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The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

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Re: The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

#71

Post by hackuser »

analyst74 wrote: post #60
macNchz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've spent years saving up to finally buy a home. You're having a baby in a few months, and you really need the space. You have the down payment ready, your credit is great, you've ticked all the boxes on the application, but you're turned down for the loan. Why? Maybe you walk home through a bad neighborhood. Maybe you sometimes grab a beer at a bit of a divey bar near your office. Maybe you've visited an old frie…

But doesn't this cut both ways? If you don't hang around questionable people, you'd qualify for better rate for loans. Or if your credit score is not very high, but the fact you don't hang around questionable people brings your credit file up a notch and make you qualify.

> If you don't hang around questionable people ...

Who is questionable and who defines it? Gay people were "questionable" for most of history; they would lose their jobs if discovered (that was still true in the US military until very recently). What about Muslims, overtly discriminated against in many places? Poor people? Latinos (someone might suspect they are illegal immigrants)? etc.

Re: The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

#72

Post by baobabaobab »

cookiecaper wrote: post #37
hackuser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> surveillance is here to stay and that making it illegal will only serve to hide the microphones. Certainly it's here to stay, but so is murder, theft, fraud, and many other things. We want to maximize the leverage and tools people have to fight it.

Unfortunately you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I don't think there's a real way to fight this in the age of networks and cameras in every pocket. There are many good uses for the ability to instantly recognize and identify anybody from a crowd, as well as bad ones. Probably the easiest way to frustrate these things would be the simplest; only go out in public with substantial facial features obscured or al…

http://cvdazzle.com/

I don't know how well obscuring facial features will really work. There might just be too much information. Partially obscured face, body dimensions, clothing, location, time... I think it might be a loosing battle.

Re: The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

#73

Post by SilasX »

hackuser wrote: post #6

A HN contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end-users, that will make them aware of this issue and persuade them that it is important to them. Vote up the best ones. [EDIT: The goal is to persuade them about its dangers, not sell them something based on it] That elevator pitch is key. I have extensive knowledge about this issue but have a hard time coming up with it; I need to be prepared. Ch…

"Would you tell your full name to a random person at a bar that scares you? No, because they can find a lot about you just from knowing that.

"Okay, you don't have that choice anymore. They can get it just from seeing your face now."

Re: The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

#74

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

shabbyrobe wrote: post #67
macNchz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've spent years saving up to finally buy a home. You're having a baby in a few months, and you really need the space. You have the down payment ready, your credit is great, you've ticked all the boxes on the application, but you're turned down for the loan. Why? Maybe you walk home through a bad neighborhood. Maybe you sometimes grab a beer at a bit of a divey bar near your office. Maybe you've visited an old frie…

I've tried this one on lay people before. The problem I have is that they usually can't get past their firm belief that these things are technologically impossible, even after you explain to them that they are. "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world." Also it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this…

Do they not notice Facebook using facial recognition to automatically tag faces in their photos already? That isn't even a very new feature anymore.

Re: The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

#75

Post by kefka »

hackuser wrote: post #6

A HN contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end-users, that will make them aware of this issue and persuade them that it is important to them. Vote up the best ones. [EDIT: The goal is to persuade them about its dangers, not sell them something based on it] That elevator pitch is key. I have extensive knowledge about this issue but have a hard time coming up with it; I need to be prepared. Ch…

I have a great way to explain Facial Recognition and why it's important....

_________________________________

I wrote a program called uWho(https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho) for our hacker/maker convention, Makevention. Our goal was to determine how many people showed up to the convention, as it was a free-to-attend with a suggested donation event.

With a permissive license (OpenCV) attached to a GPL3 (Qt), I was able to make a real-time face scanner. My version was nice, in that it saved a one-way hash of the person's face. It is a 2 liner to save the full face instead of the nice method I did.

I did this using software anyone can get. Now, imagine having this software, with mainframes combined with the ability to trawl through a user's facebook profile... Because a like allows that. And do you have a company's Facebook permission? Now they can see your whole profile, as well as your friends.

Now, tell me this: what would happen if a company downloaded every face in a user's profile, checked the names of tagged faces, and ran all of them through a face recognizer like what I already made?

That's why it is important.

Re: The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

#76

Post by baobabaobab »

hackuser wrote: post #71
analyst74 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doesn't this cut both ways? If you don't hang around questionable people, you'd qualify for better rate for loans. Or if your credit score is not very high, but the fact you don't hang around questionable people brings your credit file up a notch and make you qualify.

