Facial recognition: It’s time for action • Hacker News Board

Re: Facial recognition: It’s time for action

#251

Post by Nasrudith » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

ukulele wrote: post #153

phkahler wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This is a laudable first step in advocacy for real regulation of a technology... Perhaps I'm jaded, but I don't agree at all. They're trying to get it regulated so they can be creepy without fear. One of the first "good" uses listed was finding 3000 children. "Think of the children" is a common rallying cry for evil. Nothing else mentioned was really relevant. The line IMHO needs to be drawn at anything that you'd…

> "Think of the children" is a common rallying cry for evil. I'm not familiar with this line of reasoning -- can you elaborate, or are there any good examples?

It is used for censorship plenty, for suppressing the disapproved without rational thought. There are 'ugly laws' on the books because of a bullshit misinterpretation of biblical passage that images seen by a pregnant mother could cause the child to be formed accordingly - never mind that the whole thing is essentially a miracle. Otherwise they wouldn't bother encoding 'common sense' livestock techniques in their holy books! They would leave it for their 'animal husbandry manuals'.

So now they have an excuse to get all of thus unsightly severely maimed Civil War Veterans reduced to begging out of the way. It isn't that we don't want to provide for them at all or have to look at them but it is for the children!

That bit of stupidity got left on the books until the 70s - mostly since it got forgotten until it came up as an excuse for the police to be dicks. Then there are the similar rationales of 'we have to discriminate against gays because they are all sexual predators'.

Re: Facial recognition: It’s time for action

#252

Post by Nasrudith » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #94

BowBun wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if the oath comparison works out so well for development. Let us not forget that each physician is directly responsible for a life every time they see someone. They also have a more direct effect on the success or failure of the procedure as they tend to produce a large portion of the work. I'd argue few companies ever reach this level of risk, and those that do are so large that the individual contribut…

No snowflake is responsible for the avalanche, therefore I must pile on as much snow as possible -- The modern developer.

The analogy works better than you think - gravity is responsible for the avalanche. They are all responding to irresistible forces.

Re: Facial recognition: It’s time for action

#253

Post by phkahler » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 2:39 PM UTC

crawfordcomeaux wrote: post #201

phkahler wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> when we connect that AI to the rest of the computer capabilities out there it quickly becomes something a human couldn't do. Connecting the AI face recognizer to the cloud or any other system is exactly where the line needs to be.

Disagree. This is a technology that can be secretly or openly deployed in businesses for the sake of emotional exploitation via dynamic displays targeting specific emotional states. I'm against turning the world into anymore of an emotional hunting ground than it naturally is. http://eqradio.csail.mi.edu

You may have just convinced me that this technology needs to be banned outright.

Re: Facial recognition: It’s time for action

#254

Post by Nasrudith » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 2:44 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #53

geephroh wrote: post #11

This is a laudable first step in advocacy for real regulation of a technology that already has huge impacts on privacy and civil society. I was in the room for one of the meetings with Microsoft's senior leadership as a representative of a Seattle-based civil liberties group. While our coalition would like to see MS go further, it was quite clear that they take their commitment to corporate responsibility and ethics…

> He also denied that Amazon had any responsibility for the negative impacts of their AI/ML technologies, or role to play in industry efforts to self-regulate. For a period of time, there was a lot of chatter about all developers having some kind of professional oath, like doctors. Many of the approaches that were taken have issues (preclude working on smart weapons program or legal surveillance). I wonder if what we…

I think oaths are completely outmoded as a social construct - everyone knows that people lie regardless of what they claim. The actual teeth to it were their own sources of problems, guilds and not being able to run your business if violated. They were supplanted by licenses.

Even if we somehow had that measure in place it would be a cure worse than the disease - well you can't get a job doing something legitimate because it turns out that your safety human recognition algorithm got abused by somebody else? Just crime for you to make a living.

Re: Facial recognition: It’s time for action

#255

Post by Nasrudith » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 2:59 PM UTC

vertexFarm wrote: post #19

colordrops wrote: post #9

I don't understand how this could be realistically regulated. It's passive technology and its use can't be detected. It's like trying to stop people from thinking.

