<story><title>81% of &apos;suspects&apos; flagged by Met&apos;s police facial recognition technology innocent</title><url>https://news.sky.com/story/met-polices-facial-recognition-tech-has-81-error-rate-independent-report-says-11755941</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdietrich</author><text>...which makes an 81% false positive rate remarkably good. You&amp;#x27;ve massively whittled down your list of potential subjects and made the job of humans immeasurably easier. An 81% false positive rate would be nightmarishly awful if this system served as judge, jury and executioner, but it&amp;#x27;s incredibly useful as a means of improving the signal-to-noise ratio of surveillance data.</text></item><item><author>whatshisface</author><text>Bayes&amp;#x27; theorem strikes again. Even if the odds of a false positive are only 1 in 1000, if 1 in a million are criminals then out of 1000 flagged people only 1 might be a criminal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>e40</author><text>That would be true if wiggling out of the net of justice when you are innocent were not so expensive.  There are a lot of poor people who can&amp;#x27;t afford the system you speak of.</text></comment>
<story><title>81% of &apos;suspects&apos; flagged by Met&apos;s police facial recognition technology innocent</title><url>https://news.sky.com/story/met-polices-facial-recognition-tech-has-81-error-rate-independent-report-says-11755941</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jdietrich</author><text>...which makes an 81% false positive rate remarkably good. You&amp;#x27;ve massively whittled down your list of potential subjects and made the job of humans immeasurably easier. An 81% false positive rate would be nightmarishly awful if this system served as judge, jury and executioner, but it&amp;#x27;s incredibly useful as a means of improving the signal-to-noise ratio of surveillance data.</text></item><item><author>whatshisface</author><text>Bayes&amp;#x27; theorem strikes again. Even if the odds of a false positive are only 1 in 1000, if 1 in a million are criminals then out of 1000 flagged people only 1 might be a criminal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonhohle</author><text>Except for the people who are falsely accused and may be hassled in the process.&lt;p&gt;Around 15 years ago I would often schedule last minute flights while traveling for work. When I did, I almost certainly would receive an enhanced screening from TSA. I was the false positive, and when traveling on tight schedules, I was not amused at the frequency in which I was considered suspect (in contrast to the treatment from the airlines, who treated me like royalty). Of course, TSAs true positive rate is 0%.</text></comment>