Only 28? Shouldn't it have been 435?

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Amazon’s Mugshot AI Says 28 Members Of Congress Are Known Criminals

News 6 Hours Ago
BGR

Identifying a criminal can be tricky for law enforcement when they’re on the hunt for a wanted person, which is why many agencies have begun to lean on technology for help. Facial recognition systems have gone from a goofy sci-fi plot device to real-world use, but they’re not always super accurate.

In a new series of tests by the American Civil Liberties Union a whopping 28 members of Congress have been matched by Amazon’s Rekognition facial identification software with mugshots of known criminals. The software, which is reportedly already in use by a number of law enforcement agencies, apparently has some very serious limitations, especially when used with its default configuration.

The ACLU organized its test by taking 25,000 publicly-available police mugshots and then asking Rekognition to compare those images to photos of all 535 members of Congress. When the results came in, 28 lawmakers had been positively identified as matching the faces of known criminals.

“The members of Congress who were falsely matched with the mugshot database we used in the test include Republicans and Democrats, men and women, and legislators of all ages, from all across the country,” the ACLU explains. “The false matches were disproportionately of people of color, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus.”

The software is quite affordable to use, and the ACLU says that the entire test only set them back $12.33. However, while its accuracy would seem to be less than stellar, Amazon has since come to the defense of its facial recognition system, telling The Verge that the ACLU used the default configuration rather than tweaking the settings to decrease the chances of a false positive.

“While 80% confidence is an acceptable threshold for photos of hot dogs, chairs, animals, or other social media use cases,” an Amazon representative said, “it wouldn’t be appropriate for identifying individuals with a reasonable level of certainty.” Amazon instead recommends that law enforcement agencies use a higher confidence threshold when attempting to identify wanted individuals. The company says it advises at least a 95 percent threshold.

That said, what are the chances that every law enforcement agency is actively customizing the system’s settings and not just using the default configuration? If the Rekognition system is used in its default configuration, and if law enforcement officers put too much trust in it, it could result in lots of innocent people being questioned or detained for crimes they had no part in.

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Only 28?

My reaction, exactly.

Hopefully they get the bugs sorted out in v2.0. Too many slipped the filters.

Rekognition... Interesting name.

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The members of Congress who were falsely matched with the mugshot database we used in the test include Republicans and Democrats, men and women, and legislators of all ages, from all across the country,” the ACLU explains. “The false matches were disproportionately of people of color , including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

ACLU, go figure. I’m sure these guys think this was a roarin* success.

I think they misplaced a 0 and needed to add it on the back end of 28.

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Originally posted by zoom6zoom:

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Only 28?

My reaction, exactly.

I'm in this crowd

28 is even more misleading than it sounds, as that was actually just 28 hits on Maxine Waters.

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Originally posted by 12131:
Only 28? Shouldn't it have been 435?

Oh yeah.

Members of Congress and criminals are rather redundant terms.

I might as well come clean. There may be a mugshot of me from my misspent youth floating around the cyber.

Ignoring the fun we can have with the hits on congresscritters for a moment, does it need to be 100% accurate to be useful?

Let's say the cops get a piece of video with a perp on it, and the need to put a name to the face. They run it through this software against a driver license picture database, and get, say, 25 hits. That gives them a number names they can manually work in other ways to narrow it down the real perp. I think this would be useful.

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“The false matches were disproportionately of people of color , including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

It couldn't be anything to do with the problems of photography and dark skin tones, I'm sure it was computer racism.

There are apt to be similarities in facial features between people.

^^^^egregore...that cracked me up ^^^^

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Originally posted by cas:

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“The false matches were disproportionately of people of color , including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

It couldn't be anything to do with the problems of photography and dark skin tones, I'm sure it was computer racism.

Or disproportionate representation among actual confirmed criminals...

Maybe it has to do with them all looking alike>?

OK, I did duck for cover. Just wait until the courts begin to accept the computer hit as evidence, just like they do for DNA now. Fun times to come.

Which 28 were they?

Elections are coming up, ya know.