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A crashed advertisement reveals logs of a facial recognition system

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

#341

Post by anentropic »

csmattryder wrote: post #221
mattcoles wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel it was ethical to work on that?

I work on digital signage, our product isn't using facial expression recognition yet, but it has been asked and will eventually be a part of the system. What's the difference between this and an anonymised dataset? No PII is tracked, it's just looking at you and calculating what emotion you're likely feeling to show more targeted advertising. I mean, I'm personally against it but we've got to prove a higher and highe…

it should just be regulated, i.e. banned, to save you the hassle of implementing it

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

#342

Post by _kb »

_kb wrote: 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…

Woah, so this got a bit of interest. To be honest I'm a little surprised this seems to be news to the HN crowd.

I feel a little bad about calling out one API provider specifically, so here's a bunch more: https://www.kairos.com/ https://skybiometry.com/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service... http://www.affectiva.com/ http://www.crowdemotion.co.uk/ http://emovu.com/e/ https://www.faceplusplus.com/

Face tracking, emotional analytics and vision based demographics analysis is a pretty huge industry. There's a entire spectrum of uses for this tech, from the altruistic (psychology labs, humans factors research), to the well, not.

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

#343

Post by mikewhy »

bigbugbag wrote: post #217
abalone wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ethics are simple: If you don't get opt-in consent, many subjects are going to feel violated. Even if you assure them you anonymize the data. It's not enough to put a warning next to the camera because you've already captured them at that point and it's too late. If anywhere it would need to be at the entrance to the store. But guess what? Customers HATE this stuff. The backlash and lost business is not worth it.…

If a store has a warning at the door that this happens inside, it's good because now I can avoid getting inside the store and silently hate and boycott the brand. If a store has a warning label on the device engaging in this, it's bad because it's too late for not entering the store. I'm gonna complain right now at the store manager, maybe call the cops or sue. I'll be vocal about actively hating the store, the brand…

> If a store has a warning at the door that this happens inside.

Don't many shops have a generic "you are under video surveillance"? Wouldn't that also cover something like this?

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

#344

Post by custos »

_kb wrote: 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…

Wearing a baseball cap makes me invisible to their scan...

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

#345

Post by erjjones »

mixedbit wrote: post #237
_kb wrote: 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.

Retailers also use your MAC address from your phone which is always being published unless you take precautions.

http://lifehacker.com/how-retail-stores-track-you-using-your...

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

#346

Post by e12e »

developer2 wrote: post #281
e12e wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bring out the ugly t-shirts! (see: http://jesse-pearson.com/interviews/william-gibson/ from: "(..) What’s interesting with regards to the book while thinking of this stuff is that the garment that sort of helps to save the day is a t-shirt. You call it the ugliest t-shirt in the world." for some expansion on the reference.)

If you're talking about shirts with faces on them, those won't work whatsoever. Even if there is evidence that it appears to work right now, it's an entirely solvable problem today , with very little effort required. a) You're assuming that the AI is looking to find the first face it sees, rather than all faces in view - both your shirt and your real face will be picked up as two separate individuals. Even if it's "o…

No. The idea is that with a need to conduct covert ops in a world filled by automated camera systems, there'd be a back-door built in, such that whenever one tries to retrieve footage of an "ugly shirt" (a special, machine-readable pattern) - that footage would be deleted.

That way a camera blackout/missing footage wouldn't signal a covert action, while at the same time one could go on defending democracy(tm) without worrying creating a media-storm about the tyrannical methods used to ensure Freedom(tm).

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

#347

Post by rubber_duck »

bigbugbag wrote: post #232
edanm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It saddens me that most people refuse to accept that not everybody shares their morals, and that it might be them that are wrong. I'm not saying there isn't an absolute right and wrong, but I certainly don't find this as abhorrent as most people here, apparently.

You'd have a point if this was a general statement, but in the case of automated facial recognition it's almost universally despised across the world. If you're not sharing this position it could be that you are younger or have been subjected to the conditioning of population by industries to make intrusive surveillance technology acceptable to them which has been going on for at least 15+ years afaik.

>If you're not sharing this position it could be that you are younger or have been subjected to the conditioning of population by industries to make intrusive surveillance technology acceptable to them which has been going on for at least 15+ years afaik.

"if you don't agree with me you're either a kid or brainwashed" - nice.

From what I can tell this is anonymous analysis and classification - this kind of info is useful and I don't mind one bit that it's being collected - in fact if the data is accurate then I like it - I can provide feedback without effort. I prefer it much more than being spammed by pollsters or a service tracking and associating behavior with my profile.

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

#348

Post by spuz »

ffriend wrote: post #208

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 opinion of most people here is that facial recognition technology is for the most part creepy if used in a commercial setting. Mine is slightly different. I think it's fine if you want to show me a different advertisement or sign based on an interpretation of my expression. I also think it's ok if you track my position within a mall and see which shops I visit and when. I would draw the line at attaching personally identifiable information to that data such as a name or a photo of my face. Anyone who decides to do that is probably going to cause harm/inconvenience to me (I don't want junk email from shops I happened to visit but didn't buy in).

I should also state that I think the first use of my data is ultimately unprofitable. Will the extra cents you make by advertising cinnabon to depressed looking people or hairdressers to long haired people really offset the cost of developing such a system? If applied to a broad population any customisation effects will be marginal.

I also believe that the non-anonymous tracking system is much more likely to produce value for companies and it would be very tempting when gathering anonymous data to cross reference with actual individual information. My concern about any tracking system is that by the motivation of profit it could easily shift from an ethical to non ethical space.

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

#349

Post by spuz »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #226
ffriend wrote: post #208

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…

It's actually pretty simple - don't use it on people. Advertising? No. Sales? Definitely no. Augmenting that single-player video game so that it adjusts content depending on emotions and gaze of the player? Ok. Better if the player is explicitly told the game will track their reactions though. EDIT: Also, another angle. Even for advertisers / "sales optimization", I'd forgive you if that was a local, on-site system.…

I'm not sure what you mean by your last paragraph. How would facial recognition apply to SaaS products?

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

#350

Post by TeMPOraL »

spuz wrote: post #349
TeMPOraL wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually pretty simple - don't use it on people. Advertising? No. Sales? Definitely no. Augmenting that single-player video game so that it adjusts content depending on emotions and gaze of the player? Ok. Better if the player is explicitly told the game will track their reactions though. EDIT: Also, another angle. Even for advertisers / "sales optimization", I'd forgive you if that was a local, on-site system.…

I'm not sure what you mean by your last paragraph. How would facial recognition apply to SaaS products?

The usual way - many shops buying a "face recognition advertising service" from a single provider, who gets to aggregate all the data.
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