facial recognition systems

TRX
November 26, 2013

The Fed has been using facial recognition systems at airports since the late 1980s; it was extended to some Federal buildings and Customs sites later. Now that computing power and storage are so cheap, who knows how common it is... It's established technology, though few people are aware of it.

My problem with it is twofold: the false positive rate is high, and this man: link is, in everything but genetics, my identical twin. Even our birthdays are only a few weeks apart.

When one of the world's most wanted terrorists is walking around wearing your face, it tends to make you a bit paranoid...

TRX
December 1, 2013

Above, I mentioned that facial recognition software was getting cheap. I'm now wondering if I just had an encounter with it.

A friend and I make it out to a particular restaurant once every two or three months. It's a chain restaurant with a high employee turnover; I'm pretty sure I've never seen any of the wait staff twice.

Last week my wife and I went; last time I was in there was at least two months ago. I usually order a particular sandwich with various substitutions instead of the standard item. I had just started explaining what I wanted when the waitress rattled off the rest, asked me if I wanted anything else, and bopped off.

I'm certain I've never seen her before. My wife and I talked about it on the way home, and later I mentioned it to the friend I usually go there with, who was then seriously wierded out.

Did I have an encounter with facial recognition software? Like I was telling my wife, I could patch something workable up out of existing packages if someone were willing to pay me; capture the customer's image as he comes in, greeter seats me and gives the table number to the server, who checks her screen in back to see if there's a hit before she comes out. If there's a hit, it displays what previous orders were. Prepped server is likely to get a bigger tip, happy customer is more likely to return sooner, profits go up a bit.

We're not talking rocket surgery here. They don't need to know who I am, just match a face to an order history, and even a pathetic hit rate like 25% would probably make such a system worthwhile. And they already have the cameras and terminals in place as parts of their security and order system, so it's just software.