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<p>&nbsp;A police department that relies on facial recognition software has &nbsp;admitted that it has a false positive rate of over 90 percent. What this &nbsp;means is that nearly every person that is marked as a suspect by this &nbsp;system is actually an innocent person who will be interrogated by &nbsp;police, or possibly worse, because they were wrongly identified by this &nbsp;faulty technology.&nbsp;</p>
<p>According to a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/05/welsh-police-wrongly-identify-thousands-as-potential-criminals">report</a> &nbsp;from the Guardian, the South Wales Police scanned the crowd of more &nbsp;than 170,000 people who attended the 2017 Champions League final soccer &nbsp;match in Cardiff and falsely identified thousands of innocent people. &nbsp;The cameras identified 2,470 people as criminals but 2,297 of them were &nbsp;innocent, and only 173 of them were criminals, <strong>a 92 percent false positive rate</strong>.&nbsp;</p>
<p>According to a <a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/377980664/South-Wales-Police">Freedom of Information request</a> &nbsp;filed by Wired, these are actually typical numbers for the facial &nbsp;recognition software used by the South Wales Police. Data from the &nbsp;department showed that there were false positive rates of 87 percent and &nbsp;90 percent for different events. Further, it is not clear how many of &nbsp;these suspects were actually nonviolent offenders. The South Wales police have responded to these findings by issuing the following <a href="https://www.south-wales.police.uk/en/newsroom/2000-positive-matches-reached-with-our-identify-facial-recognition-technology-in-past-9-months-with-over-450-arrests/">statement</a>:&nbsp;</p>
<blockquote>“Of course no facial recognition system is 100 percent &nbsp;accurate under all conditions. Technical issues are normal to all face &nbsp;recognition systems which means false positives will continue to be a &nbsp;common problem for the foreseeable future. However since we introduced &nbsp;the facial recognition technology no individual has been arrested where a &nbsp;false positive alert has led to an intervention and no members of the &nbsp;public have complained. In relation to the false positives this is where the system &nbsp;incorrectly matches a person against a watch list. The operator &nbsp;considers the initial alert and either disregards it (which happens on &nbsp;the majority of cases) or dispatches an intervention team as the &nbsp;operator feels that the match is correct. When the intervention team is &nbsp;dispatched this involves an officer having an interaction with the &nbsp;potentially matched individual. Officers can quickly establish if the &nbsp;person has been correctly or incorrectly matched by traditional policing &nbsp;methods i.e. normally a dialogue between the officer/s and the &nbsp;individual. “</blockquote>
<p>The Wales Police don’t see a problem with targeting random people for &nbsp;search and interrogation, but these findings are raising obvious red &nbsp;flags for privacy advocates.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Silkie Carlo, the director of a group called Big Brother Watch, is launching a campaign against facial recognition this month. <em>“These figures show that not only is real-time facial recognition &nbsp;a threat to civil liberties, it is a dangerously inaccurate policing &nbsp;tool. South Wales’ statistics show that the tech misidentifies innocent &nbsp;members of the public at a terrifying rate, whilst there are only a &nbsp;handful of occasions where it has supported a genuine policing purpose,”</em> Carlo said.&nbsp;</p>
<p><a href="https://thefreethoughtproject.com/fbis-facial-recognition/">Similiar numbers</a> &nbsp;were released by the FBI in 2016, with the agency also admitting that &nbsp;their facial recognition database consisted of mostly innocent people &nbsp;since they use drivers license and passport photos for their searches, &nbsp;in addition to mug shots. In fact, there is a <a href="https://thefreethoughtproject.com/study-5050-police-face-recognition-database/">50/50 chance</a> that your picture is in a facial recognition database.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Also in 2016, another <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/08/facial-recognition-technology-racial-bias-police">study</a> found that facial recognition software disproportionately targeted people with dark skin.&nbsp;</p>
<p>Facial recognition is becoming a part of everyday life whether people &nbsp;realize it or not, especially in major cities. The rollout of these &nbsp;systems has been mostly accepted by the general public under the &nbsp;pretense that they are highly sophisticated tools with a very high rate &nbsp;of accuracy. But in reality, they seem to just be an expensive and &nbsp;elaborate excuse to search innocent people.</p>
<p>Police departments across the world are always expanding their facial &nbsp;recognition databases and putting cameras in every possible place they &nbsp;can. Just last week,&nbsp;The Free Thought Project <a href="https://thefreethoughtproject.com/facial-recognition-may-be-coming-to-a-police-body-camera-near-you/">reported</a> that police will soon be scanning everything in their path with facial recognition software installed in their body cameras.&nbsp;</p>
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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
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<p>My name is John Vibes and I am an author and researcher who organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference. I write for numerous alternative media websites, including The Free Thought Project @tftproject and The Mind Unleashed. In addition to my first book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Timeless-Renaissance-John-Vibes/dp/1518828612">Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance</a>, I have also co-authored three books with Derrick Broze @dbroze : <a href="http://theconsciousresistance.com/reflections-on-anarchy-and-spirituality/"><em>The Conscious Resistance: Reflections on Anarchy and Spirituality</em></a>, <a href="http://theconsciousresistance.com/finding-freedom-age-confusion/"><em>Finding Freedom in an Age of Confusion</em></a> and <a href="http://theconsciousresistance.com/manifesto-of-the-free-humans/"><em>Manifesto of the Free Humans</em></a></p>
<p>I just won a 3-year-long battle with cancer, and will be working to help others through my experience, if you wish to contribute to my medical bills, consider subscribing to my <a href="https://www.patreon.com/Johnvibes">podcast on Patreon.&nbsp;</a></p>