12 ms·

The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here

177 points by dthal 11y ago

forgottenpass 11y ago
Also available on his blog instead of Forbes' terrible website https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_face_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_fac...
shostack 11y ago
How poignant given the end of the 3rd episode of Heroes Reborn that I just saw last night (don't worry, I won't spoil its awesomeness).
iamcurious 11y ago
I no longer know what to do about this problem. I'm convinced surveillance is here to stay and that making it illegal will only serve to hide the microphones. I'm still extremely grateful for those who fight for privacy, is just that I don't see how we can win. Not knowing how to treat the cause, I'm at least trying to treat the symptoms. We might not be able to stop them from seeing our secrets, but we might very well stop them from making us feel ashamed and from blackmailing us.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > surveillance is here to stay and that making it illegal will only serve to hide the microphones. Certainly it's here to stay, but so is murder, theft, fraud, and many other things. We want to maximize the leverage and tools people have to fight it.
  - cookiecaper 11y ago
    Unfortunately you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I don't think there's a real way to fight this in the age of networks and cameras in every pocket. There are many good uses for the ability to instantly recognize and identify anybody from a crowd, as well as bad ones. Probably the easiest way to frustrate these things would be the simplest; only go out in public with substantial facial features obscured or altered. The degree to which tools with diverse uses, some of which may be bad, should be regulated is always a matter of serious controversy (cf. firearms). Whether it's legal or not, this tech will be used, so we need to get people to accept that and learn to recognize and frustrate its usage, instead of trying to deprive the populace of the tools that provide the function, which is ultimately futile.
    - baobabaobab 11y ago
      http://cvdazzle.com/ http://cvdazzle.com/ I don't know how well obscuring facial features will really work. There might just be too much information. Partially obscured face, body dimensions, clothing, location, time... I think it might be a loosing battle.
      - anigbrowl 11y ago
        Who wants to do that every day? Also, how long before we can out-calculate it? Right now we can already match things like gait patterns and multiple biometrics (eg height, relative length of limbs) well enough for many purposes using probabilistic systems (eg your metrics match 3 people but the other two are on different continents so I'm 99% certain it's you).
    - jodrellblank 11y ago
      Probably the easiest way to frustrate these things would be the simplest; only go out in public with substantial facial features obscured or altered. Sorry, going out hidden means you're a terrorist. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/sites/sbs.com.au.news/files/styles/full/public/burqa.jpg http://www.sbs.com.au/news/sites/sbs.com.au.news/files/style... http://www.barenakedislam.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/29548827_400x400.jpg http://www.barenakedislam.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/295... http://qz.com/324805/china-has-just-banned-the-burqa-in-its-biggest-muslim-city/ http://qz.com/324805/china-has-just-banned-the-burqa-in-its-... ('authorities in the Xinjiang city of Karamy barred anyone wearing burqas, niqabs, hijabs or simply “large beards” from taking public buses.') https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering ('The key argument supporting this proposal is that face-coverings prevent the clear identification of a person, which is both a security risk, and a social hindrance within a society which relies on facial recognition and expression in communication.') Or a potential criminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws "Germany - [..]you may not disguise your identity in public meetings such as demonstrations so the police are able to identify you." "Russian Federation - it is prohibited to wear masks and any other means of hiding identity during public events"
    - 11y ago
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  I think that it has to get worse before it gets better. In the UK there is so much apathy and general fear of the nebulous 'terrorists' that surveillance is broadly supported. I hope that our children's generation will be able to free themselves from the terrible world we are building them.
