This patent application also suggests that Amazon has no plans to stop at identifying people based on their faces. The company anticipates targeting an arsenal of other biometrics […]
I can see how this will go over here in Europe…
A suspicious person walks up to an expensive looking house in a “better off” part of an Austrian town and rings the doorbell. The Amazon-made doorbell immediately scans the suspicious persons face, irises, fingerprint and DNA and sends it to Amazon’s servers. The servers decide that the person is suspicious, and alert the police.
A police car containing two officers arrives at the scene some time later. The police officers get out of their car, walk up to the suspicious person and greet them.
The suspicious person says, "Oh I am so glad that you are here. I have a complaint to make. I have been filmed, fingerprinted and DNA-analyzed without my prior written consent, and I suspect that the data has been transferred outside the EU.
This is where my perfect-world story ends. What happens next is that the police politely explain (<- yes I mean that, it’s not a euphemism) that taking GDPR complaints is not their job but have to be made directly to the Data Protection Commission. By the time the complaint is being passed on to the third different European data protection agency without anything being done, the home owner has replaced their Amazon doorbell with an iBell.
In some communities, fines are assessed against the businesses/residences by the local law enforcement for false alarms after some number between zero and two grace false alarms. The fees could be set high enough to make false alarms financially painful.
It’s amazing to read about all the many, many products based on face recognition that either got to market or were in their final stages before someone realized they simply couldn’t see people with dark skin.
I was reading a game developer’s post-mortem of a Kinect-controlled Xbox game where they realized, during the public demo stage, that it didn’t work for people with darker skin. They couldn’t admit that was the case, and were hoping to fix it before release, so they were sweating through audience participation events, hoping only white people wanted to try it and frantically trying to distract viewers from noticing that dark-skinned players were being totally ignored by the control system. Both grotesque and hilarious.
If the product had a wide roll-out, and the police were being flooded by false alarms (especially given that the “alarm” was merely an indication that someone “suspicious” might be somewhere in the area), I don’t think it would matter how lucrative the false alarm fee was (especially since it would be difficult to prove it was a false positive, unlike with a burglar alarm). They’d have to ignore them because they couldn’t do anything else.
I am reminded of the old story of using a neural network to detect (I think) military tanks in photos. Turned out the pictures with and without tanks had been taken in different lighting conditions, so the software just triggered on overall lightness in the image.
Similarly, cultural biases in the training data for the doorbell could lead to the underlying algorithms being a lot less complex than even the developers think they are, and completely useless in the real world.
My favorite situation along those lines is the system that was set up to identify skin cancer. What it ended up being was a ruler-detector, since skin cancer was usually photographed with a ruler for size determination, whereas non-cancerous skin conditions were not. It’s both ridiculous yet also seems fairly predictable…
Yeah, these kinds of facial matching systems seem to have all the problems of neural networks - cultural biases and training set issues making the results worthless - on top of the core problems of the base facial recognition systems being made by, and for detecting, only white people.
what if the suspicious person is there at your request to deliver your pizza or weed or amazon package?
plenty of religious people come to my door, and they all look and act suspicious as f*ck, i don’t think they are breaking any laws and the i’m sure the police wouldn’t appreciate being phoned.
before i have my morning coffee i’d probably set this thing off getting the paper.
seems awfully police state of you amazon.
alexa is a snitch isn’t she?
snitches get stitches alexa…
This is so much meh. What I REALLY want is a doorbell that recognizes salesepeople, canvassers, and evangelicals, then simple does not operate the bell when pressed.
