America is turning against facial-recognition software • Hacker News Board

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#81

Post by Loughla » Fri, May 24, 2019, 2:17 PM UTC

johnrbent wrote: post #77

There is a lot of sensationalism (see title of article) and high, anxious emotions around facial recognition right now, which really is to be expected at this point. But it is muddying the rational conversations we should be having about it. Can Amazon lessen Rekognition's bias towards white people (ie. bright pixels)? Yes. Get over that. This article completely whiffed on an important point regarding police use of f…

The problem I have with your statement is that it seems to put 'brilliant engineers' on some kind of magical pedestal.

Engineers, much like police, are humans. Therefore they hold biases, they can be short-sighted, and they may not understand many of the long-term ramifications of their jobs.

All this does is move the power and bias up the chain from police to engineers while simultaneously making some very, very powerful decisions about what privacy is and what your rights are in society with 0 oversight from the actual society. In fact, police are (in theory) beholden to politicians and the voting public right now. If piss-poor decisions are made based on faulty software from software conglomerate A, who do we hold accountable?

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#82

Post by danShumway » Fri, May 24, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

phissk wrote: post #58

mnw21cam wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I see your Down Syndrome point, and raise you Autism/Asperger Syndrome. Alright, there isn't currently a test that would enable people with Autism/Asperger Syndrome to be systematically aborted, but it isn't so hard to imagine a future where it would be possible. Given the high proportion of people in this forum with these conditions, how do we feel about this?

Please note that you're not aborting 'people' ... just a thing that might become a person. You're giving (actual) people the opportunity to choose to have healthier families. - Note that I say 'healthier families' specifically because willfully passing on genetic features that disadvantage your children burdens not just them but your entire family unit.

This still caries an uncomfortable implication that Downs and Autism are inherently negative traits, and that people who have them would be better off not having existed in the first place.

Depending on where you fall on the fetal personhood debate, preventing someone from existing is much better than killing them. But that doesn't mean the choice can't reveal negative things about society's overall attitudes towards people in those groups. If you're a member of one of these groups, it feels bad to have someone tell you that a fundamental part of your personality is something that ought to be eliminated from society in general.

And of course autistic people and their families often have hard lives, but a large portion of that difficulty comes from social and infrastructure problems. We're not good at building societies that are easy for differently abled people to interact with.

I want to make an analogy that should hopefully make the problem more clear. It's easy to make a case that being gay or transgender socially disadvantages both a person and their overall family unit. Raising a transgender child is going to be harder than raising someone that conforms to strict gender-rules -- you're going to have a few difficult conversations, and you're going to fight with a few systems, and you're occasionally going to have to deal with jerks telling you you've messed up your kid. None of this is right or fair, and we're getting a little bit better, but it's still a problem.

If there was a way to detect someone's future sexual orientation and identity in the womb, would you be comfortable allowing families to make abortion decisions based on that information? If that technology had existed in the 1980s where being transgender was even harder than it is today, would you have been comfortable with it being used then? Would gay and transgender rights have made the kind of progress we've seen if that technology had been available and unregulated?

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#83

Post by yusi-san » Fri, May 24, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

vfc1 wrote: post #55

It's like nuclear power, technology is what we make of it. Do we want to use it for criminal purposes only, effectively to almost make it impossible for someone to commit a violent crime and get away with it and make a much safer society? I'm all for it, there are some nasty people out there, serial killers, pedophilians, drug cartels. This technology deployed at scale would make these crimes much harder to get away…

The thing is it depends of what you call 'criminal' on the moment, right ?

And when you know you're watched, you start self-censoring to adapt what should be the 'right thing' to avoid blame or judgment.

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#84

Post by Loughla » Fri, May 24, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

povertyworld wrote: post #41

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been numerous issues where corpora of peoples faces have been insufficiently stocked with a particular racial group, in such cases people's faces might not register as faces and therefore be shut out of whatever the facial recognition is supposed to implement. For example facial recognition at a high priced building, suddenly non-white people can't get in because you did not show a real face at the scanner…

The problem with an "it's racist" strawman is that all the people selling this stuff have to do is frame it so NOT using it is racist. I don't think it would be hard to argue that a face scan is going to have less implicit bias than a poorly trained security guard or bored cop working overtime. So maybe it's racist to not use facial recognition, since that leaves room for human prejudice.

How does software not leave room for human prejudice? Who decides what data is used to feed the thing?

