The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by Estragon » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 4:43 AM UTC

avn2109 wrote: post #62

MichaelApproved wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's now easier than ever for the political party in power to spy on the opposition. Imagine what Nixon would do if he had the NSA surveillance powers that are available to the current President. Republican, Democrat, or independent. Do you want any party to have that much power while in office?

If history is any guide, you've got the surveillance directionality mixed up here. Most fallen regimes that we have good records for - e.g. the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, and (kind of) the East Germans had various factions competing overtly or covertly for power. Each faction had an intelligence service constructing dossiers on/blackmailing the chiefs and other interesting people associated with other factions. The nomi…

This is a strange perspective on the history. Why are you emphasizing comparison to the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis, and dismissing the similarity to the East Germans? Why not look at what domestic intelligence has actually already done in the US, which seems quite reminiscent of the Stasi?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

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

#102

Post by sdoering » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 4:54 AM UTC

Estragon wrote: post #99

shabbyrobe wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not abuse them. If they let themselves be led to the slaughterhouse that easily and voluntarily maybe they have to feel the pain of being abused to learn?

I get more cynical by the day, the more I read/hear such accounts.

I am/was an idealist, but I catch myself every so often to think, that these people do not deserve anything else. Everything is clearly visible - that possible paths are not that hard to understand. The consequences can be dire if nothing is done - non the less. They keep giving away their and everyone else's privacy in the blink of a thumb-flick on "what ever the next big app is called".

Have I given up? No, I try non the less to inform people surrounding me. Do I believe in positive change? Sadly not anymore.

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

#103

Post by IanCal » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 5:18 AM UTC

kefka wrote: post #75

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…

I think you're coming from this already feeling that privacy is very important. The people you're trying to explain it to probably don't really care.

With that in mind, here's how I'd see you explain in that way to a lay person who doesn't get why it's important:

> I wrote a program called uWho(https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho) for our hacker

You're a hacker?

> With a permissive license (OpenCV) attached to a GPL3 (Qt)

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about already.

> 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.

If I was following, the only thing so far is that you were taking pictures of people and recognised faces and it was really useful, and you're trying to convince me that we should be worried about others taking pictures of us and recognising faces?

> 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?

What would happen? The company can recognise who people are, like facebook can and I already allow and don't care about / like?

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

#104

Post by crisnoble » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 5:24 AM UTC

pkinsky wrote: post #40

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…

Real-life targeted advertising: bus-stop ads that scan your face, look up your private browsing history, and try to sell you the complete works of Nickelback or something equally embarrassing.

The EFF should by a bus ad with this pitch on it.

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

#105

Post by IanCal » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 5:39 AM UTC

rm999 wrote: post #95

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 exp…

I think that actually as you increase surveillance the problem gets simpler. If you're always in view of a camera then I can simply track your motion and I only need to recognise you once. Given that I've seen you in your car, I can already narrow things down significantly.

> Consistently identifying a single person from a database of 100Ms/billions of people

I don't need to, there aren't billions of people who are likely to be at the closest ATM to your house.

> constantly gaining weight, growing facial hair, etc

But I see you several times every single day.

> false positives will become an exponentially bigger problem as you increase the candidate space.

To be honest, I think that this is the most likely thing to scare people, that you won't be allowed to fly because a computer made a mistake and everyone trusts it or can't override it. That the police get called when you go to pick up your son because you're the same height and rough build as a child molester who was released from prison yesterday

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

#106

Post by Silhouette » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 5:47 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #100

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.

People are already ok with being tracked constantly.

You and I must know very different people.

Being resigned to it, feeling they can't do anything about it, or accepting some level of (usually ad-related) tracking in return for some other service are all different to being OK with being tracked constantly.

It's also striking how often people don't realise the full implications of these technologies. They're OK up to a point because nothing bad ever seems to happen to them, until it does. Sometimes they're also OK with it up to a point because they think it's necessary for some greater good, which may or may not actually be true.

