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Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

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Re: Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

#351

Post by LarryMullins »

michpoch wrote: post #334
LarryMullins wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The law says that sex is characteristic that may be a BFOQ, and in the case of Hooters it seems to be. BFOQs may apply to sex, religion, and national origin, but not the other protected classes.

Could Hooters then reject a woman based on visual trait connected to a race, arguing that it doesn't give her the required "sex appeal"? Skin colour would be of course to obvious, but lips size or body shape?

No.

The only way Hooters could in principle discriminate on the basis of race is if they come up with some first amendment pretext for it; e.g. the waitress job is actually an artistic performance and for some reason the art demands the performer be a certain race. That works for movie productions, but for a bar hiring waitresses? In practice it wouldn't work because the courts and the public would both write you off as an obvious racist.

Re: Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

#352

Post by lja »

Majromax wrote: post #291
lja wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The false positive rate on quality facial recognition is actually very low. I'm not weighing in whether or not it is proper to always use it, just as someone that's deeply experienced in commercial applications of facial recognition.

> The false positive rate on quality facial recognition is actually very low. It depends on the purpose. For identity verification purposes, when you already have independent reason to suspect that someone is specifically Person X, then a "very low" false positive rate is likely sufficient. For filtering, however, "very low" isn't enough. Suppose your facial recognition system has a 0.001% false positive rate (one pe…

I completely agree with you on this point. AI practitioners have an ethical responsibility to communicate these shortcomings to clients. I know my firm regularly talks to clients how humans should intervene in the AI systems we build. It's a necessary conversation to ensure clients know we aren't building them something flawless.

I loved your .001% example, I'm going to steal that when I talk folks. We often describe how systems fail at scale and talk about how being wrong 1/1,000,000 times can wildly backfire at large numbers.

All that being said, I just don't want people around this forum thinking facial recognition is some fringe, low accuracy modeling exercise like they used to be. The models are actually incredibly impressive these days.

Re: Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

#353

Post by thwarted »

LarryMullins wrote: post #330
underwater wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scale is also an issue. So many things are either owned by a megacorp or run via a centralised platform. Getting banned by a store pales in comparison to being banned by Uber, Google, Visa, etc.

Just as most websites today use captchas run by one or two companies, we may see a scenario unfold where most brick and mortar businesses use a facial recognition blacklisting system run by one or two companies. Get labelled as trouble by the system and you'll be banned by every store in town.

This was already a problem with the email spam blacklists, DNSBL.

Re: Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

#354

Post by monksy »

lja wrote: post #179
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #108

Everyone always goes for the discrimination angle, but what frightens me is that like other modern automated tech of this decade the facial recognition used here probably has a horrendous false positive rate which most institutions will none the less treat as the final truth. Unrelated this is also why I fear most of this new AI stuff so much despite working in the field; the accuracy rates on these things in product…

The false positive rate on quality facial recognition is actually very low. I'm not weighing in whether or not it is proper to always use it, just as someone that's deeply experienced in commercial applications of facial recognition.

It's not just that. It's the collection of updated face data that's a concern.

They're taking an image, segmenting out the face and they're improving an existing model for that individual. Super scary stuff that's going on. (Other than the fact that they have an existing image)

If she was in IL .. she should persue them with the BIPA act.

Re: Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

#355

Post by gabythenerd »

Waterluvian wrote: post #254

With the merge being approved, there were now only four Corporations. Sure, there were many off-world Corps, but they didn't have any meaningful affiliations and were really just a novelty for Roamers. Everyone, from birth, was employed by a Corp. Mind you, employment doesn't endow a title, salary, benefits, or duties. It just meant you were permitted access the various amenities it provided: transportation, tech, te…

Sounds like the worldbuilding behind Cyberpunk 2077, it has major corpos and finding yourself among the unemployed leaves you in very bad shape.

