The ethical and technical problem of “digital snapping” with automatic recognition of the faces of wanted citizens

Unfortunately, the blog “ What am I waiting for from Google Glass ” blogger @ stalker2011x was sent to drafts. I consider, however, one of its fragments is important enough so that my counterargument does not disappear - so let me dedicate myself to a separate blog post on Habrahabr.

We are talking about this proposal, which @ stalker2011x stated:

Automatic face recognition function (and automatic search in the database of criminals / wanted people)
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Just imagine that you can help in the search for criminals, doing absolutely nothing, because facial recognition will occur automatically. And those who are wanted will have to fear the most, because even an ordinary person with Google Glass can detect them. Everything looks like this - officially download the application to search for wanted people and everything, now when the glasses detect the “face”, a picture will be taken, and if a match is found in the database of the current wanted faces, the glasses will automatically send a photo with the coordinates of the place where you need :) I understand that this may seem like interference in private life, but on the other hand, if you think such a “useful function” would be very much demanded by the special services (and not only), even without our explicit consent ...

I see two problems with this technology (the appearance of which is very likely): ethical and technical. Let's discuss them.

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The ethical problem lies in the fact that it is not very comfortable to trust the special services to replenish the list of automatically searched individuals. Especially if we are talking about the Russian special services. On the example of the “black list” of sites, we see that sometimes it is replenished with such sites, that common sense involuntarily rises (or at least lifts eyebrows in surprise). Isn't it going to be with the “black list” of people? Will he remain for a long time an analogue of the stand “the police are looking for them”, will not his appetite come with food?

In particular, one may suspect that only at first the “black list” of people will be replenished with real wanted criminals: some political activists of the opposition will soon come (moreover, if you wish, you can concoct some kind of criminal case for each of them) then the list will begin to fill up literally every sneeze. As for the “black list” of sites, it was possible to notice in March , for example, that not only the relatively innocuous text of the humorist Kaganov was added to this “black list”, where some suicidal motives could also be found, but even that blog post in his blog, where Kaganov discussed the blocking imposed on him (and in this blogogram with all his desire some kind of suicide can only be considered an epigraph, obviously extremely ironic).

And by the example of the “black list” of sites one could see the entry of sites of rather large size there - for example, they brought LiveInternet , Wikipedia , WordPress , EVE Online , YouTube . Each of them has many participants, many visitors. Arguing by analogy, with regard to the “black list” of people, it is possible (and necessary, necessary!) To suspect the theoretical possibility of total surveillance of at least numerous (even millions of people!) Categories of citizens — for example, participants in some independent trade unions, youth and opposition groups . It is also possible to track any religious groups (devil-worshipers, Satanists, anastasians, eaters and sacrifices, etc.), any national and racial groups (well, for example, Asians, or Jews, or black people; by the way, yes: so someone who, as the black-and software can be easily distinguished from the white, and after some tailor the calibration so the program can keep track of not only black, but also so-called "Cobra", not to mention the possibility confidently distinguish between separate ethnic Rupp them) - or, alternatively, chauvinists, racists yes (assuming anti-Semites - it is easy to recall that France sought to reveal their personal data, and thus can easily and become interested in the location). I think that in fact they will be watching without bias (that is, those and those). But it will turn out to be absolutely funniest (I certainly laugh sincerely, sincerely!) When someone “upstairs” finally remembers the story of how Facebook and Twitter became catalysts for the Arab spring, interested in the owners of Google Glass, and all these users of the program voluntary surveillance "will stupidly inform the special services about the movements of each other and themselves. It is not so difficult programmatically isolate from the crowd those citizens who have Google Glass on the head.

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The technical problem is much more serious, and it cannot be reduced to energy and informational costs alone (although they are also expected to be enormous). The problem of false positives will certainly be far more complicated than these costs.

Suppose that the probability of a false positive (false comparison of a person’s citizen with one of those known to the search system) is only a thousandth of a percent (unthinkably low, even unattainably low for such primitive systems as modern fuzzy cameras in Google Glass or even in mobile phones, besides working in motion and at a considerable distance from persons in the urban crowd).

We also assume that all the above ethical problems have been completely overcome, and only those people who objectively deserve tracking and even arrest (for example, some terrorists, armed mass murderers, etc.) are entered into the database. after each detection, a capture group will start working immediately. And such persons are really few. (For example, only ten or even half a dozen.)

And what? Even with these assumptions, we get a unpleasant situation: each person entered into the database creates one extra “suspected terrorist” for every one hundred thousand people due to false positives. And what does it mean? Well, you can imagine yourself, probably: in each city with more than a million people, there is a fairly high-tech population (in Russia, these are not only both capitals, but also cities such as Voronezh, Perm, Krasnoyarsk, Volgograd, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk , Yekaterinburg, Kazan ...) for every real wanted person, at least a dozen more innocent citizens appear who cannot even appear on the street without being put on their backs, facing the dirt, at gunpoint. And this, of course, is only at least; an eager group of capture in the first week (and not even the first day) will be able to arrange fractures of the limbs, injuries of internal organs, and so on and so forth.

Therefore, almost no one implements mass surveillance systems at the state level (sometimes even deliberately and actively interfere with corporate face recognition programs - we have seen this on the example of Facebook ), and if anyone implements, it is for other purposes, probably, but not for detaining potential offenders in order to prevent crime: in particular, the director of technology from the CIA announced that in London (which is considered the city with the largest number of police cameras on the planet) for all the time these Thanks to them, they managed to prevent only one crime.

Make a conclusion: these camera cameras hang there for something completely different. For example, in order to once again infringe civil rights and receive from this another slanty impulse of intoxication with power.

You can make another, more gloomy conclusion. Suppose you are a brilliant mathematician and programmer who is ready to create a new unprecedented algorithm and make such a revolutionary breakthrough in the field of pattern recognition, which will reduce the number of false positives by two orders of magnitude. Then, of course, innocent citizens described above will not appear in a dozen in each city and for each of the wanted persons, but only two or three for the whole country and for the entire existence of your system. But then, even without being a spectator of any “ Mercury Rising ” or “ Psycho-Pass ”, you still need to be aware that these individual anomalous citizens, as they are discovered, will seek to quietly eliminate the special services in order to create an idea about the integrity of the system. So you are not just a brilliant mathematician and programmer, but bear substantial responsibility for the impending killings of innocent people in the interests of national security.

Burn in hell!