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.

  • CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    8 hours ago

    It’s established fact that these racial recognition systems do poorly with virtually any confounding factors, particularly darker skin colour.

    10 hours. What the fuck.

  • RoidingOldMan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    60
    ·
    9 hours ago

    Choudhury’s mugshot was held on the police system only because he had been wrongly arrested in 2021 when he had been attacked on a night out while at university in Portsmouth. The police released him with no further action. Now he has had a second mugshot taken he is afraid the automated system could trigger more wrongful arrests.

  • Sumocat@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    8 hours ago

    Thames Valley police admitted to Choudhury the arrest “may have been the result of bias within facial recognition technology”. No, the bias wasn’t within the technology.

    • Gathorall@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      48 minutes ago

      But the police would have just arrested the nearest ethnic otherwise so it is totally the AI’s fault and the manufacturer should compensate travel expenses. /s

  • runsmooth@kopitalk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    40
    ·
    10 hours ago

    So police did not have to flag the file as AI generated, and don’t prioritize the review of these allegations by an actual human?

    Did anyone tell that man he was unlawfully detained and has a civil claim against the government who knowingly and recklessly detained an innocent person?

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    7 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.