A big biometric security company in the UK, Facewatch, is in hot water after their facial recognition system caused a major snafu - the system wrongly identified a 19-year-old girl as a shoplifter.

  • cheesepotatoes@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    No, it wouldn’t be. The base circumstance is the same, the software misidentifying a subject. The severity and context will vary from incident to incident, but the root cause is the same - false positives.

    There’s no process in place to prevent something like this going very very bad. It’s random chance that this time was just a false positive for theft. Until there’s some legislative obligation (such as legal liability) in place to force the company to create procedures and processes for identifying and reviewing false positives, then it’s only a matter of time before someone gets hurt.

    You don’t wait for someone to die before you start implementing safety nets. Or rather, you shouldn’t.