Exclusive: Alvi Choudhury claiming damages against Thames Valley police after biased technology confused him with man looking ‘10 years younger’

Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage.

Alvi Choudhury, 26, a software engineer, was working at the home he shares with his parents in Southampton in January when police knocked on his door, handcuffed him and held him in custody for nearly 10 hours before releasing him at 2am.

Thames Valley police had used automated facial recognition software which matched him with footage of a suspect of a £3,000 burglary 100 miles away in Milton Keynes, according to documents shared with the Guardian by Liberty Investigates.

But the CCTV footage showed a noticeably younger man with different features apart from similar curly hair, said Choudhury, who was left confused about why he had been arrested.

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    Here’s what I think the world needs.

    Every citizen in every country gets 10 atomic bombs.

    Ok so you falsely arrest this man. You don’t release him now, because he’ll just go get his atomic bombs.

    But now his brother or his wife, or whomever, ALSO has atomic bombs. And they demand his release or else.

    So NOW whenever anyone tries to do anything, they have to think. Will this make them use an atomic bomb?

    And suddenly, police are a lot more careful. Corporations switch their gosls from profit, to citizen utopia. Can’t make anyone mad ever.

    And in a strange way, I find that to be far more peaceful. Nobody is an asshole or a bully anymore, because we’ll ALL be blown up if one person snaps.

    Maybe others are afraid of MAD. I was born into it. Raised in an environment where they say the russians could bomb us at anytime, and almost did multiple times.

    I was raised to have nuclear bomb drills where they sound a siren, and thousznds of kids rushed into underground bunkers. We had fire drills, and tornado drills, and atomic bomb drills.

    I imagine the kids who are like 20 today, are almost immune to fear of public shootings, because they grew up in the school shooting drill days. These kids could walk into a warzone, and dodge bullets like NEO. But nobody would even shoot a gun if anyone anywhere could nuke you.