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

#107

Post by IanCal » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 5:55 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #44

gknoy wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's unwise to underestimate your fellow humans' propensity to "be a dick", as you put it, even if they don't gain anything more than the satisfaction of treating others poorly. Facial recognition + a database allows POWERFUL and fine grained discrimination! Imagine being able to know ${Things} about people -- via analytics / The Internet -- whenever any prospective customer comes into your store. You could r…

> I think it's unwise to underestimate your fellow humans' propensity to "be a dick"... That tendency exists quite strongly in humans, yes. Unfortunate, but true. On the other hand, businesses also have the tendency to want to make money. If I've got a business, and I make it hard for group X to buy stuff from me, they're probably going to try to find someone else who wants more strongly to make money and/or less str…

> That tendency exists quite strongly in humans, yes. Unfortunate, but true. On the other hand, businesses also have the tendency to want to make money. If I've got a business, and I make it hard for group X to buy stuff from me, they're probably going to try to find someone else who wants more strongly to make money and/or less strongly to be a jerk. And that business will get their money, and I won't.

Which is true, although there are a few rubs:

1. It's not so easy to start a business, and if the group you exclude are small there's very little [edit - forgot to finish this sentence, sorry] incentive to open a new business just to cater for a small proportion of people. Depends on the business, obviously.

2. You're ignoring any influence other customers have. If 90% of your customers threaten to boycott you because you (bake cakes for gay weddings || print leaflets for republicans) it'd be good business sense to not serve that small percentage of your client base.

With 2, consider a "realistic" situation. In the future, all sex offenders will have their photos published on some public crime database. Cue outrage that sex offenders are being served in the local bar (or choose the establishment of your choice), they are then banned. Are people going to open up bars with the motto "sex offenders welcome here!"? To make people more wary of this, what happens when it thinks you're a sex offender because of a false positive?

I'm always really concerned when people argue that the free market will remove discrimination, and perhaps they're right in the long term but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that there was a fair amount of time when people in the US were discriminated against because of the colour of their skin (not to get into a discussion about now as it's not too relevant).

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

#108

Post by OkGoDoIt » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 5:55 AM UTC

cantrevealname wrote: post #34

ksenzee wrote: post #21

As someone with prosopagnosia (neurological inability to recognize faces) I find this incredibly frustrating. My everyday life would be immensely easier with assistive tech that told me the names of everyone I see. And now that the technology exists to develop such a useful device, what do we get instead? Mass societal surveillance.

That would be the killer app for Google Glass. Not just for your situation, but for salesmen, customer service reps, security guards, politicians, or anyone who needs to recognize lots of people, recall names, and bring up an instant profile about the person standing in front of them. (Granted, even this application has serious overtones of societal surveillance.) EDIT: Anyone care to speculate on why Google Glass do…

I briefly worked with a company that made a facial recognition app for Google Glass (http://www.nametag.ws). Google officially banned us but you could still sideload it. The two major issues were assembling the database of faces (we used mainly LinkedIn photos but you really need multiple photos per person in different light/angles to train it well) and hardware performance (we had to do processing server side but even the basic part running on Glass killed the battery and made it run very hot). The hardware is Glass is basically an underclocked original Moto Droid (the one that launched Android 2.0), and is extremely underpowered for doing local face recognition on a large corpus of faces. I imagine a Glass-like device created a few years from now could be much more viable for this sort of thing. As for the database of people, there are companies that will sell you that (FullContact, Spokeo, Pipl, AllThePeople.net, etc) although the photo quality can still be an issue.

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

#109

Post by IanCal » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 6:00 AM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #47

swsieber wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that Target can tell whether you're pregnant or not before you do based on your purchases, I'd assume that online habits encode your preferences a lot more strongly that one would like to think. More info on that weird pregnancy story: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

They can't tell "before you do". They can tell before you tell people, but the woman needs to know she's pregnant before her habits change.

That's definitely true in this story, but is this general statement true?

> the woman needs to know she's pregnant before her habits change.

There are always stories of people who don't realise they're pregnant, do their habits change in a reasonably identifiable way?

This wasn't particularly relevant to the point, I just wondered and thought it was an interesting question.

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

#110

Post by Silhouette » Tue, Oct 06, 2015, 6:01 AM UTC

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…

You're conflating regulating what software you can write with regulating what data you (or anyone else) can collect, use, and share.

It is perfectly possible to restrict, say, the systematic collection of facial images or the commercial or government use of facial images or the transfer of facial images to another party, without impeding casual, incidental use such as taking your own personal photos that sometimes happen to catch someone in the background.