I would like to see a national law requiring the permanent deletion of mugshots if the arrested is not convicted of a crime within a certain period after the arrest. What percentage of these mugshots that are archived and shared are of innocent people?
chneu · 7h ago
The county I grew up in recently stopped posting mugshots online.
There was a whole cottage industry that sprang up where people were selling these like..tabloid periodicals that just had people's mugshots in them. No guilty verdict or anything.
So people would be at the gas station or convenient store and there's a stack of free mugshot tabloids. It was wild. Once or twice a year I'd get texts from friends, "hey did you see that so and so got their mugshot taken!?"
sparrish · 9h ago
Mugshots are typically available to the public anyway. I think they traded easier access to mugshots.
Arainach · 9h ago
Big data is different, has different threat models, and needs to be treated differently.
Technically, in 1960, you could pay a huge number of people to listen to a huge number of telephones or watch a huge number of cameras, but it was so insanely expensive that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a threat you had to consider.
Cheap cameras and cheap hard drives and LLM vision processing models which mean that you can have a permanent archive of every license plate or face that went by a location mean that things are very different and even though things were legally possible before, it's a totally different problem now.
seeknotfind · 8h ago
Mugshots are pretty locked down now, but when I was younger, you could just scroll and scroll. Used to go through, check to see if I knew anybody. Got lucky a few times. Well, if you think you're safe, you're not, and if you think it's deleted, it knows everything about you. The difference between the marginal mugshot and the whole database is how prepared you are. Scrape that data every day, baby.
roughly · 8h ago
The Supreme Court has historically recognized this, too - the FBI tried to argue that putting a tracker on a car was no different than having an agent tail the car, and were roundly shut down for that.
tptacek · 8h ago
Yes, but the majority opinion in that case was based on the physical intrusion of placing the tracker, which doesn't apply here.
godelski · 8h ago
I'm not sure that makes the trade right. If you think they shouldn't be public (I don't) then it certainly wouldn't.
Just to be clear: having a mugshot does not mean you're a criminal. It means the person was arrested, not convicted (charged with a crime). I'm not finding good statistics but other data makes it seem reasonably high. Even if very low it would still violate the spirit of "innocent until proven guilty"
fiduciarytemp · 8h ago
Reasonable solution: Extract homomorohically encrypted features and mandate homomorphic face search
juliusdavies · 8h ago
Am I wrong to assume police already have access to their area’s database of driver’s license photos?
Never mind mugshots - I think they already have access to most people’s faces, even those that have never been arrested.
zx8080 · 9h ago
Is it the first total surveillance proposal in the US?
intalentive · 8h ago
Total Information Awareness goes back to the 1990s
Ajedi32 · 8h ago
Is there any surveillance involved in this proposal at all, let alone "total" surveillance? Facial recognition software doesn't "surveil" anything on its own.
If you want to talk about total surveillance, I'd worry more about something like Flock where they're actually deploying cameras on a massive scale.
wahnfrieden · 8h ago
Flock is a YC investment btw. It’s what YC supports
catlikesshrimp · 9h ago
Legal Ownership in perpetuity of 2.5M citizen mugshots accompained by their respective "metadata" Name, gender, age...? Or the right to scan the pictures to store hashes only?
"Free facial Recognition Access" is "Two licenses" Worth $12,500 each. For how long? Under which limitations? etc
glaucon · 8h ago
"Milwaukee police _consider_ trade"
astrea · 8h ago
Wait until y’all learn about the PCSO facial recognition dataset
PSCO stands for Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. The dataset mentioned contains 47,784 mugshots of 18,007 recidivists spanning from the years 1994 to 2010.
There was a whole cottage industry that sprang up where people were selling these like..tabloid periodicals that just had people's mugshots in them. No guilty verdict or anything.
So people would be at the gas station or convenient store and there's a stack of free mugshot tabloids. It was wild. Once or twice a year I'd get texts from friends, "hey did you see that so and so got their mugshot taken!?"
Technically, in 1960, you could pay a huge number of people to listen to a huge number of telephones or watch a huge number of cameras, but it was so insanely expensive that unless you were in East Germany or Moscow it wasn't a threat you had to consider.
Cheap cameras and cheap hard drives and LLM vision processing models which mean that you can have a permanent archive of every license plate or face that went by a location mean that things are very different and even though things were legally possible before, it's a totally different problem now.
Just to be clear: having a mugshot does not mean you're a criminal. It means the person was arrested, not convicted (charged with a crime). I'm not finding good statistics but other data makes it seem reasonably high. Even if very low it would still violate the spirit of "innocent until proven guilty"
Never mind mugshots - I think they already have access to most people’s faces, even those that have never been arrested.
If you want to talk about total surveillance, I'd worry more about something like Flock where they're actually deploying cameras on a massive scale.
"Free facial Recognition Access" is "Two licenses" Worth $12,500 each. For how long? Under which limitations? etc
Oh plenty more when you put in the full name. https://search.brave.com/search?q=%22Pinellas+County+Sheriff...
Dataset information gleamed from https://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/Publications/Face/DebBestRowd...