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China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

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Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#81

Post by jbob2000 »

joe_the_user wrote: post #69
jbob2000 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it gets built, I can count on thousands of my countrymen to install it improperly, lose the documents, mail the cheques late, accidentally lose equipment, and fail to plug it in. Don’t worry, systems like this are incredibly fragile. You could spray paint the cameras and force the government into an attrition war (I can spray paint them faster than you can replace them, and paint is cheap).

There are plenty of camera designs that are essentially invisible. There can be plenty of those cameras that are installed in an overlapping fashion. If you want to go vandalizing the visible cameras, you might get entered into the arrest queue somewhere but indeed the police likely have more pressing issues. Sure, if the powers-that-be get nervous, any sweep would miss a lot of subversives while picking up plenty of…

I'm always so surprised by this community. In discussions about self driving cars and AI, everyone says "the tech isn't there yet", "it's weak because of X scenario", etc.

But talk about cameras and surveillance? The tech is everywhere and can do everything with perfect accuracy and will come for you and your babies if you even sneeze wrong!. Come on.

Having worked with security camera systems (I used to install them) let me tell you something: the cameras are shit, the quality they produce is shit, clients are cheap as fuck and don't want to repair them, they break constantly, the software is terrible to use... I could go on.

We are a very long way away from the dystopia you are describing. People will gladly unintentionally fuck this up long before it becomes what you're fearing it will be.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#82

Post by mentat »

muraiki wrote: post #60
marmaduke wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accelerometer in a smart phone might be sufficient to identify gait parameters which map to stress, relaxation etc. Why bother with cameras?

If the goal is to police and/or suppress, using this system means that your targets don't have to carry a phone (and that you don't need to have access to the phone's data).

There are ways to induce people to carry the instruments of their surveillance with them (including phones).

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#83

Post by logfromblammo »

new_guy wrote: post #58
jbob2000 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it gets built, I can count on thousands of my countrymen to install it improperly, lose the documents, mail the cheques late, accidentally lose equipment, and fail to plug it in. Don’t worry, systems like this are incredibly fragile. You could spray paint the cameras and force the government into an attrition war (I can spray paint them faster than you can replace them, and paint is cheap).

When the price of getting caught spray painting cameras is you and your family getting executed, or being sent to a 're-education camp', would you still do it? No matter how 'incredibly fragile' you perceive the system to be? This is already a daily reality for certain minorities in some countries already. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne94dg/jingwang-a...

If that's the price for spray painting cameras, the marginal additional punishment for getting caught murdering those who are arresting the spray-painters is no longer sufficient to deter me from attempting it.

Once you go full family execution, that's pretty much the limit of escalation against an individual. If you're willing and able to destroy everything and everyone I care about, there is no longer any bound you can control on what I might be willing to do to prevent that, or avenge it, and you are now relying entirely on my own ethical reticence and my resource limitations to avoid me engaging in acts of terrorism against your nation-state and its loyalists.

And that's the practical argument for proportional punishments, if your government is so dysfunctional that there is no moral argument for them. If you lock up all the Uighurs just for existing, for example, you may find that the ones who escape your pogrom are more willing to fight, and to fight dirty.

Realistically, we should probably be talking about vandalism of surveillance equipment in terms of how many cameras or camera-equivalents you could be compelled by force to replace whenever you are caught destroying one. And that is balanced by how likely you are to be caught when destroying one. Which depends somewhat on how many cameras/snitches in the area are fully operational.

There's probably an optimal camera-destroying algorithm to be discovered in there somewhere.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#84

Post by temp-dude-87844 »

cimi_ wrote: post #46

Setting who wants to do this aside in order to avoid the constant 'X is worse than Y' arguments. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that in a near future we will have cameras that can do much more than identification on a massive scale. It may be easy to track things like how stressed, healthy, sober etc. people are without their consent or without them even noticing. And this would be precise , not speculativ…

This kind of world gets built by some people who are excited to work towards this goal, but also by a much larger group of people for whom meeting their daily needs outweighs the abstract, distant drawbacks that they can pretend to rationalize away.

