London police to roll out facial recognition CCTV

[Anomalocaris]

In China they don’t just use CCTV for this.  Apparently they’ve developed clear goggles with projection display for police officers that contains a camera and an air data link.   As the officer looks around what he sees is relayed by camera and data link to some central computer, which applies facial recognition and identify the people the policeman sees, and sends back detailed ID and data on each person, which are than projected onto the officer’s google so he sees each person around him with a floating data bubble over their heads.   Suspects and what they are suspected of are automatically identified. 

Replace the policeman too and the journey to sky net shall be complete.

It would be cool if it were real.

Oh, it is....

Chinese police goggles

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It might have detrimental effect based on demographics.
Facial recognition software tends to be good at identifying individuals belonging to the dominant group in the region where they were developed. ie, western software tends to return a higher proportion of false positives for people of African or Asian descent. The reverse is true of Chinese software which gets confused by European features.
The group most consistently misidentified by software regardless of region is women.

That kind of problem is caused by insufficiently intensive effort to hack everyone else’s facial recognition database.    Once everyone’s data has been hacked by everyone else, the bias will go away.