Facial recognition false positives lead to license revocations in Massachusetts

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/07/17/man_sues_registry_after_license_mistakenly_revoked/

by ilamont • 15 years ago

65 34 15 years ago

The problem is similar blood tests. Even a seeming small false-positive rate can result in massive disruption to the lives of many people. Run a "99.9%" accurate test on a million-person database - if a false-positive isn't just an annoyance but screws up a person's life, you've screwed up the lives of 1,000 people.

m3koval• 15 years ago

If I am not misinterpreting the article and, "his driving privileges were returned...after 10 days..." is the time between receiving the letter and having his name cleared, I am impressed that the government moved that quickly. Most of the interactions I've witnessed with the DMV, albiet not nearly as serious, have taken an order of magnitude longer to clear up.

That being said, it is ridiculous for the state to revoke a drivers license with no warning. This situation could have been avoided if the state merely gave the alleged fraudsters a few weeks to present the required documentation before revoking the license.

Overall, I found this to be the most concerning quote in the article:

“A driver’s license is not a matter of civil rights. It’s not a right. It’s a privilege," she said. “Yes, it is an inconvenience [to have to clear your name], but lots of people have their identities stolen, and that’s an inconvenience, too."

With this mentality, who knows what future "inconveniences" await Pennsylvania residents in the name of security...

pasbesoin• 15 years ago

These days, the companies involved are probably protected from such, but I'm put in mind of some of the successful slander lawsuits against credit reporting agencies for their errors.

In the absence of a better, more rational process, it would be nice to know that an injured party can walk away with some hundreds of thousands of dollars from such contemptuous companies (and I wouldn't mind seeing the State dinged, as well, although that's probably even more difficult). (I fully support punitive judgment in addition to compensation, in the face of such activity as it is described.)

The State is actually probably more at fault, but I can't help imagining a certain amount of collusion with firms seeking to sell them this business.

"Guilty until proven innocent" really seems to be taking hold in the U.S. Shoving the work off onto private contractors further aids in this regard, I can imagine. I'm also put in mind of states' use of private, commercial databases to make an end run around their own statutory limitations on data collection and use.

Anechoic2• 15 years ago

You probably right that 10 days is "quick" for a government, but ten days is a long time to be without a license if your work requires a valid license.

Similarly, the eleven day notice (well less considering mail travel time) is BS. I travel a lot for business and two+ week trips are not out of the ordinary. There should be at least 30 day notice.

paulgerhardt• 15 years ago

So while it appears Massachusetts does collect fingerprints, from this article it would seem that the software does not or is not very effective at cross referencing them with photographs.

Similar case from 1903: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2011/04/29/mistaken-identity-2... which "became a strong argument in favor of the new science of fingerprinting."

Anechoic2• 15 years ago

So while it appears Massachusetts does collect fingerprints

For driver's licenses? Not as far as I know - I've never been fingerprinted for a MA license.

yaakov342• 15 years ago

The article tries to make it sound like this is some kind of a computer-age cyber-problem, but in fact, any face recognition technology, including the Mk. 1 human eyeball and brain, is going to have a certain false positive rate. Actually, the article says the pictures are already reviewed by humans before it's decided there is a match.

The real problem, in fact the only problem in my opinion, is the "guilty until proven innocent" approach of the state. They are sending letters which state that the license has already been revoked! If they sent a letter saying "we strongly suspect fraud, you must verify your identity in 30 days", I would not have a problem with that, as long as they have a decent match.

Instead, we get talk about how "driving is a privilege". Guess what - working for the state is also a privilege, and people who abuse the citizens who pay their salaries should lose it.

jseliger• 15 years ago

Part of the problem is that the state controls the means of living anything resembling a normal life, and if it decides to abuse its power, its employees are seldom all that interested in your problem. Megan McArdle had a similar DMV snafu not too long ago: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/01/car-succ... .

yaakov342• 15 years ago

Hopefully there will be some movement on increasing accountability for state workers. It is not impossible - I heard that New York City is ending its infamous "rubber rooms" in which bad teachers are paid to do nothing for years and years, because it's unrealistically difficult to get them fired.

harshpotatoes• 15 years ago

I think in this situation, more arguements should be made that driving is not a privilege, it is an unfortunate necessity of modern life. What percentage of Americans could work without a car?

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

Don't most Americans live in cities, now? Dallas has awful public transportation, but hypothetically, you could use it to get to work - it would just turn your 30-60 minute commute into a 2.5 hour adventure.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

What percentage of Americans could work without a car?

Whatever percentage of Americans who could find housing within walking distance of work.

Okay, yeah, if the answer is that short, it sounds like a flippant response to a serious question. But what I mean to illustrate here is that we always have to deal with policy trade-offs. There are a whole set of policies all over the United States that zone neighborhoods of houses to be separate from places where factories or stores or other workplaces are found, and those POLICIES then make cars seem indispensable. But if cars are indispensable, it becomes all the more urgent to make sure everyone driving a car is driving safely, so it becomes more urgent to figure out how to keep unsafe drivers from driving. This is the conundrum we get into in a society that doesn't plan actively to decouple employability from owning and operating a car.

