Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Banning facial recognition is missing the point

schneier.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 163 posts

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#91

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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 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.

In general I think this is exactly how it should work. You cannot stop all technological developments early on and make rules for imagined problems that may or may not arise.

Imagine it's 1995. The Web gets banned for five years so that a government committee can meet to figure out what could possibly go wrong with that technology.

There are always groups that stand to lose when new technologies are introduced. And these groups are inevitably very powerful at the beginning of any new development. You can be pretty sure that nothing would go ahead without great resistance.

That said, we have to find a balance. Of course there are technologies that are so dangerous that they must be regulated fairly early on. Making some rules for face recognition and similar technologies seems entirely sensible to me.

But as a general principle I think problems should be solved when they arise. Solving imagined problems before they arise is impossible and prone to misuse of power and influence.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#92

Post by kuschku »

igorkraw wrote: post #76
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the EU has done any other notable things to fight mass surveillance, because if so it would mean they weren't focusing on one particular identification method. I mean maybe they are working on multiple fronts. Also perfect being the enemy of the well-intentioned here.

Well the GDPR helped quite a bit already. Creates a proper inventive to not "just for good measure" aggregate PI

Especially if one considers how the NSA got most of their data through PRISM from corporate partners like Google. If those never collect it, the NSA can't gather it.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#93

Post by lbarrow »

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 think this article was written a few days before the EU memo was leaked. He doesn't mention the EU in it.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#94

Post by martin_a »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #75
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.…

I wonder if the EU has done any other notable things to fight mass surveillance, because if so it would mean they weren't focusing on one particular identification method. I mean maybe they are working on multiple fronts. Also perfect being the enemy of the well-intentioned here.

General data retention was also banned by EU courts, I think.

While Germany is over and over trying to integrate something like that with dubious reasoning ("it will only be used against terrorists and other really bad crimes" - reality is that everybody wants his piece of it, even to use against false parking), the EU regularly puts a stop to this.

So, it's great to have this higher-level legislative to stop single countries efforts, but there could even be done more...

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#95

Post by ptah »

cryptoz wrote: post #43

Schneier is missing the point. > The whole purpose of this process is for companies — and governments — to treat individuals differently. This isn't true. It's about population control, not treating individuals differently. He has an extremely close-minded view of the future here. The point of this isn't to treat people differently, it's to contain the overton window and basically thought-police entire populations. N…

how is "treating individuals differently" not an aid to population control?

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#96

Post by fsflover »

dmje wrote: post #88

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 n…

Once Librem 5 is ready, this problem will be solved for many nerdy people here. It's just the lack of choice now.

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#97

Post by miek »

mirimir wrote: post #69

I see that these bans regulate use by police. But how could any of them affect use by federal agencies? Which would then share information with local police. I mean, police lie to courts about StingRay use, or data from the NSA via SOD,[0,1] and do parallel construction. I really do think that privacy in meatspace is hopeless. 0) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R2013... 1) https://www.deamuseum…

I agree with you, and I'll add that they will simply (continue to) use companies like this Clearview AI:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-priv...

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#99

Post by thu2111 »

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.

What's street art got to do with it? In the city I live in, there are areas specifically reserved by the government for pro-grade graffiti. It looks great. These areas are where people really are too, it's not like they're shoved miles out of the city centre.

No protesting? Why not? Democratic countries all have laws on the book that allow and regulate protests.

Social credit? Why does that depend on face recognition?

All these are government related. I think there's a huge problem with such anti-face recognition arguments, namely, all of them can be implemented by just interrogating the phone in your pocket. Phones are linked to contracts linked to verified government-issued identities. Phone companies can track their location very precisely, especially now with 5G. So governments have had the ability to track people en-masse for decades, and have done it, Snowden showed us the PowerPoints and ... nobody cared. Only some people in the tech industry but wider society, no. In practice people prefer safety and low crime.

That's why I've come to see all the EU's privacy actions as just posing for political reasons. Do any of these laws make NSA-like organisations illegal? No? Do they stop police using ANPR or phone triangulation? No? Then they are just for show. GDPR is an especially pernicious offender as it's so badly drafted, but the cookie law is a clearer example: it makes no difference to anyone's privacy but does make life in the EU worse on a daily basis. Banning face recognition is the kind of micro-managing that governments throughout history have proven very bad at and which are riven with unanticipated side effects (well, unanticipated by the regulators).

Re: Banning facial recognition is missing the point

#100

Post by diffeomorphism »

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…

> Obvious one would be no more purse snatchers, ever. Almost no rapes, much fewer violent crimes. No lost kids. Lives and wallets saved.

That is unrealistically optimistic. At best purse snatchers will move to parts out of view of cameras or wear something. Like all these proposals they are only effective against non-criminals. Also, "car pulls up, kidnaps a kid" or "kid runs away from home and hides" seems entirely unrelated.

Post reply on HN