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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

#401
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a machine has much more capabilities than one salesperson. The salesperson doesn't know in what shops you have been before. The salesperson might also not know you talked to his colleague the day before. This is about trust and privacy. You can't trust what they do with your data.

So if the salesman has an eidetic memory it becomes unethical? How about just an above-average one?

Your reply is disingenuous. The problem is not that abuse is not possible in a human-driven system. Of course some gifted salespeople have incredible memories, hypnotic powers of persuasion, and so on. However, you must consider the following:

1) These people are rare in the general population, and demand for their time is likely to be incredibly high. Therefore, they cannot be deployed everywhere, unlike machines.

2) When confronted with a human being in a sales scenario, people have a chance to be on guard against potential manipulative behavior. When the sales scenario becomes ubiquitous and invisible, it is much harder for people to avoid being taken advantage of.

3) Ethics are not so absolute. Something that is only mildly bad at an individual level can have terrible results when thousands are doing it. (Littering, for instance, or illegal hunting/fishing.) This is known as a social trap, and it leads to negative outcomes for everyone involved.

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

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Not on iOS anymore, that value is scrambled on a regular basis.

This is super cool. Was there any announcement or documentation for this?

We used a Cisco Meraki router once for a client and rigged it up to know who was in the office (for fun, to be aware that it could be done). It'd be nice to know the iPhone/iPad scramble themselves if possible.

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

#403
post #19

In Japan at least, before automated facial recognition, cashiers recorded buyer demographics by hand. I would think other places do it too. Edit: Here is what the buttons look like. Gender and age. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/hvc-c-android-prototype20141...

I volunteer at the Boston Museum of Science on Sundays and we also track how many people we interact with at the various activities. We log by group, so log might read "1 man, 1 woman, 2 boys, 1 girl (family)" or "3 women, 10 girls, 12 boys (school group)"

It's really handy to see how many people the activities attract, and who they appeal to most. You're tracked everywhere!

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

#405
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You going to offer me another job that has comparative pay and work-time flexibility? I'll take if one's going, but right now this is my gig. If you want to start a war, have a quick Google for the big players, they'll have this tech in and will be proudly advertising it on their site. The thing is: People don't care. Not your HN reader (evidently), but your Joe Bloggs. Hell, Snowdon told them the Five Eyes are readi…

> You going to offer me another job that has comparative pay and work-time flexibility? I'll take if one's going, but right now this is my gig. That's exactly what bigbugbag meant. You don't really care and are in for the job. That's okay but just be honest here. I could sell useless products to old people and make some money on the side. But I don't because I'm against that.

You can care and be opposed to something and still not stake your job to stop it. I'm against a whole lot of things that I do not spend all my time fighting because I have things to do, or it would be inconvenient as hell.

And some I sacrifice things for. A person can't die on every single hill they happen to fancy :)

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

#406
post #136
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…

Why is this scummy exactly? If a salesperson was to try to sell to you in a store, they would take into account how you appear and act to tailor the sale. There's nothing wrong with that. Why is it suddenly bad if a machine does it?

I find it funny that the store doesn't trust their salespersons to make such a judgement on their own. Probably they hope to do analytics on what kind of people are visiting and when. Selling the data would only make sense if they are able to link it to an identity, I am not sure that they can legally do that.

Well, you never know into what dystophia you are heading...

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

#407

I'm a little surprised about the HN reaction on this one. You guys didn't seem to care about collection of passive biometrics a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11172652 . What's changed?

That's the one benefit of Trump getting elected: half of the US cares about civil liberties and privacy again.

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

#408
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 tried the demo. A little sad, that it sees me as 12 years older than I am, and that I apparently always look angry and disgusted! I'm going to blame it on my glasses and bushy beard, and try to look at the bright side - apparently face scanning systems aren't quite good enough to get a read on me yet. (And try not to be too sad about looking like a grumpy old man) (Anyone else with a glasses, a beard, or other non-…

I wonder if the age error is symmetrical, or if it tends towards guessing lower or higher? It would make for an interesting study.

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

#409
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was blown away by the accuracy of Microsoft's https://how-old.net/ This just kicked it up a notch.

Counterpoint: this tool pegged my 8-year-old as 13 (and she looks younger than her age) and me as 56... well into the double-digit error zone. Someone recently thought I was 30. People aren't any better than computers.

When I was 18, some lady at the community pancake breakfast in my grandpa's small town told my mom that 13 and younger are free. Humans make mistakes too.

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

#410
post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm pretty much sure it's possible to implement given enough training data No, the point of the comment you are replying to is that there are emotions that are impossible to detect using external information. We can hide our emotions very well. The question is to what extent does external emotional information provide monetizable value?

> there are emotions that are impossible to detect using external information. We can hide our emotions very well. This is an assumption which I'm not convinced holds true. Just because we can hide our assumptions well enough to fool other people doesn't necessarily imply that's it's impossible to detect using external information.

I've seen some pretty convincing expressions of emotions from actors who were obviously not at the time, in love, in pain, in anger etc. I'm pretty certain that any system that takes your facial appearance and no other information (e.g. you are an actor, you are currently on a movie set), it would have no way to distinguish genuine from false emotion.
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