The failure mode is incorrect detections. If the automated system says person 1 from camera 1 is the same as person 1 in camera 2, and then extrapolate out to 10,000 people and cameras, and then don't get it wrong. Because the BBC is never going to let you live it down if the person they arrested for stealing kinda sorta looks like the guy that actually did the stealing.

▲

andyjohnson0 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Jean Charles de Menezes never got as far as being arrested. The police observed him enter an Underground station, followed him onto a tube train, and put seven bullets into his head.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jean_Charles_de_Men...

▲

mattlondon 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Perhaps facial recognition would have saved him? It's not like humans are 100% accurate as this demonstrates

▲

andyjohnson0 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Or perhaps facial recognition would leave even less time for decision making.

Someone who's face resembles that of a known terrorist was detected entering the station 8 seconds ago. He's carrying a backpack and will be on a crowded platform in 37 seconds time. There are armed police in the ticket hall. What do you do? Only 31 seconds now...

	▲	snozolli an hour ago \| parent [-]
		What do you do? Walk up and place him under arrest. He might have a bomb. He might have a trigger for it, or he might have a dead-man's switch. It might detonate and kill you along with bystanders. That's a risk you take. Unless you know with certainty that he has a bomb and does not have a dead man's switch, you don't just take his life because you're concerned about what-ifs. It's no different than cops killing a man because he was holding a wallet, which they imagined might be a gun (e.g. Amadou Diallo). Police need to stop pretending that they exist within fiction, where the outcome is known by the author. Just because you're afraid of something doesn't mean it's an actual threat. Since 2001, there's been a real uptick in confusing fear and suspicion for evidence and knowledge.

▲

2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

▲

raverbashing 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

These are different problems, with different sensitivity/selectivity (and fail modes)

It's one thing to identify a person from a database, another from camera 1, then camera 2 etc. My guess is the latter has a much lower false positive rate