> If you don't hang around questionable people ... Who is questionable and who defines it? Gay people were "questionable" for most of history; they would lose their jobs if discovered (that was still true in the US military until very recently). What about Muslims, overtly discriminated against in many places? Poor people? Latinos (someone might suspect they are illegal immigrants)? etc.

Who is questionable and who defines it?

It might not be a person making the call. Whatever the state of the art machine learning algorithm decides. Not to suggest that a learning algorithm won't be able to learn racism.

Re: The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

#77

Post by duderific »

imron wrote: post #70
shabbyrobe wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried this one on lay people before. The problem I have is that they usually can't get past their firm belief that these things are technologically impossible, even after you explain to them that they are. "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world." Also it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this…

> "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world." Tell them that the mobile phone they have in their pocket also seems like science fiction - and it was 20-30 years ago. Now it is science fact. Facial recognition is getting the same way. If anything, based on all the shoddy movies that 'zoom in, enhance' with photos, the public should be primed to accept facial recognition quite easily.

Ha, when watching those shows, I am always the nerd telling my wife how it's impossible to zoom in and enhance, because you can't create more information than existed when the photo was taken. I'm not sure that she gets it.

Re: The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

#78

Post by Houshalter »

macNchz wrote: post #51
hackuser wrote: post #6

A HN contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end-users, that will make them aware of this issue and persuade them that it is important to them. Vote up the best ones. [EDIT: The goal is to persuade them about its dangers, not sell them something based on it] That elevator pitch is key. I have extensive knowledge about this issue but have a hard time coming up with it; I need to be prepared. Ch…

You've spent years saving up to finally buy a home. You're having a baby in a few months, and you really need the space. You have the down payment ready, your credit is great, you've ticked all the boxes on the application, but you're turned down for the loan. Why? Maybe you walk home through a bad neighborhood. Maybe you sometimes grab a beer at a bit of a divey bar near your office. Maybe you've visited an old frie…

On the other hand you are just as likely to get a loan you otherwise wouldn't have because you haven't been seen with questionable folks. In any case that kind of policy is already illegal. And it's not even technically feasible at the moment. Even if it was, it's very unlikely there is a strong correlation between being seen with some random person in a photo, and your likelihood of paying a loan.

There is plenty of questionable shit happening right now in the NSA and stuff. I don't see why we need to resort to fearmongering about absurd hypotheticals.

Re: The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

#79

Post by joe_the_user »

hackuser wrote: post #10
joe_the_user wrote: post #8

I'm not sure what "good as a person" means in the context of large scale facial recognition. I know software is now scoring as people on various standard AI tests. But most people couldn't recognize a million other people correctly. The situation is kind of odd. It's like how engineering a car to drive automatically in a variety of controlled situations which might represent 90% of the normal driving. They are still…

> store clerk knowing your name when you walk in the store is mostly creepy and wouldn't help sales Saying your name might be creepy (but maybe people will become accustomed to it). Knowing your identity I think would certainly help sales, the same way it does when you shop online.

Knowing your identity I think would certainly help sales, the same way it does when you shop online.

How?

I suppose you could have store change it's stock based on who it knows has visited it. But that sounds cumbersome and speculative. The store might find itself removing the things people like to buy from that store and stocking things people prefer to buy from other stores and so wind-up selling less.

Kind of like when things I've searched for on amazon reappear as Facebook ads. It don't click through and buy 'cause I've already decided on whether or not to get them.

Re: The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

#80

Post by dpflan »

macNchz wrote: post #51
hackuser wrote: post #6

A HN contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end-users, that will make them aware of this issue and persuade them that it is important to them. Vote up the best ones. [EDIT: The goal is to persuade them about its dangers, not sell them something based on it] That elevator pitch is key. I have extensive knowledge about this issue but have a hard time coming up with it; I need to be prepared. Ch…

You've spent years saving up to finally buy a home. You're having a baby in a few months, and you really need the space. You have the down payment ready, your credit is great, you've ticked all the boxes on the application, but you're turned down for the loan. Why? Maybe you walk home through a bad neighborhood. Maybe you sometimes grab a beer at a bit of a divey bar near your office. Maybe you've visited an old frie…

This pitch reminded me of the cartoon in beginning of the documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply - a concise documentary related to the topic of how your data can be used by the company whose services you are using. The cartoon may be good to use too.

1. Cartoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y2M8BUcXG4

2. Documentary site: http://tacma.net/

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