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America is turning against facial-recognition software

economist.com

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Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#101

Post by mLuby »

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…

Facial recognition just vastly increases the likelihood to locate a suspect. What happens after that, from detention to arrest through jail and trial remains unchanged, and is still conducted by humans in the criminal justice field.

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#102

Post by snowwrestler »

I can't read the article without an Economist account, but I think the headline is a bit too broad. There are a lot of people who happily use facial recognition to unlock their iPhones every day, and I haven't seen much of a backlash against that.

Why not? Because it's isolated on the device, and can be turned off whenever you want. I think the real concern is the combination of facial recognition with vast centralized databases. Those big centralized databases are just begging to be exploited and abused, whether for commercial, authoritarian, criminal, or even creepy "LOVE-INT" stalking by the people running the databases.

I think facial recognition (and other forms of recognition) can have a bright future in society, but only if they conform to our expectations of privacy. Those expectations have been created over thousands of years based on how we interact with people. The closer that computer interaction can hew to existing social conventions, the smoother path it will have to adoption.

I don't mind if the waiter in a local restaurant recognizes me when I come in; in fact I like it! But I don't think I would like it very much if I knew he was calling 15 different data brokers to report on me every time he sees me.

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#103

Post by phissk »

danShumway wrote: post #82
phissk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whether it be autism or sexual orientation, it seems even more wrong to choose to have a child with something that will disadvantage them just to bolster the numbers of the other people already in the world being unfairly discriminated against.

Given that in this scenario there are two potential children; the one with undesirable_trait_x, and the replacement without it, and one will come into existence and one will not, as a parent, shouldn't you pick the child that will have the happiest life rather than the one that will better serve as canon-fodder in someones ideological crusade?

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#105

Post by chuckgreenman »

Loughla wrote: post #95
notus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your average engineer is far more intelligent and introspective than your average police though. They will have biases, but not the same ones police have and far less racist or sexist ones. Police officers have a rate of domestic violence at 2-4x that of the normal population. We 100% benefit by moving the power up the chain from uneducated people to educated people.

>We 100% benefit by moving the power up the chain from uneducated people to educated people. Most cops are college educated? >They will have biases, but not the same ones police have and far less racist or sexist ones. I honestly am going to need citations for that statement. >Your average engineer is far more intelligent and introspective than your average police though. Again, this is nothing more than a magical be…

Most cops are college educated, however, let's not kid ourselves, a BS in criminal justice is a little different than a BS in engineering.

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#106

Post by Loughla »

bpyne wrote: post #61
coding123 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. About half the US needs them for 3 or more months per year. And then there's the rise of surgical masks to prevent the spread of viruses. I also foresee a surge in wide-brimmed hats.

I remember stories from 5 years ago or so about artists who were making facial recognition blocking scarves. The scarves made you look like a lightbulb on camera, so they couldn't see your face.

I chuckled, because it was ridiculous, and now I'm wondering if they make them in professional colors. . .

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#107

Post by dwyerm »

Yes, but the thing is that facial recognition IS just video compression.

You take a video stream and compress it down into a timestamped stream of IDs. It's really lossy, but it's the same as OCR or Speech-to-Text -- it is a tool that allows us to better handle large streams of data.

As always, the tool isn't the problem. It's the use of the tool.

(But I think we all know that.)

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#108

Post by [deleted] »

mnw21cam wrote: post #54
lazyvoice wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, let's assume you live in Brunei where homosexuality is a capital crime. Facial-recognition (especially in concert with other pattern-recognition software) drastically reduces the man-power necessary to identify individuals for enforcement. If you're talking to someone who's more conservatively inclined I'd talk about how Iceland has managed to basically eliminate Down Syndrome. Prenatal pattern recogniti…

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?

[deleted]

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#109

Post by tim333 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #102

I can't read the article without an Economist account, but I think the headline is a bit too broad. There are a lot of people who happily use facial recognition to unlock their iPhones every day, and I haven't seen much of a backlash against that. Why not? Because it's isolated on the device, and can be turned off whenever you want. I think the real concern is the combination of facial recognition with vast centraliz…

>I can't read the article without an Economist account

try https://outline.com/BhW2BL

Re: America is turning against facial-recognition software

#110

Post by PunchTornado »

briatx wrote: post #66

> Earlier this year the Washington Post reported that many small police departments were abandoning body-worn-camera programmes because of the cost. > Although the cameras are cheap, officers can generate 15 gigabytes of video per shift; storage costs mount. Police unions often oppose body-worn cameras, fearing they imperil their members by giving superior officers licence to search them for punishable behaviour. >Ot…

would you want a body camera at your work? You wouldn't I'm sure. Don't blame them for looking for their interest. It's someone else's job to (politicians) to legislate the use of it.
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