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EU Privacy

Germany Tests Facial-Recognition Surveillance On 300 Citizens (dw.com) 86

An anonymous reader quotes DW: Earlier this year, with no shortage of publicity, Berlin police found volunteers to participate in a test of a prototype facial-recognition system at Sudkreuz station. The system seeks to match images of people on CCTV cameras with pictures of the volunteers in a test database. Volunteers also wear transponders providing information about their whereabouts. Comparing the two sets of data will give a good indication of whether the technology is of any use.
Another DW article reports the six-month test is attracting criticism: Germany's interior minister is pleased with the initial results, but critics are wary of increased surveillance... The 300 testers who volunteered for the project carry a transponder that apparently only transmits data on ambient temperature, battery status and signal strength, according to the project staff member in the Sudkreuz station control room who explained the technology to [German Interior Minister Thomas] de Maiziere. But [activist Paul] Gerstenkorn contends the angle and acceleration of the testers are recorded as well... For German Data Protection Commissioner Andrea Vosshoff, the fact that active and not passive technology is being used is going too far. Unlike a passive chip, the transponder constantly transmits information that anyone can collect with the help of freeware available on the internet.

Vosshoff says the police have not "sufficiently" informed the testers, and called for the project to be temporarily halted...The interior minister has vehemently defended the project, saying the technology is not being used to catch petty criminals such as shoplifters, but terrorists and serious offenders. Four weeks into the test phase, De Maiziere has praised its "surprising accuracy" - specifically referring to people recognized by the software whose pictures are already stored in police databases. According to Germany's federal police force, pictures of all other passers-by captured by the surveillance cameras are "immediately deleted." After the six-month trial phase in Berlin, a decision will be made on whether automatic facial recognition will be implemented nationwide in Germany's train stations and other public spaces.

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Germany Tests Facial-Recognition Surveillance On 300 Citizens

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  • Maybe these 300 people should be considered enemies of freedom and privacy.
    • Looky here, goy. You know what happened the last time Germany started surveilling her citizens!
      • Yes. Thousands fled through the inner-German border and the state was finally brought to an end through a mostly peacful revolution.

        Oh, that wasn't the German surveillance state you where talking about? Well, it was the most recent.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      In effect, yes. 300 people that significantly contribute to the erosion of freedom.

      In actual reality, I think they are just stupid and naive.

  • This sounds great. Now even the people in Cologne get to live in East Germany.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26, 2017 @08:51PM (#55091407)

    ...will be to identify and track political activists and democratic protesters. I bet we'll see a substantial uptick in arrests and harrassment after political rallies and protests once this is rolled out.

    • Regardless of what their laws say:
      Our leaders.

      Just throw up their pictures and decide it's free hunting season and the situation can be dealt with.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. There is zero chance this will not be heavily abused. It will contribute significantly to the creation of the 3rd surveillance state on German ground though. You would think that they have learned their lesson after the second one, but no, obviously the same evil scum as before has managed again to get into power and is being cheered on by the population.

    • Real Terrorists will use makeup or masks to bypass this, so they are clearly not the intended target. These systems have a high false-positive rate (ex. Lets send out the SWAT team to check these 400 computer reports of Terrorist! today, more again tomorrow). This system seems ideally suited to identify the protestors at an anti-government rally.
  • We all know the first directive will be Don't Hassel the Hoff. ;)

  • Zu Befehl!!! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Vinegar Joe ( 998110 )

    Obergruppenfuhrer Merkel wasn't happy with the way tattoos on the forearm worked out last time so now it's facial recognition.

  • The machine is always watching.

  • These algorithms that recognize faces, fingerprints or other "difficult" things are usually just doing binary comparisons: how likely is the subject the one from database-picture 1? 2? 3? There is a number from 0-1 that represents the likelihood of a match.

    So when forced to make a decision, you take the one with the highest number, provided that numbers is larger than say 0.5 or 0.8 or whatever threshold you choose. These things work just fine with 100 or 300 subjects in the database, but once you actually

    • Yes. I wish had points. I can't stand slashdot interface on a mobile. The only way to read your comment was to lower the filter to +1.

      It's as if developers have never heard of collapsible elements

    • "That's when the reliability goes down enormously. False positives: I see subject X while that person is not in the database at all, or I see subject X when it's actually subject Y who is in the database as well."

      That's why they have another database with the metadata of the cellphones of everybody. If it goes long enough, they will be able to recognize terrorists without any phone in their pockets, because the system will get better and better.

    • I strongly suspect that the sheer number of faces in pictures actually massively simplifies the problem of face recognition. People are coherent in space and time. They don't jump through hyperspace. So if you have enough cameras over the place, you're not looking at recognizing one picture; you look at a 4D space and you're looking for a trace of high match probability in it. Chances are that this could be much easier to accomplish in case that you can't reliably recognize a person from a single picture, e
  • by manu0601 ( 2221348 ) on Sunday August 27, 2017 @08:32PM (#55094949)
    Dear Slashdot, please not that using the EU flag for Germany is quite imprecise, and probably offensive for many German people.
  • "the technology is not being used to catch petty criminals such as shoplifters, but terrorists and serious offenders" ... if you're caught robbing granny for crack you get a pass LOOOL ... now that's believable ... buy stock in baseballcaps, get the scramlApp NOW at half price, track thy neighbour with the freeware. In soviet germany the nazis will be defeated with their own tools !
    it's not getting out of hand, it IS out of hand, and they blame europe but europe is to blame for trying to carry too much in

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