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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

#141

Post by cowpig »

My sister works as a lawyer in NYC on these kinds of cases.

I can tell you that when landlords have a financial incentive to get rid of a tenant (as is very often the case in rent-stabilized housing), they can and will do anything in their power to do so, including every possible form of harassment.

A system that allows landlords to track their tenants' activities with a computer, lock out whoever they want individually, whenever they want, is not a good idea.

The balance of power is already crushingly in the landlords' favor.

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

#142

Post by scrollaway »

detaro wrote: post #107
Faaak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Switzerland I've always changed the locks to my apartment and its garage. 1) The landlord is _never_ allowed to enter your house 2) In an emergency, the firemen would just break the door.

GP was talking about the entrance to the building, not the apartment. Having your own keys to the apartment doesn't help much if you only have one key to get into the building.

Yep, sorry for the lack of clarity. I assumed we were talking about building entrances, I've never had magnetic locks on an apartment itself.

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

#143

Post by crooked-v »

FakeComments wrote: post #139
crooked-v wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It would take more development time, so we didn't do it" is not a sufficient excuse for discriminating against one racial group.

But we allow that kind of discrimination based on physical characteristics all the time. Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content? Because there’s a ton of “one size fits all” products which don’t fit the ends of the bell curve, and reflect the choice of manufacturer to not serve all body types. I think it’s a poor choice for a door lock, but I’m not sure I a priori think it’s…

> Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content?

Because society as a whole hasn't spent hundreds of years literally enslaving short people before deciding that strict moral and legal standards are necessary to prevent it from happening again.

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

#144

Post by bobthepanda »

bilbo0s wrote: post #132
crooked-v wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to wonder what the legalities would be here of having a handyman come and remove the front door lock after being locked out at night or the like.

I'm pretty sure that would be illegal in most places. What you have to do is call the management company. It sucks, but I would just advise darker skinned people, who this is likely to be an issue for, to rent only in places without this sort of system. Being locked out once out of every three times you come home is not really tenable.

But then when every large complex moves to this all of a sudden darker skinned people have less housing choice and we’re back in 1950.

We could just not allow these systems.

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

#145

Post by manfredo »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #42
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.

> 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.

Where in the article did it state that people's activities were being tracked? Let alone inferring what they are carrying, how they are dressed. The latter things are the stuff of science fiction. I talked with a guy working on posture recognition for the military. It's hard for cameras to figure out when a guy is holding a rifle, let alone make highly subjective judgements like "how did this person travel to the building?" and "is this person well-dressed?".

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

#146

Post by manfredo »

mgleason_3 wrote: post #90
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.

Hmm, there’s a lot to take exception with in this comment. “Makes sense for publicly subsidized housing (which is what rent control is, in essence). In the US, rent control is when the government controls the amounts charged for rented housing - it’s not “publicly subsidized”. “It’s not like the facial recognition is resulting in any privacy loss...” Ouy, where to even start. Of course it is. Every time you’re tracke…

> “It’s not like the facial recognition is resulting in any privacy loss...” Ouy, where to even start. Of course it is. Every time you’re tracked is a loss of privacy.

This statement is true, every time you're tracked it's a loss of privacy.

That said, you're making an unsubstantiated leap to go from facial recognition to tracking people. Where in the article does it say that people's entry and exit is logged? Where does it say that people's clothing, whether or not they are carrying objects, etc. are being tracked? Unless you can substantiate the claim that facial recognition is being used as a means of tracking people, your comment is not relevant.

From what the article writes, it looks keyed entry systems is being replaced by facial recognition. Unless we have evidence to the contrary, it looks to me that facial recognition is being used exclusively as a key for authentication. This doesn't seem any more tyrannical to me than Apple pushing facial recognition as the default mode of unlocking its latest iPhones.

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

#147

Post by vetinari »

closeparen wrote: post #103
vetinari wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in EU, that's much more complicated. If you have a camera that has any publicly available (not just public, also private-but-unfenced) place in it's FoV, you must register with your local data protection office and fullfill all the requirements (you must prove, how you use, make available, securely store and dispose any recordings). If you don't have any publicly available space in your FoV, you must have a…

Are renters considered co-owners? Even if they are, can't you collect that permission in the lease?

No, renters are not considered co-owners.

I didn't investigate this further beyond my use-case (many co-owners, asking them to agree to anything is like cat herding). Given the protection the renters are getting, I wouldn't be surprised if such a permission would be difficult to get, and the common areas would be considered publicly available.

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

#148

Post by lotsofpulp »

fwip wrote: post #77
grey-area wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I now view this outcome as inevitable. Such systems are already being trialled on the streets of london. However our privacy is not just about face recog - we leave myriad digital traces thousands of times a day (payments, phone, search, maps, likes, car plates, emails, phone calls, store cameras) which can already be used to trace out our lives in excruciating detail. Just one of these factors gives a lot of colour;…

> It may be better to legislate for all this data to be open to all rather than trying to legislate it out of existence. I can't imagine that it would be better for every person on the planet to have access to my face scans at my apartment than just my landlord.

Complete transparency for everything is better than only some entities having all the power. Obviously, we’re not going to be able to achieve privacy, so the only other option is to have everything be transparent.

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

#149

Post by beenBoutIT »

The biggest problem with this is going to be the iPhone-style inconvenience of lining one's head up properly to unlock a door. When the technology gets streamlined and unobtrusive it will be adopted by everyone but career criminals and severe paranoids. Ease of use is the issue, if the new system takes more work and is a pain in the ass people are going to dislike it and complain about 'privacy' because that's the popular topic.

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

#150

Post by 0815test »

crooked-v wrote: post #143
FakeComments wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we allow that kind of discrimination based on physical characteristics all the time. Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content? Because there’s a ton of “one size fits all” products which don’t fit the ends of the bell curve, and reflect the choice of manufacturer to not serve all body types. I think it’s a poor choice for a door lock, but I’m not sure I a priori think it’s…

> Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content? Because society as a whole hasn't spent hundreds of years literally enslaving short people before deciding that strict moral and legal standards are necessary to prevent it from happening again.

> Because society as a whole hasn't spent hundreds of years literally enslaving short people

Actually, they have done exactly that. For many centuries before appropriate nutrition became essentially ubiquitous, there was indeed a highly-significant correlation between height and social class - and the lowest class often faced near-slavery conditions in surprisingly recent times, especially outside Western Europe. Of course, you're right that "strict moral and legal standards" are rather lacking on the issue. I'm not sure that we would agree on whether that's a desirable state of affairs.

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