UKH

In a policy, taken directly from a right wing think tank, passport and other databases are going to be linked to the police national database. The idea is laudable, to stop crime is a noble aim. In practice I can see it going wrong.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/02/uk-passport-images-database...

If we ignore the fact that the passport machines at airports, sometimes need to take a second or more scans, in perfect conditions, to verify a person. Facial recognition doesn't work so well on darker skin tones.  But AI. AI will solve all of the blurry images and fuzzy matching problems. Of course we don't have that technology, but google, amazon, snowflake and others do.

Some malcontent stated:

“Instead of ramping up the use of oppressive policing tools like facial recognition, the government should ensure that families can pay their rent and feed their children. That starts with supporting people who are struggling to survive amid a cost of living crisis, an inadequate welfare system and rocketing food prices.”

Now I know what you're going to say.

But I say, I have a picture of you in Asda stealing a bottle of Chardonnay. You can say it wasn't you, but AI. Of the millions of photos it knows about it picked out you. Why do you suppose that might be?

it weren't me.  It were Lord Frost,  he dunnit and fiddled the computer

Matching (large numbers of shoplifters) vs (giant databases) is a recipe for false matches.  I’d hazard a guess at tens of thousands of false matches a year.  Wintertree Sr had a false match on a car registration plate once; the car was in pieces in the garage but the matter still escalated rapidly.

AI or traditional methods, this is an awful idea.

When I was growing up mass surveillance and listening to communications was what the KGB & Stasi etc did for the other side. It wasn't something we were supposed to envy.

If the papers are to be believed, shop keepers have caught shoplifters only to be told there are no police available to deal with them. There is also a call to make citizens arrests, in the article. Nothing says justice, like vigilante justice. What could go wrong with that?

@Wercat, next time you're in Asda by the wine section, wear a baseball cap. Most cameras are located above head height, so a cap will obscure your features. Billions in technology subverted by a 99p hat. Just sayin...

And do you have a phone ? Or a bank card ? etc etc. My phone now says on a Monday, 23 minutes to the Depot cos it knows I go there at that time. Tesco knows I buy x,y and Z. My phone supplier knows which cell I am in at any time. CCTV sees me most of the time. Road cameras know where my car is a lot of the time. Oh and UKC knows I posted here ! Ads on the internet know I was looking at at Ryobi tools ......

I have an eclectic bag of skills and AI/Biometric recognition is an area I happen to work in at the moment. On the face of it it's a reasonable idea (pun intended, and I don't like the idea I might add) using a readily available database of official images. The reality is very different however, and it's a bit of a pipe dream. There are so many holes in the data (the photo bank) that implementing this wouldn't pass the threshold for reliable data, the matching algorithms need a lot of training, and most importantly as developers of the tools that do this sort of thing we have subconsciously built-in A LOT of bias which means that there is a disproportionate skew in terms of false positives and false negatives based on race.

This stuff is in use however and as the OP pointed out it's in the airport and it sucks, but that's just one airport experience tbh. Across major airport terminals you are being tracked and scanned and referenced to a database of nefarious types - this just happens to be for more heinous crimes than lifting a bottle of Prime from the Tesco Metro Arab states, China, and other less friendly actors have this sort of facial recognition at street level we are lead to believe though they have their images sourced from a national ID database of which no-one is exempt so at the least the data pool is good, if not the accuracy of matching - yet.

I do. And I know how the tech works. And I can decide when and how I use them.

Propaganda by people too stupid to know or too cynical to care about what does & does not work in response to criticism from the chairman of Asda  that shoplifting had in effect been “decriminalized” given the lack of resources and action that had been taken to curb it.

Really?  Have you tried not using them recently?

The fix is dead simple - more Police policing on the ground, on foot.  We had it once, we could have it again.

There are a lot of data sets out there. If you have a picture on social media, it has been collected by some company or other and used for training. If it has your name and exif data in the pic, then so much the better. Google for "image training datasets".

I expect they will bring in partners, to implement this. So an AI back end provider and an Integrator, such as Capita. They will likely to offer 'enhanced' data sets using these 3rd party image pools. When facebook, stops facial recognition due to societal concerns, you know its a tricky topic.

