A little piece of you will forever be in Rotterdam

Big Brother Watch was recently alerted to the case of an East Midlands school which had deployed automatic facial recognition software as a means by which to sign their pupils in and out of school.

Rotterdam City Council, it appears, have gone one step further in announcing the roll-out of facial recognition scanners on their public transport network as a means by which to prevent those with travels bans from boarding trams.

According to DutchNews.nl:

"The scanners will record the biometric features of passengers as they enter the tram. If a passenger with a public transport ban is spotted, an alarm will sound in the driver's cabin and the passenger will be removed.. At the moment, drivers are issued with photos of banned passengers and have to recognise them from these"

So there, you are warned: if you board the tram while in Amsterdam, the Dutch authorities will forever hold both your biometric data and details as to where you boarded and disembarked the tube.

Ah well, you needn't worry; at least the scheme isn't being introduced in Amsterdam, so they'll never find out about that trip you're planning to De Wallen...

By Daniel Hamilton

Comments

[Andrew Ampers Taylor]

[...Ah well, you needn't worry; at least the scheme isn't being introduced in Amsterdam, so they'll never find out about that trip you're planning to De Wallen]

PHEW!!! You really had me worried for a moment!

[opsimath]

I have never been to Amsterdam, so my life could possibly be said to have been a little 'sheltered'!

Is De Wallen something like Hamburg's(?) notorious but quite fascinating Reepersbahn?

I'm betting myself it is!

[SadButMadLad]

Even taking into account the privacy aspect, and I don't see it handling the disembarkation of passengers only the embarkation, the cost aspect is so wrong too. €200,000 to handle 40 trouble makers in 2 years.

[T.England. Very working class.]

We could try makeup!......

"What would camouflage look like if it let you hide from a camera?"

http://ahprojects.com/blog/117

"By reverse engineering the algorithms behind face detection, I generated a preliminary series of images that could be the building blocks of anti-surveillance makeup"

........Or just not worry!

"How Facial Recognition Systems Work"

http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadgets/facial-recognition.htm/printable

"Boston's Logan Airport also ran two separate tests of facial recognition systems at its security checkpoints using volunteers. Over a three month period, the results were disappointing. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the system only had a 61.4 percent accuracy rate, leading airport officials to pursue other security options"

:O)

[alastair]

"So there, you are warned: if you board the tram while in Amsterdam, the Dutch authorities will forever hold both your biometric data and details as to where you boarded and disembarked the tube."

Did it really say this? Or have you made this up? Where in the DutchNews article does it say that anyone other than someone with a public transport ban will have their details "forever held"? I would interpret "record" in this context as meaning temporarily; obviously they need to be kept until such time as it is determined that your journey is over and you didn't cause a problem substantial enough to result in a public transport ban, but at that point they probably need to be deleted for pragmatic reasons (saving storage space) never mind the privacy issue.

And where is your evidence that biometric data can be extracted from this system? Are we relying on the mythical god-like hacker and the "no system is safe" mantra that is repeatedly spouted online? In which case, you do know that real-world hacking is nothing like it is in movies? Moreover, what do these people stand to gain, actually? An image of your face? Which is visible as you walk down the street and may in fact be photographed by anyone who cares to?

Oh, and while we're about it, where are your complaints about casinos? They all use facial recognition because of the whole MIT student blackjack thing…

[Purlieu]

I hope they can afford the lawsuits from the false positives' defamation claims

[Lee]

The writing on BBW is generally of a poor standard, but this really is a sea of shit.

"So there, you are warned: if you board the tram while in Amsterdam, the Dutch authorities will forever hold both your biometric data and details as to where you boarded and disembarked the tube."

So, we get on the *tram* - and then get off the *tube*.

This, of course, happens in *Amsterdam*.

We are then told that:

"Ah well, you needn't worry; at least the scheme isn't being introduced in *Amsterdam*"

I can handle the fairly regular clumsy diction, the poor structure, the lack of clarity, the random punctuation, but when things drift towards the seemingly random - you start to ask yourself how keenly do you check your output, it reflects poorly on the whole enterprise.

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