Israel quietly rolled out a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip

wanderingmagus@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 617 points –
Israel quietly rolled out a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip
theverge.com

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.

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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.

what's wrong with hunting down terrorists?

What if they decide you're a terrorist? Governments should not have this power period. Anybody can become an "enemy of the state" at any time.

What if I tell you the instant you make a successful protest. Leak information of crimes commited by the government, or threaten some industry interests they'll do that anyways.

They are still hunting down a couple of guy's whose only crimes was to denounce crimes the government did. They call those "whissle blowers".

i don't think it's for that purpose , it's to identify where terrorists are hiding and not label anyone of terrorism

How cute. Is this the first time you've seen a government use terrorism to excuse atrocities?

Sure, I guess you could trust them, but I see no reason to. Do you think this will just stop being used after the conflict? Do you think they aren't using it to target families/friends of people who resist them? Do you think any form of resistance is terrorism? Is Israel using force to induce fear and submission not terrorism?

It labeled many people falsely as terrorists and was a waste of time. That's why it got leaked to begin with.

Nothing, as long as that’s actually what you’re doing and you are good at doing only that without creating collateral damage.

I don’t think the people upset with the treatment of Gaza got that way by being concerned for the welfare of actual murderous terrorists.