Live data from Hacker News

N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

nytimes.com

61–70 of 112 posts

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why do you think privacy is dead? Where I travel, (digital and otherwise) privacy is quite alive and well. (This is definitely outside of highly populated first-world cities.)

Which way are things trending where you are today? The cost to surveil is going down at a tremendous rate so it is just a matter of time before someone decides to pay to surveil you and then sell their insights or take advantage of them. I don't think it's possible for politicians to keep up with the rate of tech advancement. Did you ever watch a congressional hearing in the US on any technology realated subject? It'…

>Did you ever watch a congressional hearing in the US on any technology realated subject? It's a comedic bit.

This comment could be straight out of 1870 when things were industrializing rapidly. We'll figure it out eventually. Hopefully without any serious oppression and/or bloodshed in the process.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#63

I wonder how this affects their system. If you have 10 years of a changing facial profile on someone, is their algorithm smart enough to drop older items? Or do you, in your 20s, look like your ten year old brother?

I'd imagine the problems are far more fundamental -- do they work at all given the typically poorly constructed training sets. And also what is their FP/FN rates for subsets of the population -- do they work as well/poorly for everyone?

The problem I see with many of these systems are -- they are trained on one population and used for inference on a very different distribution (minorities.) OR their accuracy is only high on the overall population, not universally accurate across all subsets.

When those in charge, those with political power, etc (usually non-minorities) "see" the performance of the system, they experience it in their own context where it works. They don't feel the pain from the experience of the sub-populations where false positives/negatives are larger.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#64
post #12

I know that this might be an unpopular opinion, but if privacy really is dead, why don't we just make this data public? I know there's significant risks, but I feel like it's a better step forward than having this technology developed and deployed in secret.

I'd be ok with that if we also a) make public every time the data is accessed, including who is doing it, and b) require that anybody accessing the data have at least as much data public as they are accessing. I think the worst problems here are around asymmetries. If I secretly have all your data but you don't know that and have none of mine, there's a power imbalance. But if we have equal amounts of data and know w…

Wouldn’t people just obfuscate data access through intermediaries and flooding with junk queries?

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#65
This reminds me of when I was a little kid, maybe 2nd grade, and our class took a field trip to the police station. We all had our fingerprints taken. At the time, it just seemed like a fun activity to show us a little bit about how police work is done.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#66

Facial recognition helps catch criminals. Young people can be criminals too. And if the police catch them while still juvenile, they might have more of a chance to turn their life around. Young people can also go missing, and facial recognition of security cams could help find them. I honestly can't see any reason why children shouldn't be included like everyone else. It goes without saying that a conviction should n…

> Young people can be criminals too. And if the police catch them while still juvenile, they might have more of a chance to turn their life around.

The US justice system isn't designed to turn anyone's life around -- it's designed to punish people. There's no benefit whatsoever to a kid spending time in jail or prison (or to putting their parents in debt over fines or bail payments).

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#67

I know that this might be an unpopular opinion, but if privacy really is dead, why don't we just make this data public? I know there's significant risks, but I feel like it's a better step forward than having this technology developed and deployed in secret.

We still have our thoughts, for now. We should at least know when our face is being accessed on demand and in some ai process. Same with our data. We'll get there eventually but there will be lots of issues along the way.

Facebook is apparently researching brain-machine interfaces

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#68

I know that this might be an unpopular opinion, but if privacy really is dead, why don't we just make this data public? I know there's significant risks, but I feel like it's a better step forward than having this technology developed and deployed in secret.

People will start walking around with masks on at all times.

Canada made it illegal to take part in a public protest while concealing your face under the Harper government...

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#69
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And anyone can come up with some contrived chain of events about how any particular technology might be misused. That's not a reason to dismiss it wholesale, otherwise we would never have any technology at all.

How is it contrived when it's happened again and again historically?

The next Hitler will be horiffyingly more efficient when they can track everyone by their phone location and know a history of everyone they interacted with as well as facial recognition on every street.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#70

I know that this might be an unpopular opinion, but if privacy really is dead, why don't we just make this data public? I know there's significant risks, but I feel like it's a better step forward than having this technology developed and deployed in secret.

Because these are all pictures of juveniles. Not even children who were convicted of a crime, those who were arrested. Children should be able to make mistakes and to learn and recover, without a bad decision following them for the rest of their lives. That's not only good for the child, it's good for society. It's why juvenile records are usually sealed and/or expunged and why data like this should never ever be public, even if "privacy is dead."
Post reply on HN