- marincounty 11y ago
  I'll let the NSA surveillance me because I don't have the power to stop it on my own. I will not let a corporation/individual do the same if I can spot the devises they use, or the hear they are surveilling me. The small changes I made are: I don't shop at Home Depot as much as I used to. I walk out of any store that has too many cameras. I don't shop at stores that a require membership picture. I never had a big presence on the Internet, so I didn't need to delete to many real name/identifiable ip accounts. I think their are small ways we can fight. The problem I see is most people think, "I'm not doing anything wrong, I really don't care."--with the exception of HN members. I have actually looked into ways to defeat facial recognition, but everything I looked into might bring more attention to myself than doing nothing. I do understand the big hoodie though. To be honest, I've never liked my picture taken. As a Photographer, I don't take people's pictures like I used to; it just rude, and shows poor manners these days. (I did look into a hat with IR lights on the brim. It seems to work now, but looks like new cameras will be able to defeate the lights, and there's always the establishment that says no to hats?)
- euske 11y ago
  As much as I hope this is wrong, I think the logical consequence would be a transition from an imbalanced one-to-all surveillance society to an all-to-all surveillance society, i.e. everyone knows everyone else's secret. If we can't take the surveillance part back, all we can do is to equalize it. I don't know myself if this is dystopian or not. I'd just feel very uncomfortable, but maybe that's what a society really is.
- analyst74 11y ago
  Surveillance technologies themselves is also a tool, dangerous one. It's only bad when wielded by bad characters. The problem, I feel, is lack of transparency, what exactly is the government collecting, and how they are being used, etc. Once those information are made public, then we can allow the judiciary system to decide on a case by case level what is allowed and what is not.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- eps 11y ago
  It's actually mentioned in the article.
hackuser 11y ago
A HN contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end-users, that will make them aware of this issue and persuade them that it is important to them. Vote up the best ones. [EDIT: The goal is to persuade them about its dangers, not sell them something based on it] That elevator pitch is key. I have extensive knowledge about this issue but have a hard time coming up with it; I need to be prepared. Change only will come through political pressure, and that requires public awareness. I had lunch recently with a journalist from a prominent publication, someone very well informed, and they told me that widespread surveillance wasn't real, a sort of urban myth. Organizations like the EFF have been unsuccessful and I think that's because they don't generate mass public awareness. It's up to us to create it, and we need a pitch. EDIT: [deleted]
- JupiterMoon 11y ago
  www.cantheyseemydick.com
  - fsargent 11y ago
    More like "Do they know that it's MY dick?"
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      Yes they do.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Link for the lazy: https://cantheyseemydick.com/ https://cantheyseemydick.com/
  - zardo 11y ago
    How reliably does dick pic recognition work at this point?
    - JupiterMoon 11y ago
      Very well if you use one of the many popular email or messaging services which does not use end-to-end encryption to send it or one of the popular cloud service providers that does not encrypt to data on your computer first to store it.
joe_the_user 11y ago
I'm not sure what "good as a person" means in the context of large scale facial recognition. I know software is now scoring as people on various standard AI tests. But most people couldn't recognize a million other people correctly. The situation is kind of odd. It's like how engineering a car to drive automatically in a variety of controlled situations which might represent 90% of the normal driving. They are still nowhere near ready to drive on real roads. The supposed advantages are perverse; Face recognition with a 1% false positive rate can translate one fugitive to 10 or 100 false arrests of random people. A store clerk knowing your name when you walk in the store is mostly creepy and wouldn't help sales - the store that had their clerks saying goodbye by name to credit card holds a few years back have stopped. So, benefits? Changes? The article is kind of light on the whole subject.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > store clerk knowing your name when you walk in the store is mostly creepy and wouldn't help sales Saying your name might be creepy (but maybe people will become accustomed to it). Knowing your identity I think would certainly help sales, the same way it does when you shop online.
  - joe_the_user 11y ago
    Knowing your identity I think would certainly help sales, the same way it does when you shop online. How? I suppose you could have store change it's stock based on who it knows has visited it. But that sounds cumbersome and speculative. The store might find itself removing the things people like to buy from that store and stocking things people prefer to buy from other stores and so wind-up selling less. Kind of like when things I've searched for on amazon reappear as Facebook ads. It don't click through and buy 'cause I've already decided on whether or not to get them.
