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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

#61

Post by closeparen »

sithadmin wrote: post #52
closeparen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-cont…

If nothing else: there's a market for fighting back against this. KeyMe kiosks (usually found at US supermarkets, pharmacies, etc.) have had RFID fob/card cloning capabilities for a while now. You scan the fob/card at the kiosk, then they clone it to a sticker and send it to you via mail.

Interesting. I wonder if they have actually productized the security research on HID iClass, etc. or if they are only supporting simpler credentials with no cryptography.

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

#62

Post by abeppu »

omegaworks wrote: post #21
kaycebasques wrote: post #8

I get where it’s coming from. I know a guy who’s been subleasing a rent-controlled studio in Nob Hill for years. It’s not a money grab, I think he’s just passing through his own cost. He’s just holding onto it as a backup.

I know a guy who calls himself an "environmental consultant" subleasing three rooms in his rent-controlled four room Nob Hill apartment. Cycled through a second subtenant in one of the rooms while I was there and raised the rent $400. I doubt he works.

Maybe I'm misreading your tone, but you seem to find this distasteful. If this guy was stopped from doing this, and the landlord evicted him, the landlord would just capture that value. The distinction I don't understand is, why is it might be acceptable for the landlord to try to want market rate for the apartment, but not acceptable for the tenant to want market rate for a room when a new subtenant starts?

Perhaps in general, you'd like people to support themselves with work, rather than rent-seeking. I agree. But surely that view should produce at least as strong a criticism of the landlord as of the tenant?

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

#63

Post by r3bl »

Cenk wrote: post #31
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?

Probably a consequence of being mostly developed by and tested on white people Edit: Take a look at this video, it illustrates the problem quite well with a soap dispenser as an example: https://twitter.com/nke_ise/status/897756900753891328

I distinctly remember this example (about HP's laptops) being all over the Internet a decade ago: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/hp-webcam

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

#65

Post by jfk13 »

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.

Given how hard it is, even with a pretty high-quality camera, to get a photo of our black cat that actually shows her (charming) face effectively, I find this easy to believe.

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

#66

Post by envy2 »

closeparen wrote: post #46
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-cont…

I've yet to meet an apartment key fob I haven't been able to clone with a 'universal' RFID cloner gadget I bought in Shenzhen for $150 a few years back and some blank cards of various frequencies. You can also link it to a Aliyun/Tencent Cloud account for compute power to crack some older/low-end encrypted tags. I even managed to successfully clone a HID badge from work that was supposedly clone-proof...

Most landlords, in my experience, don't invest in the high-end RFID systems that have real security.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

sithadmin wrote: post #52
closeparen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-cont…

If nothing else: there's a market for fighting back against this. KeyMe kiosks (usually found at US supermarkets, pharmacies, etc.) have had RFID fob/card cloning capabilities for a while now. You scan the fob/card at the kiosk, then they clone it to a sticker and send it to you via mail.

[deleted]

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

#68

Post by jfk13 »

kaycebasques wrote: post #8

I get where it’s coming from. I know a guy who’s been subleasing a rent-controlled studio in Nob Hill for years. It’s not a money grab, I think he’s just passing through his own cost. He’s just holding onto it as a backup.

I doubt this was the intended purpose of rent control regulations.

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

#70

Post by Mirioron »

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?

If NSA employees abuse their surveillance powers and get away with it, then so will random landlords.

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