How will this help the police? I expect they already know the most prolific shoplifters in town. Will the police turn up at your house or work and ask about that bottle of wine? Will you get an invite to come down and answer questions at your leisure?

If people didn't need to scrape by using food banks they wouldn't shoplift or buy from shoplifters. I notice Jeremy Hunt has proposed stopping benefits for unemployed people who wont look for work. I wonder if they will turn to crime to feed themselves. If they do and get sent to jail, the costs are orders of magnitude more than their giro. £48k per year (£26k for open prison). For each person they jail, they could employ more police (or nurses, doctors etc) and still have change.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/...

I can see the solution to this being similar to the Amazon Fresh model. Basically you cannot enter a shop until you have logged your card details and ID before entry. You then shop and your card is debited as you leave.

It will probably just push the crime to robberies of shoppers outside rather than theft from the shops. But Amazon Fresh operate this model and petrol stations are increasingly dispensing fuel after you have given payment details in advance so I won't be surprised to see Supermarket "locals" going down this path.

Of course we will be able to trust these integrators with our data won't we? They won't leak data or be subject to theft will they? Oh...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/aug/04/cyber-attack-to-cost-outso...

And then the identity theft, the stalking, the harassment will start... and you can't change your face like you can your passwords.

Yes.

Does this mean all customers will be required to remove their glasses before entering a shop? Also what about the (not inconsiderate) proportion of the population who have never owned a biometric passport?

No it isn't...

"More bobbies on the beat – another part of Labour’s response – won’t help. Shops are private spaces, and shoplifters can wait until a policeman passes outside before they commit their crime. The number of extra police needed to adequately guard every shop from thieves, Newburn says, would border on the absurd. Labour wants specially trained patrollers to plug into local knowledge, which might catch the odd repeat offender but would also absorb a lot of resources. Meanwhile, forces are currently so stretched that some can no longer respond to serious mental health crises."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/27/shoplifting-out-of-co...

And are the Police the best response to a mental health crisis...? Or do they do that (and social care crises) because other services have been slashed...?

This takes us down the dreaded DNA home testing route. The outcomes are different in that you're not going to find out by accident that your mom is your sister or anything (big commercial DNA data-sets are now scraped by the police etc and it seems that DNA labs have a vested interest in buying-up companies like 23andMe so they have both the kit for taking samples at a forensics level of accuracy, and a huge dataset to reference for little or no effort - have you opted in or out of scrutiny, or is your crime of such seriousness that a positive match is a positive match irrespective of you opting in or not?) every time you upload an image to a database be it LinkedIn, FB, National ID scheme or whatever, do you tick the box allowing state actors to use your image to bolster their ML capabilities in terms of image recognition or do you stay off their grid as much as possible whilst still making use of available tech for day to day activities?

can you though ? 

There are commercial systems already available and in use which flag up 'threats' to shop security trained on a database of images of shoplifters caught in the act. There was an R4 interview with the creator/marketer of one such system recently.

jk

Simple if you ignore police resources and the election losing tax increase needed to pay for them.

That doesn’t imply I disagree with you.

It absolutely will help, it historically did, because it elevates the risk of being caught from "none at all" to "reasonably high".  The police officer doesn't have to see it happen, they just need to be able to be summoned very quickly.  Traditionally there'd be an officer or two patrolling the High Street who'd see someone running from a shop, give chase and stop them, and modern tools like ebikes would make this easier.

It's quite shocking how underpoliced the UK is compared to most other countries.  I can easily go a week or more without even seeing one.

Some of the quotes in the article are so ridiculous that I'm astonished it isn't written by Polly Toynbee, I guess Martha Gill is another one to add to the list of left wing blue sky thinkers who wouldn't know reality if it fell on them from 35,000ft.

Yet another symptom of "the race to the bottom" I guess.  We need to pay much more tax in order to fix society in lots of ways.

I'd like to think this was true, but what's your evidence for this?

That depends on the shoplifter being seen. But the main modus operandum of the shoplifter is not being seen.

Can't argue with that - I understand we have one of the lowest levels of policing in Europe.

Your prejudices are showing... 

