Live data from Hacker News

N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

nytimes.com

91–100 of 112 posts

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#91

I know that this might be an unpopular opinion, but if privacy really is dead, why don't we just make this data public? I know there's significant risks, but I feel like it's a better step forward than having this technology developed and deployed in secret.

A real answer: because I personally don't want to make job easier for crazies. Your comments stick around on the web instead of evaporating in thin air. Among hundreds who may read them, there may occur a couple angry people with skewed priorities. I don't want such people to easily know how I look and where I live.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada made it illegal to take part in a public protest while concealing your face under the Harper government...

NYC is not in Canada. In the US, the 1st amendment would likely protect citizens from any such law like this.

You should take a look at New York Penal Law 240.35(4).

Also, 1st amendment challenges only protect you if the supreme court is sympathetic.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#93

Honestly, I have no problem with a database of public images showing/tracking people's public actions. It used to be in a small town you knew who was good and bad by their actions. With the population explosion, the only way we have a practical means to return to that is with facial recognition databases.

You make it sound like this is an attempt to return to a more desirable set of circumstances.

We aren't talking about small towns here, we're talking about an urban metropolis. Relative anonymity is a feature, not a bug.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#94
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're gay, you should know the risks about going to Saudi Arabia or any place with similar laws and avoid going there. One does not usually "end up" in a different country unless they're kidnapped and at that point the homosexuality laws are really the least of your problems.

Your argument implies that 'it's the gay person's fault for getting caught,' so that tracking organisations have less responsibility for their actions. Instead of Saudi Arabia, how about the United States 100 years ago? It is not as though there are no more harmless activities for people to participate in that they will suffer for. A comparatively trivial but important example: how about tracking your employees movem…

It implies no such thing. There is no blame because this is a contrived hypothetical that makes a number of ridiculous assumptions.

1. That someone going to a gay club in NYC later decides to go to Saudi Arabia, knowing full well that the government there is actively hostile to them.

2. That the government of Saudi Arabia somehow has access to facial recognition data from the NYPD.

3. This data for some reason includes not only mugshots directly collected by the NYPD (which was what TFA was actually about) but also private survellience footage from gay clubs, and this footage is clear enough to make a match (remember people tend to go to clubs at night)

4. The government of Saudi Arabia decides that they need to expend a tremendous amount of computing resources to run facial recognition of all of their survellience footage of every face in their country against this fictional database that they somehow obtained.

5. Further they conclude that a single facial recognition match, which is known the flawed, of a person in the vicinity of a gay club is sufficient to convict someone.

There are real privacy concerns yes, but this is absurdist fearmongering and deserves to be ridiculed.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#95
post #64
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be ok with that if we also a) make public every time the data is accessed, including who is doing it, and b) require that anybody accessing the data have at least as much data public as they are accessing. I think the worst problems here are around asymmetries. If I secretly have all your data but you don't know that and have none of mine, there's a power imbalance. But if we have equal amounts of data and know w…

Wouldn’t people just obfuscate data access through intermediaries and flooding with junk queries?

Depends on how it's done, but if penalties are sufficiently large for that, hopefully not. Especially if we give big awards to bounty hunters and whistleblowers who find malfeasance.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#97
post #65

This reminds me of when I was a little kid, maybe 2nd grade, and our class took a field trip to the police station. We all had our fingerprints taken. At the time, it just seemed like a fun activity to show us a little bit about how police work is done.

Fingerprinting kids is a regular thing in the US. I had it done when I was young, maybe 30 years ago. I believe it's used to help identify kidnapped (murdered?) children. It was so long ago I don't know if they still do it or what's done with the fingerprints now.

Yup. 30 years ago or so, I was in 1st or 2nd grade and I remember they fingerprinted all of us in the school cafeteria. i think they told us it was in case we get kidnapped.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#98
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it contrived when it's happened again and again historically?

Really? Saudi Arabia has historically, again and again, used facial recognition data collected by the NYPD to hunt down people who went to gay clubs in NYC, who for some reason spontaneously "end up" in Saudi Arabia via some unspecified process they can't control?

Look up the history of the helpful IBM census machines just before WWII.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#99
post #73
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be in a small town that your life was ruined by spurious rumors and salacious gossip.

Not used to be. In many places today you will literally be murdered by the mob for being suspected to be a witch.

There's some horrendous stories of this happening in PNG. The police are present and try to stop the mob but they are outnumbered 100-to-1 by a group of villagers intent on murdering some poor innocent woman accused of being a witch and causing illness in the community. They stand by and watch as she is lynched.

Re: N.Y.P.D. Adds Children as Young as 11 to Facial Recognition Database

#100

>The New York Police Department has been loading thousands of arrest photos of children and teenagers into a facial recognition database despite evidence the technology has a higher risk of false matches in younger faces. They already have the photos from arrest records. They already have footage from security cameras, etc. I don't see a problem in using computer algorithms to try to find possible matches between the…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN