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A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

nytimes.com

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Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

#41

Post by pavel_lishin »

gist wrote: post #29
alister wrote: post #10

One result of doors being controlled by facial recognition -- or any other kind of biometric system -- is that you have to get permission from someone whenever you have a regular visitor. You can no longer give your girlfriend, boyfriend, dog sitter, relatives, or whoever you wish a key or access card to your home. You have to enroll that person in the facial database. And whoever is doing the enrolling can ask for l…

> And whoever is doing the enrolling can ask for lots of further information about your visitor Why are you jumping to the conclusion that is has to go this way? Very possible that a landlord would be happy to simply have someone log a face and then go back to that person if there was a particular and legal reason to know who the face was. Now sure if they wanted maybe they could google image search the face and find…

> Why are you jumping to the conclusion that is has to go this way?

Same reason we put on a seatbelt when we go for a drive.

Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

#42

Post by pavel_lishin »

manfredo wrote: post #33

Makes sense for publicly subsidized housing (which is what rent control is, in essence). A lot of people sublet their price controlled housing under the table. It's not like the facial recognition is resulting in any privacy loss for those that legally live there. The government already knows their permanent address.

> It's not like the facial recognition is resulting in any privacy loss for those that legally live there.

Except knowing exactly when they come and go. And depending on how the camera works, how they're dressed, what they're carrying, how they got there, who they said goodbye to on the sidewalk, etc., etc.

Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

#43

Post by pavel_lishin »

rb808 wrote: post #37
envy2 wrote: post #5

This is almost surely about catching "unauthorized" tenants (e.g., medium/long-term guests) and finding grounds for eviction. One of the many sorts of ubiquitous lease provisions that landlords are more than happy to turn a blind eye to for "desirable" market-rate tenants who pay on time each month, but will vigorously enforce against others.

Yes, but surely this if fair right? There is a real problem with people subletting rent stabilized apartments. This helps to keep the apartment for those that are supposed to benefit.

> There is a real problem with people subletting rent stabilized apartments.

Is it a problem that could be solved with regular cameras? Is it a problem that costs more than this system? Are the potential problems brought on by this system worth incurring to attempt to solve the other problem?

Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

#44

Post by jonathankoren »

Unsurprisingly, this technology, and presumably utilizing the surveillance to find any reason for eviction, is being applied to poor people. You rarely find this being rolled out in luxury apartments. Let's be honest here, poor people are stereotyped as being lazy, sneaky, untrustworthy, and stupid, so they have to be subjective to a more paternalism.

Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

#45

Post by cubano »

gist wrote: post #25
mLuby wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% agree. Relatedly, does a landlord have the right to know when you are in your home? Because that's a side effect of this (which could already be possible by monitoring things like electrical usage). Asking in both legal and ethical senses (which I expect are different).

Nothing to prevent owner of a building (landlord or other person/entity) from installing a camera and taking a picture of everyone entering the building (outside the door). [1] Inside (legally) maybe the same no expectation or privacy in the lobby of a public building. The end result of the landlord knowing when you are in your home does not change that. [1] Same principle that allows you to photograph the police out…

Yes, but surely that is miles away from a system that automatically recognizes and then logs that info to a database. right?

In your case, the landlord does indeed have a very hard to search record of your comings and goings, in mine it's an up to the second report.

Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

#46

Post by closeparen »

alister wrote: post #10

One result of doors being controlled by facial recognition -- or any other kind of biometric system -- is that you have to get permission from someone whenever you have a regular visitor. You can no longer give your girlfriend, boyfriend, dog sitter, relatives, or whoever you wish a key or access card to your home. You have to enroll that person in the facial database. And whoever is doing the enrolling can ask for l…

This is already accomplished by having difficult-to-duplicate keys or fobs for the building entrance, which is a pretty standard feature of apartment living. And yes, some management companies are very stingy with extra fobs, as a control against having extra people in the unit who are not on the lease, or Airbnb, or whatever. You can tell you are in a building with a lot of illegal extra tenants when the keyfob-controlled gates are always propped open, or there are always people waiting to tailgate through them.

Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

#47

Post by Cenk »

ohazi wrote: post #34
mc32 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the system even care about color in the first place? Can't it measure other facial characteristics, measurements?

It doesn't care about color. Dark faces reflect less light, making them more challenging to photograph well. If you have less light illuminating a scene, you'll have more noise and less contrast/dynamic range in the image. You need these things to extract features reliably. It's physics, not racial bias.

Yes, but the result – people actually using door locks with a failure rate of 30% for black women — reflects racial bias. If the locks had the same failure for all people they would definitely not be deemed production ready.

Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

#48

Post by failrate »

jacques_chester wrote: post #17
afiori wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you do not imagine that people will compile a profile of all your random photos where you are just background. (maybe google does, but that would be extremely creepy too)

The LinkNYC monoliths have cameras[0]. If they're not already selling or planning to sell this data for exactly this kind of aggregation, I would be very surprised. (They swear they have a privacy policy but frankly, I just don't believe them). [0] https://theintercept.com/2018/09/08/linknyc-free-wifi-kiosks...

Even if they had a privacy policy, if the data leaked, that policy would be irrelevant.

This is an additional problem on top of the obvious problems with mass surveillance. You have to trust the Observer to have an appropriate intent. You have to trust that they can secure the data. You have to trust that they will not hire a malicious person Who will misuse their access to the data. You have to trust that they won't be sold to a company that will revoke all of the above considerations.

This is far too much to trust, and none of it is in the control of the observed.

Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

#49

Post by cubano »

pwg wrote: post #19

The privacy concerns here are huge, but the much more direct issue is from this quote from the article: > the same programs failed to identify darker-skinned women up to one-third of the time. A one-third failure rate means that on average, for every three times you try to return home, you are likely to have the system fail to identify you at least once. Being locked out, as a resident, one-third of the number of tim…

That is an almost impossible stat to believe.

My last contract I worked developing a biometric system to extract a consistent "headshot" from all the various mugshots from arrest records in the US, and I worked with the Kairos system to extract pixel coordinate data from the images.

The API calls gave me a lot more then just pixel information, and one of the data points was skin color and it was correct like 98% of the time.

Now, of course, it's possible that posed mugshots deliver a much more consistent image quality then surveillance cams would, but 33% seems suspiciously high to me.

Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings

#50

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

ohazi wrote: post #34
mc32 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the system even care about color in the first place? Can't it measure other facial characteristics, measurements?

It doesn't care about color. Dark faces reflect less light, making them more challenging to photograph well. If you have less light illuminating a scene, you'll have more noise and less contrast/dynamic range in the image. You need these things to extract features reliably. It's physics, not racial bias.

I agree, but I guess there could be unintended bias in the product development process.

In particular, when using empirical testing to decide if the system is sufficiently reliable, accidentally using an unhelpful sample of faces.

Or even earlier, when selecting the camera and lighting technologies to use.

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