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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

#91

Post by bigiain »

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 reckon some subversive art projects. Set up a camera and an SDR in a fairly well trafficked public place (shopping mall, train station concourse, etc) and have the camera do face detection/recognition and the SDR grab MAC addresses from bluetooth and wifi radios. Collect a few weeks worth of data, then put a screen on it so it can put up a big sign

"Hi again! Haven't seen you since Tuesday, when you were with this person [photo of other face seen with them]! Have you been OK? You haven't missed a Wednesday before?"

Make it intentionally innocuous-but-creepy.

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

#92

Post by bigiain »

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 reckon some subversive art projects. Set up a camera and an SDR in a fairly well trafficked public place (shopping mall, train station concourse, etc) and have the camera do face detection/recognition and the SDR grab MAC addresses from bluetooth and wifi radios. Collect a few weeks worth of data, then put a screen on it so it can put up a big sign

"Hi again! Haven't seen you since Tuesday, when you were with this person [photo of other face seen with them]! Have you been OK? You haven't misses a Wednesday before?"

Make it intentionally innocuous-but-creepy.

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

#93

Post by vorg »

When surveillance systems are put in place and collected information stored for later use, irrespective of whether it's a personal, business, or government system, the people who get themselves in control of them will use the surveillance and/or information to steal from, preach to, discredit, and/or wear down the target/s, all of which ultimately equate to benefiting in some way at the target's expense. There's no such thing as unused surveillance capacity or unused collected information.

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

#94

Post by msellout »

Where's the line that separates generic image recognition from facial recognition?

Forget corporations for a moment and think about your own rights as a programmer. I want to tinker with image-similarity scores by downloading random images from the internet and comparing with a photo I just took in a public place. Oops, my photo just so happened to have a stranger's face that matches a photo in my database and that filename contains the person's name. Should that be illegal?

Consider the effects of a legal requirement to have an "opt-in" for facial recognition software. That was what the "consumer advocates" thought should be a minimum standard. Large corporations with trusted brands might be able to run such an effort, but any startup certainly could not.

Regulating what software I can write is a slippery slope. Compare facial recognition with encryption. If there's regulation for recognition software, then regulation for encryption will be coming right after. The worst-case scenario in my mind is if the federal government has a monopoly on any kind of software. Our best defense against a government/corporate monopoly on surveillance is not to ban it, but to democratize it.

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

#95

Post by rm999 »

jpatokal wrote: post #65

So are we actually there yet? I was under the impression that, while face recognition has evolved to the point that face matching against a limited group of people (say, your Facebook friends) is feasible, we're still a long ways off from being able to put a face-scanner in a crowd in NYC and have it spot the 1 suspect among 10 million without a totally ridiculous rate of false positives.

This should be a top comment - this kind of tracking is not possible at scale and probably won't be for a long time. Identifying a person in a group of 100s/1000s has been a solved problem for decades. Consistently identifying a single person from a database of 100Ms/billions of people who are constantly gaining weight, growing facial hair, etc is impossible with today's technology; false positives will become an exponentially bigger problem as you increase the candidate space.

Perhaps one day increased camera resolutions will allow trackers to identify something humans can't, like retinal scans. This would allow cameras to basically "fingerprint" people, and will be super creepy.

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

#96

Post by bigiain »

jpatokal wrote: post #65

So are we actually there yet? I was under the impression that, while face recognition has evolved to the point that face matching against a limited group of people (say, your Facebook friends) is feasible, we're still a long ways off from being able to put a face-scanner in a crowd in NYC and have it spot the 1 suspect among 10 million without a totally ridiculous rate of false positives.

You say that as though the people deploying things like this[1] care much about false positives...

[1] No fly lists, for example.

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

#97

Post by 15155 »

tjr wrote: post #18
philbarr wrote: post #11

Walk into a store, and the salesclerks will know your name. - they already do once you scan your store card The store’s cameras and computers will have figured out your identity, - store card and looked you up in both their store database and a commercial marketing database they’ve subscribed to. - store card again. They’ll know your name, - store card salary, - if you entered it and if you didn't lie when you filled…

RMS has been advocating against using store cards for years. I guess in-store facial recognition could thwart the privacy efforts of people like him? (To some degree?)

Unless he's using cash, make no mistake, his purchases are being tracked in some capacity.

Why do you need a store card when a credit/debit card track has more than enough information to identify?

- Card number (useful on its own as an identifier) - Name (not perfect, decent secondary info)

Granted, these don't generally make for a super-continuous history on someone, but they're pretty decent for the average person for a year or two.

Also, if you make any returns at one of these stores that you've previously used a CC, your real state-issued ID will be correlated with your purchases (via your CC).

Also, if you do any online shopping with a retailer and use the same cards in the store: instant correlation.

Checks? Necessarily correlated with DL and account numbers, even better than CCs.

Outside of cash: there're just too many ways to establish purchase histories for most individuals.

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

#98

Post by PostOnce »

msellout wrote: post #94

Where's the line that separates generic image recognition from facial recognition? Forget corporations for a moment and think about your own rights as a programmer. I want to tinker with image-similarity scores by downloading random images from the internet and comparing with a photo I just took in a public place. Oops, my photo just so happened to have a stranger's face that matches a photo in my database and that f…

What you can do in your own time is one thing, what you can do commercially is another.

Encryption is something you do by yourself or with another consenting party, facial recognition is something you do to someone else without their permission and possibly use for nefarious purposes.

There's nothing wrong with outlawing certain activities from the commercial sphere, or any sphere. It's not an assault on your freedom, its protection of my privacy? It's illegal to stalk and harass people in person or over the phone. It's illegal to serve people undercooked food or raw milk or whatever. It's illegal to breach HIPAA.

Are you next going to say its terrible that you can't access my medical records for your startup?

How about security cameras and genitalia recognition in the bathrooms at restaurants, is that cool too?

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

#99

Post by Estragon »

shabbyrobe wrote: post #81
imron wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

I know it seems crazy, it seems crazy to me too, but this is what I encounter time and time again. No matter how carefully you explain it, it seems too unlikely to them. Once the explanation passes a certain threshhold of complexity (for which the bar is frighteningly low), they tune out and shut down.

Maybe what's needed more than an elevator pitch is an open-source app using facial recognition to creep people out without abusing them.

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

#100

Post by InclinedPlane »

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…

It might be too late for that, it's not a matter of elevator pitches anymore. People are already ok with being tracked constantly. I think it's a matter of going back to the fundamentals and re-instilling an appreciation for individual liberty and the value of privacy. That's not something that happens with an elevator pitch, that's something that takes essays, and blog pieces, and conversations, and lots of time.
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