Watch THIS
According to an article in USA Today, an Arizona middle school will be installing cameras to record everyone entering the building, then using software to compare their faces to a database of sex offenders and child abductors.
Laying the privacy concerns aside — and they are important, although as a society we seem to have decided that privacy rights don’t extend to schools — this is clearly done for political reasons, not because anyone actually thinks it will make a difference.
Facial recognition software doesn’t work — not with mobs of people in motion, certainly. It’s just not that good. Ask Tampa, Fla., which installed just such a system on some of its public streets. The city removed them two years and millions of dollars later because A) people who actually care about civil rights kept complaining, loudly, and B) there were too many false positives. People were being detained by cops not because they looked like felons, but because some measurements of their facial features matched those of some felon.
Someday cameras might be good enough and computers fast enough for this facial-recognition technology to work. But not today. So right now this seems to be the work of a county sheriff who wants to look like he knows what he’s talking about … but he doesn’t.