Basis for knowledge for my comment: I have lived for six years of my life, in two separate three-year stays, in a country where I never drove (even though I had a driver license there). Even during much of the time I have lived in the United States, I have commuted from home to work on foot, or by bus, or by bicycle. It can be done. What trade-offs society accepts in making it more or less easy to obtain paying work without investing in a driver license and car first depends on the political process, of course.

arthurgibson• 15 years ago

The RMV in MA is basically their own governing body, they have no attachment to the courts and can and will do as they please. Many of the decisions solely rest on whether or not the person you talk to is having a good day.

ldar152• 15 years ago

FTA: Registrar Rachel Krapielian said that protecting the public far outweighs any inconvenience Gass or anyone else might experience.

“A driver’s license is not a matter of civil rights. It’s not a right. It’s a privilege,’’ she said. “Yes, it is an inconvenience [to have to clear your name], but lots of people have their identities stolen, and that’s an inconvenience, too."

This person is why I'm a libertarian.

to3m• 15 years ago

If the driving licence were a right, on what basis would this be the case? Do you think this would bring down the cost of driving? If so, why?

I'm having a hard time believing that this kind of deregulation would be helpful, but maybe it would? Perhaps if private road providers were more common, there would be a wider range of options. Can't see that flying though... people seem to like to drive without paying for the road at point of use...

smashing2• 15 years ago

People are driving on the road paid for by their taxes. And freedom of travel by automobile is a liberty not a right because it can be taken away, as this article appears to document, unjustly or in criminal matters, justly.

a-priori• 15 years ago

At 1500 suspension letters per day, 365 days per year (optimistic...), 1000 false positives per year is a 0.1% false positive rate.

I think that's a fairly good rate if a false positive only meant that a human had to verify a person's identity, but not low enough to warrant automatically suspending a person's license.

tedunangst• 15 years ago

"The software then displays licenses with similar-looking photographs - those with two or more images that have a high score for being the same person. Registry analysts review the licenses and check..."

A human did verify the false positives.

derleth• 15 years ago

For a nontrivial number of people, saying that "driving is a privilege, not a right" is equivalent to saying "being able to remain employed is a privilege, not a right".

What's the right way to deal with this?

mcherm• 15 years ago

Speak to your state legislators. Ask for a rule mandating an opportunity to present evidence to an impartial adjudicator before any license suspension.

ruby_on_rails• 15 years ago

Or you can not waste you time and do what will actually result in the required change: Either make a campaign contribution to a person or persons capable or changing the law or have a lobby group do it for you at a similarly significant cost to you. Even if you manage to outbid the private contractors this year (which is highly unlikely), do you seriously think you can out bid the largest defense contractors year after year, while they are busy raking in $14.5 billion every year from the 37 other states participating?

That is the only "legal" way to change laws in the US.

Or we can call that battle what it is: lost. Spend your time and effort (and money) and go invest in those security contractors so that you will have a nest egg waiting if ever you are out of work as a result of losing you license for 2weeks+.

Or to put another way: "Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" is all conditional upon what matters to people with money and power and which methods they use to ensure they continue to have money and power.

cheez• 15 years ago

> An antiterrorism computerized facial recognition system that scans a database of millions of state driver’s license images had picked his as a possible fraud.

> Last year, the facial recognition system picked out more than 1,000 cases that resulted in State Police investigations, officials say.

That's a lotta terrorists.

parrisj2• 15 years ago

Part of this problem is their using software L1. L1 has terrible performance but their EULA states that you can't refer to them by name in Academic papers. So their always refereed to anonymously as the"Commercial Competitor".

younata• 15 years ago

That's both brilliant, and dumb.

With that in their EULA, they are essentially stating: "We know that our software sucks, but to prevent others from stating that we specifically suck, we're going to forbid academic papers (which are, for the most part, impartial studies) from mentioning us by name, thereby putting doubt over whether it's us or some other facial recognition product."

I need to make a note to actually read EULAs from now on, because I want to get my money back if I ever buy software with that in the EULA.

jackpirate• 15 years ago

This sounds fishy. IANAL, but what would be the possible repercussions of mentioning their name? Having your license revoked seems like the maximum possible punishment, and would this really stop a tenured professor?

parrisj2• 15 years ago

I'm not sure of all the details. I recently organized a face detection competition. And we included a couple of commercial face detectors for comparison. My boss informed me that since we purchased them under an education discount program we had to refer to them as "Commercial Competitors".

My view might be slightly skewed since the basis of the competition was to make it hard (low light, noise, occlusion, pose, atmospheric blur) and the commercial competitors are trained on easier datasets (close range, well lit, uniform pose and expression). While L1's system would perform better on driver's license images false positives are going to occur in any system. So when it flags a person it should be regarded as something fishy might be going on instead the oracle says this person is a terrorist who buys alcohol for teens, lock him away!

techiferous• 15 years ago

"We send out 1,500 suspension letters every day."

Assuming a single person does not receive multiple suspension letters, and estimating the number of business days in a year to be 250, that's 375,000 drivers receiving letters per year.

Using 4,645,705 as the number of drivers in Massachusetts[1], 0.8% of drivers get suspended per year. That seems high.

[1] Source: http://www.statemaster.com/graph/trn_lic_dri_tot_num-transpo...

Facial recognition false positives lead to license revocations in Massachusetts

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