this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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This I'm ok with actually? The airport is already a place you expect to have to give your real identity to be there, and in the case of unfortunate people who share a name with a watchlist person this technology helps them travel normally without hours long interviews at every stop, I think mainly because the TSA agent can say the computer ok'd it instead of having to stick their neck out personally.
I guess the problem would be if the new scans of your face collected by this software are connected to your identity and/or travel data and then exported to third parties who didn't already have that info.
Because by itself it isn't really giving the TSA any new information. They have your id and your boarding pass. The government already knows who you are and where you're going and this bill doesn't stop them acquiring or keeping that information.
Facial recognition is bad for a multitude of privacy reasons. But, the biggest reason though is it is also wrong, and often trained with biased data (which is almost impossible to completely remove).
Sorry, this needs more clarification! Do you mean "intent recognition" where some AI, trained with biased data, will assume that some brown person is upto no good? Or do you mean that they will misidentify black and brown people more often due to how cameras work? Because the latter has nothing to do with biased data.
Both in fact. Training data for things like this regularly mix up minority people. If Omar is a upstanding citizen, but gets his face mixed with Haani, known terrorist, Omar gets treated unfairly, potentially to the point of lethality.
For "intent recognition", I agree. A system trained on data of mostly black committing crimes might flag more black people with ill intent.
But for the sake of identification at security checkpoints, if a man named Omar - who has an eerie resemblance to Haani the terrorist - walks through the gates, then they probably need to do a more thorough check. If they confirm with secondary data that Omar is who he says he is, then the system needs to be retrained on more images of Omar. The bias was only that they didn't have enough images of Haani and Omar for the system to make a good enough distinction. With more training, it will probably be less biased and more accurate than a human.