It will be built through economic coercion appealing to their livelihoods, and the impacts will be perceived as externalities. Incidentally, this is the same way most of the modern world got built over the last several centuries, with those having to work to earn their keep taking on various risks to enrich themselves ostensibly to provide for their families: mining, military service, or data mining others' personal information to sell ads; their participation in these has far-reaching impacts on the world, but gets distributed over a large population and avoids hitting close to home.

Some people can't rationalize this away, so (in a low-violence society) they quit and do something else. Given enough time, the workers who are uneasy will be replaced by people who have no such qualms. They, and their bosses, will make good money until an outraged public prompts government regulations to catch up. By that point, they will likely have a seat at the table. In an authoritarian society, or when the state itself is the actor, there's even less of a chance of this balance.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#85

Post by vokep »

coliveira wrote: post #38
bsamuels wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont remember anything in the snowden docs about the NSA trying to track the movement of all american citizens. Comparing what the NSA does to what China does is like comparing the treatment of women in the US and Saudi Arabia

Of course, Snowden was only able to review what he saw 5 years ago or more. Why you have any doubts that the NSA, with ample resources to track and control, would use techniques similar to what the Chinese do? Do we really need another Snowden to realize this obvious fact?

Because while sure they may be working on any sinister form of control possible, the NSA has to do it in secret, which makes it a bit harder to trample on rights. In China it isn't secret, its just the way things are.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#86

Post by mentat »

jbob2000 wrote: post #81
joe_the_user wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of camera designs that are essentially invisible. There can be plenty of those cameras that are installed in an overlapping fashion. If you want to go vandalizing the visible cameras, you might get entered into the arrest queue somewhere but indeed the police likely have more pressing issues. Sure, if the powers-that-be get nervous, any sweep would miss a lot of subversives while picking up plenty of…

I'm always so surprised by this community. In discussions about self driving cars and AI, everyone says "the tech isn't there yet", "it's weak because of X scenario", etc. But talk about cameras and surveillance? The tech is everywhere and can do everything with perfect accuracy and will come for you and your babies if you even sneeze wrong! . Come on. Having worked with security camera systems (I used to install the…

People said facial recognition was absolutely impossible a decade ago. Now we can remap one face to another in real time. The tech is there.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#87

Post by logfromblammo »

Gabriel_Martin wrote: post #73
24gttghh wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walk without rhythm, and you will attract the autocrats?

I've got no rhythm, who could ask for anything more?

Where else on the Internet can you find Gershwin and Herbert tied together by machine vision gait analysis?

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#88

Post by PhasmaFelis »

otto2 wrote: post #2

This will cause people to start walking on the street in the same way as Fremen in Frank Herbert's Dune, by varying frequency and step length in order not to attract a (government) worm.

Which will make the staggering oddballs much easier to detect by human review of the footage, or by police/informants in person.

It's like that anti-face-ID makeup that covers your face with dazzle patterns. It may work as a visible act of protest, but it won't actually protect your privacy.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#89

Post by krustyburger »

nabla9 wrote: post #24

1. Gait detector is functional. 2. Countermeasure: use stone in the shoe, tape and other things to fool the gait detector. 3. Counter-countermeasure: detect artificial gaits. Everyone unrecognized with artificial gait is person of interest.

It sounds like the Ministry of Silly Walks may need to be folded into MI5.

Re: China can apparently now identify citizens based on the way they walk

#90

Post by logfromblammo »

dpwm wrote: post #41
nabla9 wrote: post #24

1. Gait detector is functional. 2. Countermeasure: use stone in the shoe, tape and other things to fool the gait detector. 3. Counter-countermeasure: detect artificial gaits. Everyone unrecognized with artificial gait is person of interest.

4. Counter-counter-countermeasure: wheels.

Use of skateboards (and Heelys) is already punished in the US.
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