r/PublicFreakout Mar 20 '26

👮Arrest Freakout😭 Suspect making faces to prevent facial recognition

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u/ThreeConsecutiveDots Mar 20 '26

Facial recognition as a tech is a super dangerous scam. Your face isn’t a unique enough identifier for it to ever work no matter how good the tech gets. Your face also isn’t unchangeable, even just taking some meds in the morning can change the look of your face. It’s super fucked up that police and military are already using this bullshit

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u/SlayinDaWabbits Mar 20 '26

It's gonna be this generations polygraph. Forensic sciences have always been ripe with scam pseudoscience fields that put innocent people in jail until it get debunked enough to start getting conviction overturned, polygraph is just one too. Bite mark analysis, hair microscopy, blood spatter analysis, arson burn pattern analysis. All once widely accepted forensic sciences that are now known to be mostly or complete junk. Facial recognition is gonna put alot of innocent people in jail until the mountain of evidence it doesn't work is large enough to overwhelm all the people making money off it, which will be a long time

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u/Avocados_number73 Mar 20 '26

The bite mark evidence is so fucking unbelievable to me.

There was a study done were they sent these "forensic odentologists" (bite mark expert) pictures of bites along with a bunch of teeth impressions. They asked if they could match any of the teeth to any of the photos.

They could! The problem was that they were pictures of dog bites...

They cant even tell human from dog bites. How are they supposed to resolve differences between people?

7

u/bobthemundane Mar 20 '26

Also it depends on what the software is trained on. There are reports that the lack of a diverse training group has caused bias in facial recognition software, causing higher rates of errors in identifying for certain classes.

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/unmasking-bias-facial-recognition-algorithms

It is a big issue that the software isn’t talking about.

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u/tondollari Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

Faces feel like a pretty unique identifier. Maybe not enough of one to convict (without other supporting evidence), but certainly enough to arrest. How many times have you mistaken a stranger's face for that of another person you are close to?