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Guilty until proven innocent: shoppers falsely identified by facial recognition system struggle to clear their names (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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People shamed and ordered to leave shops after being misidentified then ‘given no help’ to investigate verdicts

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[–] 24 points 6 months ago (4 children)

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.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Fingerprints as username??

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    Yes, it was intended to be used for identification and authentification in one go. For something between 500 to 700 people, and the customer wanted it to work with dirty or injured fingers, too, so the readers would have to be extraordinarily lenient.

    My guess is that the customer watched too many movies.

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