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Comment by cwingrav | Hacker News Reader

Cameras can be used ethically in public and semi-public areas. While I don't know if we have official/specific guidelines in the US, I'm sure with a little effort we could create some that would allow for their very effective use, and not overreach, violating personal rights or leading to a police state.

In this case, it seems a mix up occurred and a little police work easily led to clearing the person's name of the charge. Looks like the system worked (but it was very inconvenient for the accused). The camera is just a single piece of evidence, and not the entire case. So long as courts realize this, it should actually help deter crime AND make prosecution more correct in catching the correct perpetrator. There is a long history of just finding someone to blame. I hope cameras make catching the correct person easier, to avoid this type of policing failures.

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>...it seems a mix up occurred...

The "mix-up" occurred because there was an ID with no picture on it. So, Apple assumed it was him - with no corroborating evidence to that. They then flagged their AI to look for him, not comparing it to pictures/video of the actual perpetrator, and called the police when he came in.

>...and a little police work easily led to clearing the person's name of the charge

True but there's a couple of problems with this:

1) He can never answer "no" on a questionairre of whether or not he's been arrested before. Depending on how strict employers are, this could prevent him from even being considered for employment.

2) There's an actual potential he lost his car, job, place to live, etc. while waiting to be cleared. We don't have a time-frame for this, so it's anyone's guess, but it's a safe bet that his employment, alone, wouldn't have been safe (e.g.: no call, no show).

>I hope cameras make catching the correct person easier, to avoid this type of policing failures.

The policing failure,as you refer to it, was actually a failure on Apple's part and not the part of the police.

> They then flagged their AI to look for him, not comparing it to pictures/video of the actual perpetrator, and called the police when he came in.

Nope, that's not what happened. The article is poorly written, but read it and it might make sense.

" However, since the ID didn't have a photo, the lawsuit states Apple programmed its stores' face recognition system to associate the real thief's face with Bah's details"

In other words, the only thing Apple used facial ID for was to link the thief's face to thefts where the thief didn't show ID. That allowed them to report the wrong person for multiple thefts (presumably instead of just one). (Yes it's terribly unclear from the article.) But it's fairly clear the wrongly accused was not arrested at the store, because the face recognition was primed for the real perp's face.

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