as their databases grow and they misuse what it statically enough for 'eliminating any non-matches in the pool of suspects' to pools of millions including vast numbers of non-suspect and non-victim samples which basically guarantee a conviction of an innocent statistically via lack of precision.


I agree about the risk. It is incumbent upon we who know better to sound a loud and long cadence about the unreliability of technology and the risk of false-positive.




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