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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

> And why do you need to track people

They're looking for specific hamas commanders who are believed to be hiding in the civilian population.

Given how accurate these systems usually are… they are looking for some rando with a beard, and a way to spend some money on defense contracts sold by a friend.

Are biometric systems not accurate? The whole point of this is so that they aren't "looking for some rando with a beard."

> Are biometric systems not accurate?

They are very inaccurate, especially face recognition on dark people, which palestinians are, is going to be a crapshot.

I responded below about how they're probably training on photos of locals, but it's also worth noting that Palestinians, Israelis, and Lebanese people are all quite similar looking on average and have quite a bit of phenotype diversity. A well known Palestinian activist (Ahed Tamimi) in the West Bank famously has red hair, light skin, and freckles. Former congressman Justin Amash is half Palestinian and just looks like a Midwestern guy with a tan.

Several israeli are eastern europeans, I'd expect that palestinians are much darker than all the israeli that moved there during USSR times.

The ashkenazi population is about 30% of Israeli Jews, and Arab Israelis are about 21% of the population.

Palestinians have a fair amount of Anatolian, Lebanese, Armenian, and Iranian ancestry. So again there’s quite a bit of phenotypic variation. There’s also a high degree of genetic relatedness to even the Ashkenazi Jews.

In practice if you lined up 100 random Israelis and Palestinians you aren’t going to reliably determine who is who based on appearances.

It seems a lot more certain than using cell signals, and can present some opportunities to make arrests without endangering a lot of civilians. I'd normally be against facial recognition for general purpose law enforcement, but but trying to be precise in an urban war is always a worthwhile goal.

Don’t confuse high profile false positives for overall efficacy

Face recognition on dark people is well known to be inaccurate.

This has definitely been the case with commercial offerings do to limitations in the training data, but the application here is obviously using photos of people in the population they're trying to do recognition in for training. It's probably better than off the shelf tools for this application.

If they'd have the person they are looking for, to take a picture… they wouldn't need face recognition.

Their problem is that they don't.

Plus, training takes so much time. I doubt they will actually do what you are suggesting.

Stating the impossibility of successfully using facial recognition on Mediterranean people is a weird claim to make in a technical form. Do you have any citations showing that Mediterranean and Near Eastern people present particular problems for facial recognition?

And they will record everything just like Google, Facebook, etc. Fingerprinting everything.

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