Cops Used DNA to Predict a Suspect’s Face—and Tried to Run Facial Recognition on It | Leaked records reveal what appears to be the first known instance of a police department attempting to use faci...

agitatedpotato , 5 months ago

Frenology 2.0, only difference is the science being misused to fuel it has bigger words and shinier tech.

dirthawker0 , 5 months ago

It's far too vague to be reliable. You notice how easily the facial construction became termed a "photo" as in "We have a photo of the suspect." DNA is not going to have info on hair length, facial hair, if the suspect dyed their hair, or weight.

7heo , 5 months ago

Any face mods, scars, etc will also render that totally useless. I can't wait to have to register any cosmetic surgery with the state police...

chemicalwonka , 5 months ago

The vast majority of the world's population is feeding this entire mass surveillance system with their valuable personal and behavioral data, often without realizing that this system they feed is already oppressing themselves in the present. All in exchange for exaggerated convenience

maynarkh , 5 months ago

iF yOu HaVe NoThInG tO hIdE

andrew_bidlaw , 5 months ago

It's a cold case of a single murder from 30 years ago. I thought they would use it on something more unique. Guess they thought it's a way to silently normalize it via cases that are dead ends anyway to then bring it into a use on more recent stuff.

Land_Strider , 5 months ago

Algorithm printing the pig face as the most likely suspect:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/P81gorDdQp0/maxresdefault.jpg

aeronmelon , 5 months ago

Algorithm: "Police are much more likely to commit a crime."

Police: "We've stopped using the algorithm because of inherit flaws in the code."

tsonfeir , 5 months ago

That looks like the most average man possible. Surely no one will look like that except the perp.

aeronmelon , 5 months ago

Yay, the Department of Pre-crime.

randon31415 , 5 months ago

This new "finger-printing" technology is a bad idea, said cops in the 1800s. Few people are trained on how to accurately take and match "fingerprints", so mistakes will be plenty, and innocent people will go to jail because if it. Everyone but the cops think it is a bad idea, so we should never use fingerprints to solve crimes.

can , 5 months ago

According to a report released in September by the US Government Accountability Office, only 5 percent of the 196 FBI agents who have access to facial recognition technology from outside vendors have completed any training on how to properly use the tools. The report notes that the agency also lacks any internal policies for facial recognition to safeguard against privacy and civil liberties abuses.

How is this allowed?

Sanctus , 5 months ago

Because society is a farse that is only held together by the adhesive of the few people in positions of power who care to keep it alive over warring tribes? Either that or everyone is exhausted and ready to return to cave drawings.

Gork , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Archive link to bypass the paywall.

Edit: on reading the article, I'm curious to know if anyone has actually gotten arrested or charged with a crime based on an algorithmically generated face which is then scanned though facial detection software.

AbouBenAdhem , 5 months ago

IMO, the only valid use of DNA-based face generation would be to rule out existing suspects, not to label random people as suspects based on their faces alone.

Zron , 5 months ago

I hate to say it, but there’s a better way to eliminate suspects based on our current DNA technology.

If all your suspects are black, and the dna is from a someone with Irish heritage, it’s probably not any of the black people.

Trying to reconstruct someone’s face seems really inaccurate, considering I have the same DNA as I did 10 years ago, but I’ve had high school friends who have walked passed me without recognizing me because I lost a lot of weight and grew a beard since they last saw me.

As much as racial profiling is shitty, it’s way easier to tell someone’s ethnicity from dna than it is to reconstruct their whole face. You can then use that to narrow down a list of suspects, similar to how we used to use blood type analysis before dna was a thing.

Rootiest , 5 months ago

While I'm as skeptical as you are, I don't think people recognizing you is a good metric.

A better test would be if an AI trained on your younger face could accurately and reliably identify you with your adult face.

The way AI and human face recognition work are different from each other. An AI may be able to identify you based on markers that human recognition doesn't account for

ShellMonkey , 5 months ago

AI does a scary good job of recognizing age different photos sometimes. I've set up a couple self hosted photo management apps that contain such functions (photo prism and immich) and had surprising results. After feeding it a number of recent digital pictures I went on to put on n a bunch of old scanned photos from 10+ years earlier, and with a reasonably good accuracy it was able to dicern the difference in baby pictures between two kids to match with the older pictures.

Steve , 5 months ago

This is an interesting idea. Absolutely worth looking into. But I wouldn't approve it to use on active cases until the false positive rate was below 1:1000.

neptune , 5 months ago

Nature VS nurture heavily implies this will never ever work

diabeetusman , 5 months ago

That would mean ~300k false positives with every search.

paraphrand , 5 months ago

“As long as we can pin it on someone…”

grabyourmotherskeys , 5 months ago

Exactly. Just so very dumb.

ULS , 5 months ago

They just look for anything to make the case... Ruining lives. It's so dystopian and sad.

aaaantoine , 5 months ago

There's no way this would have been admissable as evidence on its own.

rikudou , 5 months ago

Heh, you wish. All it takes is one corrupt judge.

variants , 5 months ago

https://i.imgur.com/WGzBXEO.gif

hostops , 5 months ago

Well they do have a DNA of a suspect.
It may be enough to get court order of DNA extraction of a subject.
And matching DNA is definitely enough to get someone behind bars.

Mango , 5 months ago

Been the someone. It's shit. ACAB.

neidu2 , 5 months ago

Police metrics are governed by clearance stats, and pinning a crime on someone is enough for a case to count as "solved". If it goes to court, that's all they need, and it doesn't matter if the suspect is found guilty.