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Comment by apcragg | Hacker News Reader

Privacy concerns aside, I can't wait to read the "Facial Recognition let me on the wrong flight when I got in the wrong line by accident" articles that are going to come out of this. Unless these systems have some fantastic (1e-6) P_{false alarm} rate or better, people are going to be mistaken for other people and let on the wrong flight sooner or later.

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I'm predicting perfectly innocent people who happen to have some algorithmic resemblance to some murderers and terrorists to be detained.

They already do this based on names. A former coworker shared his name with his grandfather, and both of them matched the name of a man on the terror watchlist. Naturally, the man was much younger than both of them and of a different nationality, but that didn't stop his grandfather (~50 years older!) from getting stopped and questioned every time he flew.

I was wondering about this. From what I hear it's basically impossible to get a name removed from this watchlist, so short of actually legally changing your name there's basically nothing you can do!?

> short of actually legally changing your name

Shh! Don't let the terrorists know!

It's something that was fought around the implementation of the Patriot act, but still needs to be fought. The lack of transparency or ability to easily ask for redress or correction of problems is a significant withholding of due process for many suspects (not convicted or charged) who basically have quasi-warrants out on them by being on the list.

Checking the list via facial recognition adds extra dimensions to the problem, but is the same core problem.

Honestly I don't care that much about such case. The system is not there to babysit you. In other transportation system if you get on the wrong car/bus, it's your problem.

So you should check your flight and gate number for your own benefit.

Not to mention the chance would be very low, you have to go the wrong flight and the system have to have false positive at you.

Accoding to https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/by_the_numbers/ there are more than 2.6 million passengers a day. So even with 1e-6 you get a handful of falls alarms each day.

When dealing with large systems, even small probabilities regularly occur.

You need at least 2 people for this mixup to happen...

Well, you have to hit a no-show. Gives you maybe another two order of magnitude. And the article might be written even if the misidentification was resolved before the flight leaves.

You don’t, really. Whoever is checked in first gets the seat. The second person will be questioned, and hopefully it will be cleared up. With the number of flights in and out of the US each day, it’s bound to happen unless the false positive rate is extremely low, which would only be possible through an extremely invasive cataloguing of photographs beyond those taken for DMV and Passport photos.

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