If I had to guess at what's really going on here...it's that the landlord suspects the residents of some of these units aren't the people they're supposed to be. Sometimes if someone has a rent-stabilized apartment, they might want to move somewhere else. Ordinarily this would cause the unit to lose rent control status, but if they simply let someone else (e.g. a family member) take their place without notifying the…
Even if there is no violations, installing a surveillance might add a motivation for tenants to move out. Make their life as unpleasant as possible within the law.
A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
111–120 of 224 posts
Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do Americans not get extra keys for their rental apartments? Granted, I've only rented out an apartment once, but it was from a big local rental agency and I got three keys despite being the only tenant in a single bedroom apartment. My current studio apartment (although not a rental) also has three keys.
As a single tenant, I've always gotten 2 keys for my apartment door, and only one fob for the main entrance.
Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Criminal histories, eviction records, poor credit....lots of reasons to sublet instead of going to the landlord.
ok - i mean it doesn't have to be one or the other. If I were subleasing a place I wouldn't want a tenant who had terrible credit either though. But could be both. I'm just hypothesizing like everyone else.
Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
#114I get where it’s coming from. I know a guy who’s been subleasing a rent-controlled studio in Nob Hill for years. It’s not a money grab, I think he’s just passing through his own cost. He’s just holding onto it as a backup.
I doubt this was the intended purpose of rent control regulations.
Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
#115“Liberty means prohibiting biometric data bases or any other type of human designation. There is no difference in principle between sophisticated biological marking and tattooing an ID number; both turn our identities into the property of a third party. In both, we lose our freedom. Simply put: We have one God above us, and we should not be enslaved to another person or mechanism.”
Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
#116The privacy concerns here are huge, but the much more direct issue is from this quote from the article: > the same programs failed to identify darker-skinned women up to one-third of the time. A one-third failure rate means that on average, for every three times you try to return home, you are likely to have the system fail to identify you at least once. Being locked out, as a resident, one-third of the number of tim…
Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't care about color. Dark faces reflect less light, making them more challenging to photograph well. If you have less light illuminating a scene, you'll have more noise and less contrast/dynamic range in the image. You need these things to extract features reliably. It's physics, not racial bias.
Given how hard it is, even with a pretty high-quality camera, to get a photo of our black cat that actually shows her (charming) face effectively, I find this easy to believe.
In color film photography they chose the CYM spectral sensitivities to best represent US white women in heavy make-up under stage lights. It was the 1920/30s afterall. The spectral sensitivities haven't changed much since then as a result (an example of the Lock-In effect in full swing). CCD and CMOS camera dopants are chosen to represent the spectral sensitivities that are similar to film, though physics does come charging in on those.
To be honest, yes, it's hard to photograph darker skinned people without sufficient full-spectrum light. Darker skin absorbs more radiation at the solar-peak frequency (~550nm, the light green of most plants), as the melanin is evolved to do. That said, if your film/sensor can see far outside of the solar peak, then you'll pick up darker skinned people better. Old-timey tin-type photographs could see well into the UV (notice how there never are any clouds in pictures taken way back when) and darker skinned people showed up just fine in those old photographs as a result.
Fun-Fact: the front facing camera on most mobile-phones does not have and IR filter on it, specifically to help with these issues of darker skin. Next time you are near a handle-less toilet with an IR sensor, you can use the front facing camera to see the little IR LEDs beeping to see if you are there. You can also use the front-facing camera to see security lights and what not, typically those are IR ones too.
UV light could also be used, but it is more damaging over time, and thus lower frequency IR light is preferred.
Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
#118One result of doors being controlled by facial recognition -- or any other kind of biometric system -- is that you have to get permission from someone whenever you have a regular visitor. You can no longer give your girlfriend, boyfriend, dog sitter, relatives, or whoever you wish a key or access card to your home. You have to enroll that person in the facial database. And whoever is doing the enrolling can ask for l…
Let's ignore whether this is dystopian or evil for a minute. Assume that the land lord is right and that this will lower his expenses. I assume he's going to pass that savings to his tenants or just use it to buy more properties?
So to answer your question - maybe? But most likely not. And it's not necessarily evil.
Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does the system even care about color in the first place? Can't it measure other facial characteristics, measurements?
It doesn't care about color. Dark faces reflect less light, making them more challenging to photograph well. If you have less light illuminating a scene, you'll have more noise and less contrast/dynamic range in the image. You need these things to extract features reliably. It's physics, not racial bias.
Re: A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, I would guess catching people that try to Airbnb their rent-stabilized apt (short-term guests). Honestly, I agree it is would be kind of messed up for someone to have the fortune of winning a below-market luxury apartment and turn that around and illegally rent it out for a massive markup on Airbnb.
It's interesting to see that Airbnb is where the HN mindset goes; it reflects a certain degree of privilege that an entrepreneurial opportunity is the first use case surfaced. Cramming extra family/friends into an apartment who aren't officially on the lease (e.g. the adult son who's lost a job or is on parole, or the parents who can't afford assisted living and are helping raise the grandkids) is actually far more c…
I would have a problem with unknown, unvetted, random AirBnb users coming in an out where the host doesn’t really know anything about the person and won’t be there.