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I have yet to work with a commercial facial recognition product that produced a reasonable number of false positives or negatives when dealing with 'live' data like that of a security feed of a crowd. Is there a facial recognition model or tool out there that actually works in that use case? It seems like the Met's police got sold some technological snake oil that wasn't close to ready.

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It really depends on if their goal with this was actually a tangible result or just security theater. Snake oil's not a bad purchase if you're planning to resell it.

The point is that it will never be "close to ready." Not unless every fourth person is a crook. Anyways, these kinds of systems exist for the same reason drug dogs exist--to generate a probable cause that appears scientific even when it is anything but.

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