OT: driver license renewal

I'm in BC and I have to renew in a few months. It's not a problem to renew if 1000's of criminals don't look like me. I don't want the cops waiting at my door asking me time consuming questions every week.

For an example of abuse of automatic identity recognition see scenes from Minority Report movie.

What is the risk?

It's for the file of leftists we need to round up as soon as Obama is out :-) ...Jim Thompson

If there were a file of rightists to be rounded up, Jim Thompson would not be on it - too far out of touch with reality to constitutue any kind of threat (except perhaps to himself).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Probably approximately zero. All Jamie has to do is to continue to wear his spectacles, since apparently the recognition software is thereby defeated.

Facial recognition looks great on teevee crime dramas and even better in a vendor's PowerPoint presentation but, as far as I've seen, its performance in real world situations is pretty poor.

As in many other cases, when P(threat) is very low and P(false positive) is non-trivial then virtually every "identification" is a non-threat contact and lots of resources are wasted chasing ghosts.

The city next door spent boo-coo bucks on a system a few years ago. Didn't help anybody except the salesmen.

Utter stupidity. Assume for the nonce you were in a group the government does not like and they take fotos or whatever for recognition purposes. You would BE WEARING the glasses then, and therby make "recognition" virtually useless. Then again,nobody in government knows how to think, much less do any logical reasoning...

Hi,

The risk is mainly feature creep, ie. maybe 10 years ago people wouldn't accept licenses would require you to take your glasses off so they could have the ability for facial recognition, but now almost everyone accepts doing it (in BC), possibly only because no one has organized against this particular feature creep, as I think most people do not like the idea but have no choice and need a license.

So in 10 years maybe they will have a new fingerprints or retinal scan feature, and for a Canadian provincial driver license. But the data will most likely be stored in USA too.

cheers, Jamie

It's creepy cause you don't know how this impacts your future.

After 911 our fears of terrorism have risen. It's easier for some to give away their identity - to be known in the system in the hope that they are ruled out as terrorists, criminals, vandals or just known for bad breath.

The value of the privacy of face picture has declined. People put their pics on facebook, myspace, youtube, Google profiles, dating sites and websites. Heck the founder of wikipedia has his face on every page. It'll be silly if your face is all over the net yet a license picture at BC drivers services creeps you out.

What is troublesome is being unable to determine if identity technology will be used for mostly good or mostly evil. The less one knows about you, the less they can harm you. The more one knows about you, the more you can be approved.

Generally, people want you money more than your face.

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I read that here in the US at least four states won't even allow you to smile when you get your driver license photo taken. Reason: They claim to compare past and present photos to prevent identity theft (and who knows what else), but big smiles fool the software.

So, I guess, if you're fundamentally opposed to all this "big brother" stuff, take up employment as a clown. I guess becoming a politician would work just as well.

Maybe yours have. I haven't felt any more terrorized since 9/11 than before. ...but then, I consume very little corporate media, so I'm not constantly seeing the ridiculous hand-waving.

I find it more useful to check out those sources who make a point of debunking the nonsense (e.g Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting

...and you're FAR more likely to die on the way to the airport than to die once you are aboard the plane.

...and the nutballs who *have* been stopped were stopped by PASSENGERS. TSA is worse than useless.

Depends on whether you're talking about the crony capitalists or the fascist authoritarians--though those have co-evolved.

I have no love for TSA, however your statement is not only ridiculous but unprovable unless you can show how many problems were stopped by security before they happened. Good luck on that one.

John S wrote:

If the Security Theater folks had ANYTHING to show, it would be on EVERY corporate outlet. That kind of stuff makes for great ratings and more agency funding. So where are the "results"? There are none because it's a sham. Read your Orwell.

How can they show anything that didn't happen as a result of their efforts?

So, you believe Orwell is an authority today? A pity.

John S wrote:

Y'mean like detaining US senators because they're "on the list"? Y'mean like letting the panty bomber on an aircraft after his father told the US Gov't that he was dangerous? Pffff.

If someone with an agenda wanted to, he could easily demonstrate what a ridiculous waste of money the TSA monkeys are. He could walk into the *LOBBY* area of an airport and detonate several hundred pounds of high explosive in his luggage. He wouldn't have to pass thru any "security" to do it and he'd kill MANY more than if tried anything on board a plane.

The fact that it *hasn't* happened shows that that bunch has already moved on. So it's generals fighting the last war and all that. All that NEEDED to be done was to secure aircraft cockpit doors

--and that was done a decade ago.

...but it's obvious that the high-school-dropout mall cops and the big spenders who are giving hideous amounts of money to the corporations for unproven and dangerous gear which has no requirement to be periodically tested/calibrated have YOU snowed.

This is all about PROFIT and CONTROL. You have already been convinced that the expensive junk is useful. You already accept that you are a sheep to be herded. Where you are concerned, it's already Game Over.

Certainly true in the USA. Not true in the UK - we have had IRA terrorists blowing up our city centres and pubs for decades.

Given that the Heathrow security from time to time pulls US passengers carrying live ammunition in their pockets I am inclined to think that the US approach to airport security is much closer to street theatre than it is to effective diagnostic techniques applied effectively.

The presently deployed face recognition software is pretty ropey with of the order of 1% failure rate particularly if you are for example out of breath and stressed whilst late and running to catch a plane!

Someone believed the slimy salesman's patter and did not adequately test their real life performance before putting them into service. They were focusing on the overhead savings they could make by replacing salaried workers with unpaid machines.

Regards, Martin Brown

=A0 =A0 ...Jim Thompson

=A0 =A0| =A0 =A0mens =A0 =A0 |

=A0 | =A0 =A0 et =A0 =A0 =A0|

=A0|

=A0 =A0 =A0 |

So...he wears his glasses all the time and they want him to remove the glasses for the face recognition picture. Am I the only one that thinks there's a flaw in that logic?

Yep. BC must be an ignorant state. In AZ (and also US for Passports) you must be in a "natural" state, no forced smiles, etc. ...Jim Thompson

Logical next step is to ban spectacles (you can always use contact lenses). And no public smiling...

Simple, practical answer? For the baseline, they prefer (note PREFER) to have no glasses on, that might obscure your basic features. In reality, it probably doesn't really matter, but it increases the accuracy of the system a few percent, so they require the baseline picture to have no glasses. You haven't developed any similiar big systems?

Charlie

I would think that facial recognition systems could easily enough "add"=20 glasses and other items such as hats and facial hair to increase the=20 likelihood of a match. It's probably harder to remove the items = accurately=20 using software methods, especially if the glasses distort or hide some=20 facial features.

Paul=20