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Banning facial recognition is missing the point

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Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#81

Post by markdown »

WA wrote: post #79
mindgam3 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“In countries like the United States, it's being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behavior, and is incidentally used by the government.” No, he’s not right about it being “incidental”. The use of facial recognition by police is widespread and widely reported (0). Unlike other forms of digital surveillance, this one has serious and potentially deadly consequences when misused. Banning it at least…

I think nobody says that banning facial recognition is a step backwards. It just doesn’t solve the underlying issue and might even distract from the real problems. Now politicians can say "but we banned facial recognition, isn’t that good enough?".

> Now politicians can say "but we banned facial recognition, isn’t that good enough?".

And we answer "No!" and continue to push them further.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#82

Post by quotemstr »

moksly wrote: post #70
radu_floricica wrote: post #67

Because the conversation is so lopsided, I feel like somebody has to ask: what opportunities are we giving away when banning face recognition tech? Obvious one would be no more purse snatchers, ever. Almost no rapes, much fewer violent crimes. No lost kids. Lives and wallets saved. What else? This feels like the kind of tech that creates its own broad fields of use where there were none before. It might take time or…

No street art. No protesting. Social credit. No way to break away from the stigmas assigned you your face. No speeding. No jaywalking. No pissing outside. No way to rebel. I mean, it wouldn’t really stop crime. London has something close to total surveillance, and they have a lot of crime. But if you really want that sort of thing, you can actually have a taste of it in parts of China.

This comment reinforces the OP's point: opponents of facial recognition seem to approach the world with a particular value system that includes a disagreement with several existing laws. Instead of working to get these laws changed, facial recognition opponents advocate bans on technology that would maken these laws easier to enforce. Why should they succeed?

> No street art

Good. Graffiti is a blight.

> No protesting

There's protesting and there's "protesting". Lawful protest will be unaffected. Unlawful protest involving criminal behavior will become much more difficult. Good outcome.

> No way to break away from the stigmas assigned you your face

In an age of background checks, your face is the least of your worries. Are you opposed to background checks?

> No speeding

Speed cameras already exist and don't rely on facial recognition to issue tickets

> No jaywalking > No pissing outside > No way to rebel

Why should people get to break the law?

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#83

Post by raxxorrax »

BurningFrog wrote: post #16

Some times a technology is so cheap and easy to use that banning it becomes absurd, and you just have to accept the new reality. Face recognition isn't quite there yet, but in 5 or 10 years every kid with a phone can do this.

Technology is never inevitable and I don't put much faith in people that cannot shape their future.

If there is political will, it is pretty easy to ban public cameras for example.

The hardware is already mass produced and as cheap as it gets, but not everyone became as paranoid as Londoners.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#84

Post by atoav »

While he is right I think Bruce is also missing the point here himself: he states that this law is the wrong way to fight surveillance – but that is not the stated goal of the law.

The goal of the law is to prevent the development of a technical reality in Europe, to which a Jurisdiction can only passively react. The technical space moves so fast at times, that reality has been made before the law can even start to think about what is okay and what isn't.

This time they wanted to say: "Yeah it is a shiny new thing, that would definitly come if the law stayed as it was, but it is such a hairy ball of mud that we ban it till we figured out what is allowed." Or phrased differently: it is so obvious for them that this is prone to abuse, they ban it first and then figure out how to deal with it in an adequate fashion.

So Bruce' idea that the goal was to fight surveillance is a tad bit to optimistic in my eyes..

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#85

Post by raxxorrax »

blazespin wrote: post #6
avmich wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the ideology of online anonymity?

I think there is some expectation of privacy online. No such expectation exists in a public space.

> No such expectation exists in a public space.

I have that expectation for most of that space.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#86

Post by icebraining »

atoav wrote: post #84

While he is right I think Bruce is also missing the point here himself: he states that this law is the wrong way to fight surveillance – but that is not the stated goal of the law. The goal of the law is to prevent the development of a technical reality in Europe, to which a Jurisdiction can only passively react. The technical space moves so fast at times, that reality has been made before the law can even start to t…

I don't really agree, and in fact I think the EU already has a pretty good proactive law, in the form of the GDPR. You can't use indiscriminate facial recognition, gait recognition, or any other such mechanism if you need individual consent to process any data related to a person.

That said, specific bans for cases that the GDPR doesn't cover might still make sense. But we should be careful about de-fanging it by making it seem that any technology not specifically banned is fair game.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#87

Post by icebraining »

nl wrote: post #55
jammygit wrote: post #21

> These efforts are well intentioned, but facial recognition bans are the wrong way to fight against modern surveillance. Focusing on one particular identification method misconstrues the nature of the surveillance society we're in the process of building. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is increasingly the norm. In countries like China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by the government for social control.…

He’s right, but we should take every winning battle we can, no? Even a few notable victories could help to change public opinion about whether things are inevitable or not "Banning" facial recognition is the worse possible outcome for people who are privacy focused. At the moment it's useful to point people at and make them feel "creeped out". If it's "banned" the concern goes away. I'm using scare quotes around "ban…

Well, in my EU country the police was recently stopped by our National Data Protection Commission from implementing such a system in a public street. It's not impossible.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#88

Post by dmje »

Everyone on HN is no doubt sitting there nodding along sagely but there’s also a pretty good bet that 90% of us (nerdy, apparently in-the-know tech types) have done very little to think about cutting down on smartphone use. It’s the single biggest surveillance vector (a device that you carry everywhere that knows where you are and reports your habits into a data store we know pretty much nothing about!), but we all now assume - hilariously, in my opinion - that we “couldn’t live without our phones”.

Personally I think the battle is totally lost until people start actually thinking about the negative impact of these devices, both from a surveillance POV and a wellbeing one.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#89

Post by tshadley »

atoav wrote: post #84

While he is right I think Bruce is also missing the point here himself: he states that this law is the wrong way to fight surveillance – but that is not the stated goal of the law. The goal of the law is to prevent the development of a technical reality in Europe, to which a Jurisdiction can only passively react. The technical space moves so fast at times, that reality has been made before the law can even start to t…

> The goal of the law is to prevent the development of a technical reality

Facial recognition in the brain is just specialized object recognition, therefore any research on powerful general-purpose object recognition via deep-neural-networks is improving facial recognition technology whether it means to or not. Only a law banning all artificial neural network research seems to have a chance at stopping the technical reality here.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#90

Post by eivarv »

icebraining wrote: post #86
atoav wrote: post #84

While he is right I think Bruce is also missing the point here himself: he states that this law is the wrong way to fight surveillance – but that is not the stated goal of the law. The goal of the law is to prevent the development of a technical reality in Europe, to which a Jurisdiction can only passively react. The technical space moves so fast at times, that reality has been made before the law can even start to t…

I don't really agree, and in fact I think the EU already has a pretty good proactive law, in the form of the GDPR. You can't use indiscriminate facial recognition, gait recognition, or any other such mechanism if you need individual consent to process any data related to a person. That said, specific bans for cases that the GDPR doesn't cover might still make sense. But we should be careful about de-fanging it by mak…

Consent isn't the only grounds for processing, though.
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