Apparently not any more, just knowing that no one will stand in your way or hold you accountable is enough by all accounts

They can't even use my Passport photo to ID me when I'm stood in front of them holding it! Last time I went through Passport Control they ended up getting a magnifying glass out to look at the photo before finally concluding it was probably me!

You're mixing two very different requirement here.

A passport gate needs to know that you are the person in your passport. So it's going to use tight tolerances that are likely to throw false mismatches.

If you are using CCTV to search a database, the tolerances are going to be much wider. A match therefore doesn't mean you have evidence. It's just a possible match and a useful start to an investigation, at least for more serious crimes.

According to "worldometer" there are 67,794,558 people in the UK.  If you have a test with a 1 in 100,000 chance of a false positive then you can expect nearly 700 matches.

Facial recognition is far less accurate than 1 in 100k.

Which is the point being made. If one is faced with an accusation and 'evidence' that your face is the 1 in 10 million, that's a fairly weighty starting point. If it's corroborated by AI, it must be true. The burden of proof might be on you to show it wasn't you.

There is a similar issue with DNA evidence. It was supposed to be one in several million (in perfect circumstances). However, there are a lot of people who been jailed and then released based on faulty statistics.

"... the chances of the DNA coming from someone other than Jackson were 1 in 95,000. But both the prosecution and the analyst’s supervisor said the odds were more like 1 in 47."

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727743-300-how-dna-evidence-create...

Like shoplifting?

I've not heard anybody suggesting using AI and photo recognition as evidence to prosecute. 

Having made the citizen's arrest, and then called the Police only to be told "No-one is available to come out to you", what do you do then?

Historical.

Many are seen but staff aren't allowed to give chase and wouldn't get police assistance if they did.

My politics are centre left, but opinion pieces in the Graun are usually devoid of any form of reality.

Precisely.  There need to be enough Police to attend such crimes and they need to be nearby so they can attend in minutes if not seconds.  A beat copper used to be on every high street.  That needs to be the case again.

Minor crime leads to major crime.

Dude!  You need to work on your punctuation!

Though, the idea of Tesco owning nation states is amusingly _Black Mirror_

Time Trumpet has you covered: youtube.com/watch?v=lfSi0D7KESk&

"The measures have been deemed controversial by campaigners as the technology could get a match even if images are blurred or partially obscured."

There is going to be a sharpening and de-blurring process to clean the images up as best they can.

To me the technology, requires some sort of fuzzy (Bayes) matching. This might be called all sorts, depending on the sales people. But I'd go with AI, as its the buzzword of the year.

Its been floated before to combat terrorism. Now it promoted for shoplifting.

The Met claimed a 70% success rate by 2020; Fussey said it was only 19%.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/27/live-facial-recognition-...

I'm safe. 

I'm 5 stone heavier in my passport photo. 

Amusingly for you (but not them), somebody else is probably a better fuzzy match for a CCTV image of you than you are.

tbh if it's used to narrow the search, fair enough.  I very much doubt it will be allowed to be sole evidence.

But then I'm sanguine about a national DNA database, so I don't expect much support!  There's too much kneejerk about all this.

I believe one calls some pipe smoking gentlemen with an interest in medieval history.

Nothing you've said or quoted suggests they are going to use AI as evidence.

AI should be used to make investigations more efficient. It's a other tool. Why not use it.

But that's not the same as using it as evidence.

Sounds like you need to write to your mp in favour of this scheme and then rake in the cash when all the current shoplifters get imprisoned.

I made a similar argument about DNA.

But to labour the point...

No one would suggest 'image enhancement' as evidence. An enhanced image is presented that shows a person doing <thing>.

No one would suggest that AI is evidence, but 'using the latest AI technology and enhanced imaging ... ' sounds impressive. If you have any sort of connection with the world of IT, or even an interest in technology, you'll find 'AI' increasingly featuring in marketing messages. Its not cutting edge. Adobe, have a product you can buy today, that includes 'AI image enhancement'. Tin Eye and others have been doing a reverse image search for years.

This is where we will be going

https://www.cnet.com/news/politics/in-china-facial-recognition-public-shami...

and it really does work -

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-43751276