alt Hacker NewsTheir conclusion reminds me of this lady in China, Lao Rongzhi, who was a serial killer along with her lover, Fa Ziying [0]. They both went around the country extorting and killing people, and, while Fa was arrested in 1999 via a police standoff, Lao was on the run for two decades, having had plastic surgery to change her face enough that most humans wouldn't have recognized her.
But in those two decades, the state of facial recognition software had rapidly increased and she was recognized by a camera at a mall and matched to a national database of known criminals. At first police thought it were an error but after taking DNA evidence, it was confirmed to be the same person, and she was summarily executed.
In this day and age, I don't think anyone can truly hide from facial recognition.
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Hmm, "cameras reported a 97.3% match". I would assume that for a random person, the match level would be random. 1÷(1 −.973) ~ 37. IE, 1 in 37 people would be tagged by the cameras. If you're talk China, that means matching millions of people in millions of malls.
Possibly the actual match level was higher. But still, the way facial recognition seems to work even now is that it provides a consistent "hash value" for a face but with a limited number of digits/information (). This be useful if you know other things about the person (IE, if you know someone is a passenger on plane X, you can very likely guess which one) but still wouldn't scale unless you want a lot of false positives and are after specific people.
Authorities seem to like to say DNA and facial recognition caught people since it implies an omniscience to these authorities (I note above someone throwing out the either wrong or meaningless "97.3% value). Certainly, these technologies do catch people but they still limited and expensive.
This could help with the discussion: "Human face identification after plastic surgery using SURF, Multi-KNN and BPNN techniques" <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40747-024-01358-7>
How do you know that story is true? Would the police say if they made a mistake? Would anyone be able to find out the truth or accuse them?
> and she was summarily executed.
Nitpick: Summary execution means execution without due process. As per Wikipedia there was a quite thorough legal process all the way to the supreme court.
"On September 9, 2021, Lao was sentenced to death by the Nanchang Intermediate People's Court for intentional homicide, kidnapping, and robbery. She was also stripped of her political rights for life and had all of her personal property confiscated. Lao appealed her conviction in court, and the second trial was held on August 18, 2022 at Jiangxi Provincial Higher People's Court. Although Lao admitted to being an accomplice to Fa, she claimed to have only done so in fear of losing her own life, as Fa had physically and sexually abused her throughout their relationship. On November 30 of the same year, the court upheld the death sentence. On December 18, 2023, the Nanchang Intermediate People's Court carried out the execution of Lao Rongzhi, with the approval of the Supreme People's Court."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa_Ziying_and_Lao_Rongzhi