Re: Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying

In the posting Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying a commentator noted that at 98% accuracy the facial recognition software would have 200,000 false positives per year for a typical airport. This is an inconvenience. The terrifying part is that you also have to consider the false negatives. Assume (for ease of calculation) that 1% of the population are terrorists. Within a population of 1,000,000 there are 10,000 terrorists. Within that, 2% of terrorists will not be recognized and 200 of them will be allowed to fly. Boom! It really doesn't matter what the real ratio of terrorists to non-terrorists is. What matters is the human costs of a false negative.