    - hackuser 11y ago
      I'm surprised to find questions like this on HN. These are fundemental concepts that drive SV; while I don't expect the world to understand I expect it here.
electricblue 11y ago
This article is a bit alarmist. I agree that government entities using this technology as a tool of oppression is definitely bad & going to happen somewhere but I'm not worried about the shop clerk knowing my political affiliation because there is zero profit motive there. You're talking about a truly massive database of customer info joined with facial info obtained...how? Is the DMV gonna start giving away my license to Home Depot? Is facebook going to torpedo their business by selling this info? I doubt it! Second, why would they want it? to creep me out when I walk into their store?
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Is the DMV gonna start giving away my license to Home Depot? IIRC this already happens and businesses can buy DMV databases. > Is facebook going to torpedo their business by selling this info? Many businesses collect and sell this information. Where do all these online businesses, who charge users nothing, get their revenue? [EDIT: More simply said, that info arguably is the basis of the Internet economy] > why would they want it? To discriminate. They may offer different products or prices. They may discriminate because you are gay or transgender, because of your ethnic background, or because of your religious (e.g., Muslims) or political affiliation (e.g., communist, right-wing extremist, etc.). This can happen in more serious situations too, such as when dealing with government, law enforcement, or in employment situations. Certainly such discrimination has been widespread for centuries and is today. Why would it be any different when they have new tools?
  - electricblue 11y ago
    Seems like a massive amount of effort just to be a dick. They get all the info they could ever want from customer loyalty cards, this is a redundant and frankly useless waste of money.
    - gknoy 11y ago
      I think it's unwise to underestimate your fellow humans' propensity to "be a dick", as you put it, even if they don't gain anything more than the satisfaction of treating others poorly. Facial recognition + a database allows POWERFUL and fine grained discrimination! Imagine being able to know ${Things} about people -- via analytics / The Internet -- whenever any prospective customer comes into your store. You could refuse to do business with gay people, divorcees, adulterers, married people, transgender people, politicians, members of the opposing political party or religion, or even police officers with X number of complaints. You could exclude people from the wrong side of town, or who didn't go to the right schools, or whose parents were (or who themselves are) illegal immigrants. Many of these things are Probably Legal (some are likely not), but most of them strike me as unjust treatment of others. The technology allows frightening things, and there are MANY people who would do so right now if given the ability. (Religious and political boundaries are one such place where people are quite willing to do so.) I only touched on business owners. Now imagine that roving bands of jerks (or criminals) got their hands on the same technology or data, and could tell who was a stranger in town, or was more vulnerable than others, or fit their desired target criteria. It's pretty scary, and I'm sure that within ten years we'll hear stories of such abuse happening.
philbarr 11y ago
Walk into a store, and the salesclerks will know your name. - they already do once you scan your store card The store’s cameras and computers will have figured out your identity, - store card and looked you up in both their store database and a commercial marketing database they’ve subscribed to. - store card again. They’ll know your name, - store card salary, - if you entered it and if you didn't lie when you filled out your store card form interests, - if you entered them and your didn't lie when you filled out your store card form what sort of sales pitches you’re most vulnerable to, - if the "deep data" / AI is actually correct and how profitable a customer you are. - store card Maybe they’ll have read a profile based on your tweets and know what sort of mood you’re in. - MAYBE. assuming the AI is anywhere near correct. Maybe they’ll know your political affiliation or sexual identity, - MAYBE, probably wrong. both predictable by your social media activity. - PROVE THIS. And they’re going to engage with you accordingly, perhaps by making sure you’re well taken care of or possibly by trying to make you so uncomfortable that you’ll leave.
- tjr 11y ago
  RMS has been advocating against using store cards for years. I guess in-store facial recognition could thwart the privacy efforts of people like him? (To some degree?)