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#85

Post by johaugum » Fri, May 24, 2019, 2:23 PM UTC

coding123 wrote: post #57

vfc1 wrote: post #55

It's like nuclear power, technology is what we make of it. Do we want to use it for criminal purposes only, effectively to almost make it impossible for someone to commit a violent crime and get away with it and make a much safer society? I'm all for it, there are some nasty people out there, serial killers, pedophilians, drug cartels. This technology deployed at scale would make these crimes much harder to get away…

Ski mask. You might catch/convict a guy with it, but soon after a lot of people are just going to wear them all the time.

The same fundamentals used in facial recognition can be applied to 3D pose estimation for gait recognition. This allows identification of a person without biometric features like a face or iris [1].

Facial recognition is used as a catch-all term because it's easily understood, but the deep-learning behind it is much more widely applicable.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.06512

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#86

Post by Loughla » Fri, May 24, 2019, 2:24 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #27

grenoire wrote: post #3

This has been debated extensively on HN (and is still being debated actively), but all I hope is that people realise sooner or later that the level of safety you can acquire in a society is inversely related to the level of privacy individuals can have. What I personally hope for is that people achieve a balance between safety and privacy.

This is a meaningless statement without a threat profile. Sure if everyone lives in a police state under the thumb of the government you're safer from petty crime but you're a heck of a lot less safe from government abuse.

Look at the news cycle. Most stories are about how crime is everywhere and your family is in danger (nevermind that the local news channel in Northwest Iowa had to report from Alabama to find some blood and gore), meanwhile, the government is fighting a noble war against terrorism in some far-off country.

I don't generally subscribe to conspiracy theories, but I do genuinely believe we're (in the US at least) being groomed for some sort of repressive state apparatus using this type of software to 'keep us safe' in the next decade or two.

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#87

Post by jasonlotito » Fri, May 24, 2019, 2:25 PM UTC

stared wrote: post #73

xena wrote: post #2

Good. This kind of software is a mirror to the data fed into it. People on the edges of society (that the people making the mirror might either intentionally or accidentally ignore) will get fucked over tremendously by this technology. We should put a complete ban on it. Even if it means gimping my photo organization programs.

As a person with prosopagnosia (vide http://web.archive.org/web/20080704154655/http://www.prosopa... ), I would love to have personal software for recognizing people. At the same time, I am aware of the dangers of people doing it for commercial purposes (on so many levels!).

It's things like this that always make me think twice about banning things. Many people look at something as useless, wasteful, or bad, but to other people, it really does help people with certain conditions. So when you outright declare something is dumb or should be banned, I generally find these people to generally be ignorant about all the technology does, and it's just a knee-jerk reaction.

This is not to say they don't have good reasons for not liking a technology. Rather, that tend to not know all sides for something.

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#88

Post by jfk13 » Fri, May 24, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

supahfly_remix wrote: post #70

asdkhadsj wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost ironic that we're progressing through a social evolution where we have to have conversations with people to understand their desired pronoun; while at the same time developing software that will suffer the same fate. Appearances mean nothing, but that's all (this) software can use. Perhaps a small badge with visual friendly metadata would be handy. Not that we need to give them more information of course,…

> The idea of everyone walking around with a little badge on their chest containing their metadata is oddly dystopian haha. This idea was tried before, but for just a subset of the population, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge

FWIW, it's started appearing on conference badges in some circles: Name, affiliation, role, pronouns.

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#89

Post by xena » Fri, May 24, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

asdkhadsj wrote: post #67

WeirdFlexButOky wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 from another trans woman

Pardon the ignorant question, but is there an accepted "standard" for pronouns when someone identifies themself as you did? Which is to say, if you say you're a "trans woman", am I able to infer that your desired gender pronoun is female?

The best way to know for sure is to ask them instead of making any assumptions.

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#90

Post by JamesAdir » Fri, May 24, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

stared wrote: post #73

xena wrote: post #2

Good. This kind of software is a mirror to the data fed into it. People on the edges of society (that the people making the mirror might either intentionally or accidentally ignore) will get fucked over tremendously by this technology. We should put a complete ban on it. Even if it means gimping my photo organization programs.

As a person with prosopagnosia (vide http://web.archive.org/web/20080704154655/http://www.prosopa... ), I would love to have personal software for recognizing people. At the same time, I am aware of the dangers of people doing it for commercial purposes (on so many levels!).

check out this: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1070992105/orcam-myme1s...