The Circle
Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door
81–90 of 128 posts
Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ring their doorbell. When they answer, tell them "Hi, this isn't the house I was looking for, but you've got that surveillance system in place, so I don't want to be registered as 'suspicious'. OK, sorry not sorry for wasting your time, goodbye."
...for every house? I don't go up to random houses and ring their doorbells to begin with, because nobody does that anymore.
Nobody? Where I live (suburbs, New England, USA), it's pretty common to be visited in person by local political candidates and/or volunteers during campaign season. I doubt this is in any way unique to my neighborhood.
Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get why this could be problematic under the wrong context. But if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option. This is not because I'm paranoic and I think right away that anyone showing up to my door will murder or rob me, but because s…
I work in information security and basically every IS system does exactly that. Tracks potentially suspicious behavior but doesn't act on it unless it becomes a pattern or something bad happens. As soon as something bad happens, the system has a history of all the suspicious behavior that actor had done before the actual crime. It doesn't matter if it's an IP address scanning your network then hitting one system, the…
I know nothing about Next Door but from reading the comments it seems like the problem is having this information in untrained hands.
I'd go with 'undisciplined' hands versus 'untrained' hands, while admitting I'm unsure of the best way to articulate the difference in a manner that is empathetic towards the desires of residents who just want to feel like they're safe on their block but also addresses a certain pragmatic reality of what happens when 'good intentions' results in a patrol car pulling up next to you in your own neighborhood.
The reasonable expectation of your neighbors would be to assume they're normal people like you, not necessarily that they be trained in surveillance, criminal profiling or tracking persons of interest but instead disciplined in their vigilance as thoughtful and watchful community members who act when there is something demonstrably out of the norm that could affect the neighborhood.
Again, not sure how I can best articulate that thought, or even what steps a community has to take to avoid everyone "narcing" on everyone else for boring, mundane behavior (say, like for instance, retreading your steps through the neighborhood after you lost your phone or some other item the night before) while still remaining active enough to do the right thing when you see someone you know isn't your neighbor picking up packages off someone's doorstep.
Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door
#84It is not the technology that is dangerous but the scale and manner of its deployment. Patented, opaque, closed source, championed by mega-corporations closely allied with powerful governments, entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage... these are the real concerning…
> a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by, but with a human Not many people can afford their own good human security guard. Not everyone lives in areas where the police department is properly funded either.
That's not really the point the parent is making. The problem isn't using an unattended system performing the function of a security guard -- because nobody's arguing that security guards are a tantamount to a surveillance state. It's that a single company operating all of these autonomous security guards gives them, and anyone with power to compel them, a level of viability which simply didn't exist before.
Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door
#85Ok, now you just have to combine the cameras with a social-credit-as-a-service ecosystem to keep your suspicious people list up to date and one or two of these guys [1] mounted on every front porch for automatic suspicious people deterrence - and we can get a nice Black Mirror style scenario where you will be physically incapable of entering certain parts of the city if you pissed off the wrong algorithm.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ys1e...
Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get why this could be problematic under the wrong context. But if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option. This is not because I'm paranoic and I think right away that anyone showing up to my door will murder or rob me, but because s…
"if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option." This sort of thing is one of the reasons why I fear these systems. A world where this is common is a world where it's no longer safe to take a stroll through your own neighborhood.
You've got all the rights in the world to walk by my house on the sidewalk and doing so an unlimited number of times will raise no suspicion from me.
The minute you cross onto my property you're going to show up on multiple cameras that are pointed right at the boundary line. You rights to do whatever you want stop when you cross that line.
I dont think you could convince me that this makes you any less safe.
Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door
#87It is not the technology that is dangerous but the scale and manner of its deployment. Patented, opaque, closed source, championed by mega-corporations closely allied with powerful governments, entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage... these are the real concerning…
"After all, a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by" Yes, but the essential difference is that the good old security guard isn't photographing everyone passing by and putting those pictures into a database.
I mean, he or she is collecting images with their eyes and storing them in their brain. We're fine with that because it's only local storage--the police can't just plug a network cord into your security guard and suck out all the images and timestamps every hour.
I think facial recognition door systems are a fine idea if they can be implemented like a doorman: local storage only, carefully trained on local data. With current technology that would be impossible or extremely expensive, though.
Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
"if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option." This sort of thing is one of the reasons why I fear these systems. A world where this is common is a world where it's no longer safe to take a stroll through your own neighborhood.
You've got all the rights in the world to walk by my house on the sidewalk and doing so an unlimited number of times will raise no suspicion from me. The minute you cross onto my property you're going to show up on multiple cameras that are pointed right at the boundary line. You rights to do whatever you want stop when you cross that line. I dont think you could convince me that this makes you any less safe.
It seems impossible to point cameras face high at a property line, but not capture images from beyond the property line. If you have a sidewalk in front of your yard, the difference between being on your property or not is like a foot. You're going to capture every single person who walks by.
That's obviously fine for you, the property owner, camera operator, and a very reasonable person. But, imagine every house working that way as you walk around your neighborhood. Is everyone as reasonable as you?
Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
...for every house? I don't go up to random houses and ring their doorbells to begin with, because nobody does that anymore.
Nobody? Where I live (suburbs, New England, USA), it's pretty common to be visited in person by local political candidates and/or volunteers during campaign season. I doubt this is in any way unique to my neighborhood.
Campaign season is an outlier, and I've had that happen... well, I can count the number of times on one hand, since a decade ago.
Re: Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door
#90Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home. This has to be the worst part of it, if you've ever been part of a suburban neighborhood that uses NextDoor as a community tool you'll know that Ring doorbell videos of "others" crank the pearl-clutching paranoia of bored homeowners up to 11. The comme…
I get why this could be problematic under the wrong context. But if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option. This is not because I'm paranoic and I think right away that anyone showing up to my door will murder or rob me, but because s…
If this system kept the info locally at your place, and had sane defaults for erasing the data ( 30 days?) - with options, I'd be more comfortable with that.
If you or some grandma install a cloud system that auto sends my info to multiple third parties I would think that is worse than creepy.
I could see grubhub delivery people end up at wrong adresses, a system detecting unusual arrival at 9pm, send alert, the system pulls other data about this person, combines it. This is shared with multiple groups of people. Now humans look through it and see her going to the sex toy store earlier in the day and the abortion clinic and the (insert non-popular religious place here) - and whatever.
All it takes is one person in multiple groups to get heated about this person's lifetsyle or 'suspicious activity' to put out a pull over and find some reason to get more info, write a ticket, fine, get them to rack up other issues.
In an extreme situation you end up one of the cog wheels that started a Sandra Bland situation because a suspicions wrong address was given via GPS to a delivery driver.
Even without wrongful deaths, having people look into your life like that and make jokes about you or whatever is pretty lame.
At least when this happens with Msoft's one drive, one could say that someone agreed to the terms of lack of privacy with the corp. Not that I would buy that as 100% true in 100% of most cases, but at least then it could be argued.