Re: Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

#356

Post by test6554 »

kstrauser wrote: post #162

I’m thrilled to see facial recognition applied against people in a position to speak out loudly against it. A lot of people seem OK with it when it’s policing the bad parts of town. This is their reminder that it can be used against them, too.

Just because you have someone on camera committing a crime in this age of deep fakes is no guarantee that they are guilty... But it definitely provides police with a suspect to investigate further.

The most devastating tool for fighting crime is not increasing the penalties or making jail more miserable. No, the most effective way to stop crime is by drastically increasing the chances of getting caught and correctly sentenced.

Re: Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

#357

Post by monksy »

nraynaud wrote: post #344

can someone explain a bit the reasonning behind banning opposing lawyers from the defendant's venue? I feel like it's to reduce "on the ground" discoveries in civil cases, but I don't understand why, as far as I know those are neither forbidden nor unethical, there is a later opportunity to debate whether those discoveries gets introduced as evidence in the case.

Retaliation.

Re: Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

#358

Post by kiernanmcgowan »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #214

This reminds me of an incident that showed up in one of my college courses: A forklift driver who got fired for drinking Budweiser. He worked for a company that Miller Brewing company contacted with and a newspaper took a photo of him at a public event drinking Budweiser. Different situation, same kind of pettiness and retaliation.

The required brand loyalty from Miller crazy - friends who have worked for them will pour non-miller beverages into glassware so that they can't be photographed holding a competitor's product. This is not in public mind you, but at someone else's apartment and not on company time.

Not sure if Budweiser / AB does the same thing back but its a really backwards way to run a company culture.

Re: Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

#359

Post by aidenn0 »

michpoch wrote: post #327
aidenn0 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition, mere customer satisfaction secondary to the primary job is not enough to establish BFOQ; it's a thin line though as Hooters seems to hide behind BFOQ (thus essentially stating that the primary reason for their serving staff is sex appeal), while flight attendants cannot. I suppose if you had an airline called "cleavage air" and had all the flight attendants wear low-cut tops, then you might get away with…

That is quite fascinating to me (as a layperson and non-american). Are there any articles or is there any literature that you'd advise in that topic? I'd be interested in something that gives more context, details and examples than the wikipedia article, but not targeted at lawyers and not excessively long. How does that work in practice for a company like Hooters - do they spend millions on lawyers to be able to def…

I don't know of any good resources, but application of the laws is mostly common-sense, with a slight bias towards non-discrimination in the gray areas.

It doesn't take a lawyer to tell that Hooters' primary product isn't chicken wings (Chris Rock even made a joke about it).

The reason behind the laws isn't common-sense, in the case that the 1964 Civil Rights Act is basically a list of "things currently happening that we think are bad" rather than an exhaustive list of things it's bad to discriminate on; it's also limited somewhat by the legal framework that the US congress was working within.

Labour laws in the US are also weird for similar reasons. There was a point at which union members were beaten and killed, with the local police being bought-off to not intervene. It escalated to at least one pitched battle between a private army and workers. Things like assault, battery, and murder are enforced at the local ("state" in the US terminology, not in the meaning everywhere else in the world) level not federal level, so rather than arresting the people doing this, laws were passed giving special protections to unions. Then a few decades later people argued that the special protections made unions too powerful and a bunch of extra rules limiting what unions can do were passed.

Re: Facial recognition tech gets woman booted from Rockettes show due to employer

#360

Post by himinlomax »

vleon42 wrote: post #35

I am torn actually unsure on what would be morally correct: 1. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike from my private property. 2. I, as an individual, am allowed to deny entry to persons affiliated with a business I dislike from my private property. 3. I, as a business owner (eg: a restaurant), am allowed to deny entry to persons I dislike (eg: a previous patron who was violent) from my b…

Another take: personal information is valuable, it belongs to the individual concerned with some fair use exceptions, making electronic files with said personal information in a way that obviously harms the individuals concerned infringes on their most personal intellectual property and is not fair use.
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