You could say the same about a credit card skimmer on an ATM. It's passive, right? It's just a sensor that sits there and absorbs people's data. I don't think this argument makes a lot of sense. The point is, there needs to be some law and order in place so that when people abuse this tech to harm people and society and get caught, there's some precedent to stop them and punish them. It doesn't matter if the technolo…

The passivity sense is in that it doesn't do anything /to be stopped/. The installation of the credit card skimmer is what is illegal along with the theft involved.

It is like declaring your city nuclear weapons free when the only players are either above the law by jurisdiction or within detonation range already. Just having the law on the books makes the city look stupid.

Facial recognition is a process that works on images - that makes it more passive than even a sensor since there are definite precedents for 'not here' with sensor recordings.

Re: Facial recognition: It’s time for action

#256

Post by Nasrudith » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

Personally I think facial recognition is a sign of an underlying problem - evidentary standards and liability. We have already had people effectively murdered by bad evidence from win seeking prosecutors taking any sort of psuedo-science voodoo they can get like bite mark analysis. False positives of any sort like from facial recognition should be no different. Similarly AWS thinks that many members of congress are already in jail. Something that bad had no place being sold.

I could see holding the providers liable for bad detection a good precedent for calibrating caution in a rational way although it is a bit 'eye for an eye' for societal liking. Having something which if it recognizes a face 60% of the time saying "Hi John" to Bob isn't a liability to anyone - really just amusement. Locking someone out of their apartment and causing them to need to call a locksmith because they got a bloody noise and facial recognition doesn't work any more is low stakes. Having someone potentially jailed for a long time would bring the intervals of confidence appropriately tight if say the prosecutor were at risk of death row or 300 consecutive years sentencing. We would see people very reluctant to work in forensics or prosecution if that were the case.

Re: Facial recognition: It’s time for action

#257

Post by bsenftner » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 3:44 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #213

AlexCoventry wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a computation. Laws against it are unenforceable in general, absent draconian restrictions on computing devices.

This is HN. I fucking get it. Facial recognition surveillance technology deployed in any public sphere should be expressly illegal. Period.

No you don't get it: FR is a sensor, it is not authoritative, and was never intended to be by anyone other than science fiction authors. FR simply helps sift through many faces to help locate. A human still needs to be in the loop, or you are misusing the system. Lead developer of a leading enterprise FR system speaking.

Re: Facial recognition: It’s time for action

#258

Post by bsenftner » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 3:47 PM UTC

mLuby wrote: post #154

Think about the participants in a facial recognition system: - Targets (people) - Enablers (tech companies) - Stalkers (consumer companies) - Big Brother (governments) Notably the only ones who cannot use the system are the Targets, because they don't have the necessary scale. Being part of a system you can't use is typically to your detriment.

FR is not out of reach for ordinary people. The algorithm of choice by the NSA is available as a cost of about $1200 per seat, and it only needs an ordinary PC to operate. This is no longer rocket science...

Re: Facial recognition: It’s time for action

#259

Post by bsenftner » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 3:51 PM UTC

herrosheep wrote: post #217

There needs to be a device that you can jam under your chin to disfigure your face for some period of time. Granted this would not be legal or pain free, but might be required in special situations like misidentification. I could absolutely see a device like this being sold on the black market in the future.

All one needs to do it wear a hat with a blinky LED light, or a illuminated eyeglass frames: the cameras try to compensate for the bright, and cause your face to have degraded color / illumination space. This will kill almost all FR algorithms because it destroys the image inside the camera before the FR algorithm can begin.

Re: Facial recognition: It’s time for action

#260

Post by bsenftner » Sat, Dec 08, 2018, 3:53 PM UTC

Beefin wrote: post #43

So MSFT was actually ranked the most accurate facial algorithm company in the world by NIST. It’s interesting they’re just now talking about this (after these results were published)

No they were not. Link? I'm in the FR industry, MSFT is a non-player.