Israel has deployed a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip, creating a database of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, The New York Times reports. The program, which was created after the October 7th attacks, uses technology from Google Photos as well as a custom tool built by the Tel Aviv-based company Corsight to identify people affiliated with Hamas.
This is all sorts of fucked up and wrong but lets face it… it’s far from the worst thing happening in Gaza right now.
True, but:
1-It helps them find “terrorists” to blow up, and
2-This isn’t going away. Even after this “war” ends what remains of Gaza will be perpetually under surveillance (more than they already are). Even if the war ends today, Gaza just became even more of an open-air concentration camp.
I would be amazed if Gaza still exists when this war is over.
Don’t be silly. Of course it will. Some cleaning up, ethnic cleansing and rebuilding and there’ll be Gaza Beach, Gaza Hills and many more high value neighborhoods for non-muslims to live in.
It doesn’t work, for point 1 very well though. The tech is fine, but the way it’s presented to users is that it’s way more accurate than it actually is. That’s marketing rather than a technical problem. Second, the tech is not as good at recognizing non-white people. It’s just a fact that there are more pictures of white people to train the tech on since white people have historically had more access to photography among other reasons. And the models used to create most of the tech was built to favor facial traits that are more likely to differ in white people.
So, the likelihood of high probability matches is much lower so the likelihood that the highest probability match that is made is actually much lower probability of it being an actual match means the bad matches bubble to the top and get accepted as real. And these kinds of uses are more interested in a “better safe than sorry” stance and they aren’t sorry about killing the wrong person, only about not killing the right one. So they’re perfectly as happy killing many people that are possible matches as they are one person that’s the correct match.
No, this enables that.