Isn't falsely accusing a person of theft in public Slander?
this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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The article notes (along with names of shops—vote with your money, if you're in the UK), that the ID system being used has the usual racial bias (has a hard time with anyone who isn't white) and also a gender bias (has an easier time IDing men). And that the provider was careful not to mention this until after people started complaining.
I suspect the claimed "99.98% accuracy" is counting out of all faces scanned, which is a bullshit way to make the tech look good. Most faces are not marked as shoplifters in the database. A system that literally does nothing would probably still have greater than 99% accuracy.
What we really want to know is what percentage of reported matches are accurate, and I bet it isn't anywhere near 99%.
I had to try to educate sales people what such numbers actually mean.
With fingerprint readers, there are false positives (your finger is accepted, although it should not), and false negatives (your finger gets rejected although it should accept). The chances for both look small, but if you have 700+ people in the system, the chance of a random person to be accepted as one of the 700 is about bigger than 50%. And there was a big chance for any valid user to be logged in as someone else.
Pretty much this. A 0.02% error margin when there are tens of thousands of visitors per year, means it's almost guaranteed to have errors.
99.9% ^700 = 49.6% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^3466 = 50% chance of no errors occurring.
99.98% ^23000 = 1% chance of no errors occurring.
Fingerprints as username??
Funny how even the things "AI" is okay at (pattern matching within a certain margin of error) still can't be used properly.
Those using it don't care if they get false positives, so it's working as far as they're concerned.
Soon on TERF Island:
They're gonna have AI cameras to detect if you "went to the right gender bathroom", and if AI decrees that you've entered the wrong one, they'll flag you as a "sex offender", then activate the terminators posted at the store to "eliminate sex offenders"
Reminds me of the US No Fly List.
No idea how your name gets on there. Impossible to remove. Every attempt to fly is a humiliation
The list of people so dangerous they can't be allowed to fly, but too innocent to arrest.
But don't worry social credit systems where you're barred from public transport is so dystopian only the Chinese do it.
This only way this is true is because we barely have any public transportation in America anymore.
You can lose your DL in the US very easily
I am not going to suggest, encourage, applaud and condone arson as a protest, because that is illegal.
These shoppers getting booted really steamed me. Individual stores, individual systems: that’s one (uncomfortable) thing. Sharing the data means disenfranchising. And when they go out of business someday the data of the whole country is sold to the highest bidder.
Wish we could fix it legislatively so they don’t say “terrorism everywhere, need camera everywhere”. (One imagines that Flock CEO would love us to constantly wear bodycams…)
btw on the internet gotta wonder if someone’s gonna read that & be like “oh let’s do it with 20 people inside”
If it does happen the company has no one to blame but themselves, because when you abuse people like this there will be a backlash, it's to be expected
Backlash only means something when the entity getting backlashed is somehow hurt by that backlash.
When the company's immune to accountability, consequences, & responsibility, then .. backlash changes nothing.
The difference-in-leverage between citizens vs the companies doing this is now sooo huge, that there's no significant chance of accountability or correction ever happening, in many countries.
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That's a possible life sentence if you get caught. Assuming there's even a single person in the building.
I guess UK and US governments viewed Minority Report as something to strive for rather than a cautionary tale?
Well, they started with Orwell's 1984, but that was 42 years ago and you can do so much more with technology now!
First the US isn't mentioned in this article. Second this is NOTHING like Minority Report. Your comment is dumber thana bucket of hair.
I never said it was? It's called a comparison? Sorry I didn't know invasive police surveillance was a good thing.
High powered lasers will burn out camera sensors. They can do it from a significant distance too.
They called him the Mall Han Solo...
On the one hand, right to refuse business. On the other hand...
This means that due-process has to be made a constitutional-right, for criminal AND civil cases..
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