Body Cam Company Files Patent For Built-In Facial Recognition Tech

from the papers,-please-v.-2.0 dept

Police body cameras are the savior that failed to materialize. Accountability was the end goal, but obstacles were immediately erected by internal policies, cop-friendly legislation, and existing public records carve-outs for anything "investigation"-related.

Making things worse are the officers themselves. When excessive force or other unconstitutional tactics are deployed, body cams seem to malfunction at an alarming rate. And that's only if officers can be bothered to turn them on at all. Body cams have served up a bunch of exonerating footage and delivered evidence to prosecutors, but have done little to make law enforcement more accountable.

This trend isn't in any danger of reversing. Body cam manufacturers are seeking to expand their offerings, but the focus appears to be on giving law enforcement the extras it wants, rather than what the public is actually seeking. A good summary of recent body cam developments by Sidney Fussell at The Atlantic contains a discussion a new patent application by body cam manufacturer Digital Ally.

While the patent application contains some nice "triggering" effects that may result in more captured footage of questionable incidents, it also contains something that would turn passive recordings into active surveillance.

In mid-September, Digital Ally, a cloud-storage and video-imaging company, announced a series of patents for cameras that would automatically be triggered by various stimuli, not just an officer pressing record. Theoretically, these would end the problem of both re-creation and cameras inexplicably failing to record use-of-force scenarios. Some of the “triggering events” in Digital Ally’s patents are for crisis response, in the event of a car crash or a gun being pulled from its holster. But some of the auto-triggers would cause the cameras to record simply as police move through public spaces. As described in one patent, an officer could set his body camera to actively search for anyone with an active warrant. Using face recognition, the camera would scan the faces of the public, then compare that against a database of wanted people. (The process could work similarly for a missing person.) If there’s a match, the camera would begin to record automatically.

As Fussell points out, the tech isn't ready yet. Processing power is still an issue. Facial recognition software needs to perform a lot of complex calculations quickly to provide near-instant feedback, and it's unlikely Digital Ally has found a way to cram that into a body cam yet. Moving the processing to the cloud solves space management problems, but would require far faster connections than are ordinarily available to portable devices.

But it won't be this way forever. And that has a lot of privacy implications, even when the footage is gathered in public spaces. Law enforcement doesn't have the right to demand you identify yourself in most situations, but inserting facial recognition tech in body cams strips away a small protection against government power citizens currently possess. The software will provide officers with personal information even when there's no reason for officers to have it. All of this is problematic even before you get to the issue of false positives and the havoc they can wreak.

It's almost inevitable facial recognition tech will be deployed by law enforcement. The DHS is already aiming cameras at passengers flying into the country to search for criminal suspects and others it wants to subject to additional screening. Any public place that routinely hosts large gatherings of people will be next in line for biometric scanning. And once the tech catches up with the dream, body cams will ID pedestrians by the hundreds, even when cops aren't actively searching for subjects or suspects.

No matter how it's pitched in the future, it's important to remember law enforcement isn't somehow "owed" every tech advance that comes its way. Supporters will say facial recognition tech makes both officers and the public safer. This may be true, but so do all sorts of privacy/Constitutional violations. Our rights protect us from the government. And that includes the right to go about your business without being asked by officers to identify yourself. Removing this right via technical wizardry and making it a passive experience for all involved doesn't make it any less of a violation.

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Filed Under: body cameras, face recognition, patents, police, privacy

Companies: digital ally