This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Why is a private entity able to use facial recognition software in the first place. I know doesn't have the equivilant of GDPR, but surely it has some level of privacy laws?
Why did the police think that was sufficient evidence to jail someone, especially when there wasn't any further collaborating evidence.
Why did the police think that was sufficient evidence to jail someone, especially when there wasn’t any further collaborating evidence.
I mean, this is US police we're talking about here, and not just anywhere in the US, but Houston, Texas.
The answer is "cops do way worse on their own as it is," and "they don't actually give a shit, they just want to arrest someone."
US cops are terrible, but Texas cops are the worst scum of the worst scum.
Texas Rangers on the other hand... or at least specific one of them. That's another story. It's the man! His tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried. He does not use spell check. If he happens to misspell a word, Oxford will change the spelling. Where some kids pee their name in the snow, he can pee his name into concrete. He counted to infinity. Twice. Once a cobra bit his leg. After five days of excruciating pain, the cobra died. And so much more...
I heard he once had sex in the cab of a semi truck, and got some bodily fluids on the seat. That truck later became known as Optimus Prime.
They had collaborating evidence, they used a photo lineup on the clerk who was robbed at gunpoint and the clerk picked him out as the perp.
But then the problem becomes eyewitness testimony and possible manipulation of lineup photos by the cops.
I think California has privacy laws. At the national level I don't think we have anything except HIPAA, which only covers medical data.
As for why the police thought the evidence was sufficient, it's because they just don't care.
Absolutely horrifying, but not surprising. This kind of shit is exactly what we were worried about when facial recognition tech started to take off.
How poorly supervised is this jail? Or is the danger part of the (cruel) point...
It is.
They will pay him off and keep doing it.
Buddy, I wish they were going to pay this guy off. They're going to hire $450 an hour lawyers and grind this guy into nothing with electronic discovery and paperwork until he takes a $10,000 settlement.
Write it off as a business expense.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A man was sexually assaulted in jail after being falsely accused of armed robbery due to a faulty facial recognition match, his attorneys said, in a case that further highlights the dangers of the technology’s expanding use by law enforcement.
Harvey Murphy Jr., 61, said he was beaten and raped by three men in a Texas jail bathroom in 2022 after being booked on charges he’d held up employees at gunpoint inside a Sunglass Hut in a Houston shopping center, according to a lawsuit he filed last week.
A representative of a nearby Macy’s told Houston police during the investigation that the company’s system, which scanned surveillance-camera footage for faces in an internal shoplifter database, found evidence that Murphy had robbed both stores, leading to his arrest.
The company said in a previous statement that it uses “facial recognition in conjunction with other security methods in a small subset of Macy’s stores with high incidences of organized retail theft and repeat offenders.”
But the technology’s accuracy is highly dependent on technical factors — the cameras’ video quality, a store’s lighting, the size of its face database — and a mismatch can lead to dangerous results.
The Federal Trade Commission last month said the pharmacy chain Rite Aid had misused its facial recognition system in a way that led to shoppers being falsely accused of theft, including in confrontations with police.
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