UCLA Abandons Plans To Use Facial Recognition After Backlash (vice.com) 19
Ahead of a national day of action led by digital rights group Fight for the Future, UCLA has abandoned its plans to become the first university in the United States to adopt facial recognition technology. From a report: In a statement shared with Fight for the Future's Deputy Director Evan Greer, UCLA's Administrative Vice Chancellor Michael Beck said the university "determined that the potential benefits are limited and are vastly outweighed by the concerns of the campus community." Since last year, UCLA has been considering using the university's security cameras to implement a facial recognition surveillance system.
These plans have been dogged by student criticism, culminating in an editorial in the Daily Bruin, UCLA's student newspaper, that argued the system would "present a major breach of students' privacy" while creating "a more hostile campus environment" by "collecting invasive amounts of data on [UCLA's] population of over 45,000 students and 50,000 employees." In an attempt to highlight the risks of using facial recognition on UCLA's campus, Fight for the Future used Amazon's facial recognition software, Rekognition, to scan public photos of UCLA's athletes and faculty, then compare the photos to a mugshot database. Over 400 photos were scanned, 58 of which were false positives for mugshot images -- the software often gave back matches with "100% confidence" for individuals "who had almost nothing in common beyond their race"
These plans have been dogged by student criticism, culminating in an editorial in the Daily Bruin, UCLA's student newspaper, that argued the system would "present a major breach of students' privacy" while creating "a more hostile campus environment" by "collecting invasive amounts of data on [UCLA's] population of over 45,000 students and 50,000 employees." In an attempt to highlight the risks of using facial recognition on UCLA's campus, Fight for the Future used Amazon's facial recognition software, Rekognition, to scan public photos of UCLA's athletes and faculty, then compare the photos to a mugshot database. Over 400 photos were scanned, 58 of which were false positives for mugshot images -- the software often gave back matches with "100% confidence" for individuals "who had almost nothing in common beyond their race"
Facial recognition? (Score:3)
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Are you down with the clown??
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At this point, Juggalos have mostly morphed into a bunch of middle-aged guys stocking the shelves at Target during the day and getting trashed on cheap beer at night.
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Faygo, not beer.
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Well when you have 87 genders getting your diversity quota gets ugly.
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Sounds like a university with a hospital/health system.
Re: 50,000 employees? (Score:2)
Indeed- OP needs to do a little research before lobbing bricks.
To the OP:
UCLA is regarded as well-run by many metrics. So... before using a single metric to make a judgement maybe review a few others. Google is your friend.
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Looking at the numbers, the out-of-state annual cost per student [collegetui...ompare.com] is way higher than the average per capita income in CA [wikipedia.org], so seems reasonable.
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Here's a thought - instead of blowing $180K on 4 years of UCLA, retire at 18 and move to the Philippines where the GDP is 3.3K [wikipedia.org] and your $180K will provide you a typical income for the next 55 years.
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Most people wouldn't want to retire to a subsistence living. You know, where every day it's wake up, work the paddy fields, cook whatever you caught, then go back to sleep because you're tired after working 20 hours.
Not unreasonable - not all for students. (Score:3)
First, the 50,000 employees includes students. You know the ones getting paid to study^W^W^W^W doing work-study in the library or working in a professor's lab learning like they are paying to do in class. There are ~7k undergrads doing that, ~4k grad students assisting in classes and labs, and ~1.5k medical interns at the hospital . So that is already ~25% of the positions.
There are between 5k and 6.5k "professors/post-docs" who don't teach and just do research. Those need to be supported even though the
In WA we are regulating it (Score:2)
No more mister nice guy, it's regulation time, baby!
Good Decision, Bad Rationale (Score:1)
Having facial recognition on any college campus can help increase the chance catching a criminal. There's no arguing that. However, there are good reasons NOT to facial recognition security cameras:
1. Cost (initial and ongoing)
2. The use of cameras to reduce a police force. (Yes, I recognize that these are the same students that believe all police are Nazis, but they will still call 911 when there's trouble and expect a cop to show up. If the cameras are being used to NOT backfill the already depleted ranks
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And this group is trying to change the expectation of privacy in public. Because that definition doesn't work anymore.
Makes sense, but not right in the circle of studen (Score:1)