Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face—and Tried to Run Facial Recognition on It | Leaked records reveal what appears to be the first known instance of a police department attempting to use faci…::Police around the US say they’re justified to run DNA-generated 3D models of faces through facial recognition tools to help crack cold cases. Everyone but the cops thinks that’s a bad idea.
“As long as we can pin it on someone…”
This is an interesting idea. Absolutely worth looking into. But I wouldn’t approve it to use on active cases until the false positive rate was below 1:1000.
IMO, the only valid use of DNA-based face generation would be to rule out existing suspects, not to label random people as suspects based on their faces alone.
I hate to say it, but there’s a better way to eliminate suspects based on our current DNA technology.
If all your suspects are black, and the dna is from a someone with Irish heritage, it’s probably not any of the black people.
Trying to reconstruct someone’s face seems really inaccurate, considering I have the same DNA as I did 10 years ago, but I’ve had high school friends who have walked passed me without recognizing me because I lost a lot of weight and grew a beard since they last saw me.
As much as racial profiling is shitty, it’s way easier to tell someone’s ethnicity from dna than it is to reconstruct their whole face. You can then use that to narrow down a list of suspects, similar to how we used to use blood type analysis before dna was a thing.
While I’m as skeptical as you are, I don’t think people recognizing you is a good metric.
A better test would be if an AI trained on your younger face could accurately and reliably identify you with your adult face.
The way AI and human face recognition work are different from each other. An AI may be able to identify you based on markers that human recognition doesn’t account for
AI does a scary good job of recognizing age different photos sometimes. I’ve set up a couple self hosted photo management apps that contain such functions (photo prism and immich) and had surprising results. After feeding it a number of recent digital pictures I went on to put on n a bunch of old scanned photos from 10+ years earlier, and with a reasonably good accuracy it was able to dicern the difference in baby pictures between two kids to match with the older pictures.
Archive link to bypass the paywall.
Edit: on reading the article, I’m curious to know if anyone has actually gotten arrested or charged with a crime based on an algorithmically generated face which is then scanned though facial detection software.
According to a report released in September by the US Government Accountability Office, only 5 percent of the 196 FBI agents who have access to facial recognition technology from outside vendors have completed any training on how to properly use the tools. The report notes that the agency also lacks any internal policies for facial recognition to safeguard against privacy and civil liberties abuses.
How is this allowed?
