Live data from Hacker News

A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

twitter.com

241–250 of 550 posts

Re: A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

#241
post #163
post #2

Well, that's disturbing. I bet we'll see much more of this in the coming days.

How is this disturbing? its just like some a public webcam that gets used to identify people. If it is in the public you have no privacy. If you want privacy go home as soon as you are out of your house you lose your privacy. I am a big voter for privacy in your home and private but out in the public your are not private anymore and therefore privacy falls away. Privacy and private kinda go hand in hand. you cant hav…

Utter crap.

Just because I am not in my house does not mean I consent to being tracked everywhere I go. We make the rules in our society, and with enough political will we can restrict this stuff.

Re: A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had same issue when visiting the US. I tried some fake numbers but it wouldn't accept it (my actual postal code has letters, so that wasn't possible), so I just ended up paying by cash.

Did you try your postal code minus the letters? Afaik[1] usually only the numbers in your address are verified anyway. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Verification_System

My UK postal code only has two numeric digits, whereas I seem to recall the US gas pumps require five digits. Just means you can't pay at the pump.

Re: A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

#243
post #15

You'd be surprised / scared / outraged if you knew how common this is. Any time you've been in a public place for the past few years, you've likely been watched, analysed and optimised for. Advertising in the physical world is just as scummy as it's online equivalent. Check out the video here http://sightcorp.com/ for an ultra creepy overview. You can even try their live demo: https://face-api.sightcorp.com/demo_basi…

I was very unhappy to discover that shoes now often have RFIDs built into soles. This + anti-theft RFIDs readers that are already deployed by the entry of most stores can allow to easily assign unique ids to shoppers.

Would putting my newly bought shoes into a microwave be a good countermeasure?

Re: A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

#244

Okay, time to start wearing ski masks and Santa Claus costumes in public at all times.

John Cleese took part in a show where he tested different ways to fool facial recognition and large sunglasses were enough most of the time.

Also IR LEDs: http://boingboing.net/2008/02/20/infrared-leds-make-y.html

Re: A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

#245
post #51

Oh look, Ghostery's product pitch comes in handy now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKzyifAvC_U

Ghostery was this tool aimed at privacy minded people that collected their data to provide advertisers for their effort of defeating measures taken by privacy minded people. No way I will trust this ever.

Re: A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

#246
post #196
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you give them a mobile phone number (which they all ask for) they will simply use that to track you far more closely than than can with a postcode

How? As far as I know a commercial company can't get your location or other personal information just by knowing your mobile phone number?

Buying data lists. You usee your mobile number to get your cinema ticket - or whatever - the cinema sells that data. Do you get package alerts when you have a parcel due, now your phone number is joined to that address, plus presumably the credit card companies sell their data (?).

Companies amalgamate that data, then sell lookups of varying degrees.

Screwfix in the UK gather a lot of personal data as part of their sales process, they're the least covert about data gathering I've seen.

Re: A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

#247

I saw a pitch for this tech 5 years ago. Not sure the name of the company. The idea is they can measure engagement (how long you looked), approximate age and sex. Five years ago it didn't seem so sinister. A lot has happened since then, I guess.

It was sinister 20 years ago (probably even before that but I'm not aware of it), and was a problem enough for the industry that they looked for way to condition the population to accept the technology over a few generations.

Re: A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

#248

I saw a pitch for this tech 5 years ago. Not sure the name of the company. The idea is they can measure engagement (how long you looked), approximate age and sex. Five years ago it didn't seem so sinister. A lot has happened since then, I guess.

I don't see why it is sinister today, so they show healthy food to women and meat to men . Seems like a win-win situation. I think this is what they did, anyway.

Why would it be sinister to have an automated eye able to instantly sort humans in dubious categories ?

Maybe in a different political context where one category is sent to death camps, another to forced labor camps, etc.

Re: A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

#249

As someone working on a similar project (specifically, emotion recognition) I'm highly interested to hear how such a product should look like to be not considered unethical. So far from the comments I see that: - it should be made clear that you are being analyzed e.g. by big yellow sticker near the camera - no raw data should be stored - it should be used to collect statistics, not identify individuals (?) Is it suf…

The only ethical possibility in my view is for it to not exist. I don't like having my emotions manipulated to make me buy more stuff, regardless of whether I am anonymized or not. But then again, I think similarly of a lot of the non-targeted advertising; the recognition just add whole new level of disgusting.

Re: A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

#250
post #3

I wonder how accurate these measurements are in practice. They could just be placeholder implementations, right?

20 years ago they were adequately accurate in university lab experiments, 10 years ago it was very accurate, nowadays it is scary how accurate and fast this is.
Post reply on HN