  - 15155 11y ago
    Unless he's using cash, make no mistake, his purchases are being tracked in some capacity. Why do you need a store card when a credit/debit card track has more than enough information to identify? - Card number (useful on its own as an identifier) - Name (not perfect, decent secondary info) Granted, these don't generally make for a super-continuous history on someone, but they're pretty decent for the average person for a year or two. Also, if you make any returns at one of these stores that you've previously used a CC, your real state-issued ID will be correlated with your purchases (via your CC). Also, if you do any online shopping with a retailer and use the same cards in the store: instant correlation. Checks? Necessarily correlated with DL and account numbers, even better than CCs. Outside of cash: there're just too many ways to establish purchase histories for most individuals.
ksenzee 11y ago
As someone with prosopagnosia (neurological inability to recognize faces) I find this incredibly frustrating. My everyday life would be immensely easier with assistive tech that told me the names of everyone I see. And now that the technology exists to develop such a useful device, what do we get instead? Mass societal surveillance.
- devindotcom 11y ago
  Alas the first application of much cutting-edge technology is in the service of authority. I hope you are at least a bit comforted by the fact that the technology is making its way slowly to you.
- dougmany 11y ago
  I am no expert on this but the article suggested that the database of named photos was the hardest part to obtain for an individual. Since you would (probably) most value a database of people you have met before, a self generated database would be a good start to gaining access to this technology.
  - ksenzee 11y ago
    Right, I could definitely train existing facial recognition software on a database of people I've met. The problem is delivery; when I need this information, I'm not sitting at a computer. I need some kind of device, with a camera and a way to feed me the person's name real time, that I can reasonably wear in public without looking like a walking server closet. That's hard to hack together (just ask the Glass team).
- cantrevealname 11y ago
  That would be the killer app for Google Glass. Not just for your situation, but for salesmen, customer service reps, security guards, politicians, or anyone who needs to recognize lots of people, recall names, and bring up an instant profile about the person standing in front of them. (Granted, even this application has serious overtones of societal surveillance.) EDIT: Anyone care to speculate on why Google Glass doesn't do this? Surely the processing capability is there.
bitL 11y ago
Anyone can suggest brands for high quality fake mustaches and asymmetric sunglasses? ;-)
devindotcom 11y ago
There was a comic recently that had a main character who had little emitters constantly blasting his face with IR radiation, so it would just turn up as an overexposed blob on surveillance cameras. Of course all they need is an IR filter to combat this, but the idea is fun.
- jaxb 11y ago
  an episode of Almost Human had 'anti-camera spray' that did this, as well. maybe a comic was based on that?
gkfasdfasdf 11y ago
Perhaps the niqab (face-veil) will see a rise in popularity...
- tormeh 11y ago
  Nah, turns out that modern AI techniques are better than the brain at certain things. In this instance, the brain has huge amounts of volume dedicated to recognizing faces. AI don't have that same preference for faces; we can make AI recognize using any feature, including seemingly unlikely ones such as gait. A driverless car with no windows would probably do it, but then again the car itself will probably be bugged a la Samsung TVs.
- caskance 11y ago
  Sounds like a boring half-measure. Let's shoot for full-scale personal holography. Look however you want, whenever you want.
on_ 11y ago
There was a great discussion I wont be able to find about this recently on HN after an article about a zebra/leopard patterned couch. Thwarting an image id algorithim is not difficult and the researcher came on and spoke about the problems in the space similar to this xkcd[0] comic. It is a super complex problem to solve. How far away are we? It is like the turing test, everytime someone gets close the term is redefined. It is certainly coming, maybe reasonable models in ~5 years publicly acknowledged. What can someone really do to prevent it? Short of making an account every few months with a lot of your data but different pictures, what american doesnt have a photo that has been published on the internet? Even if you dont have facebook, someone you know does. The tech will take a while to dev and refine, and longer to deploy at scale, but I can't think of a scalable solution to this. [0]http://xkcd.com/1425/ http://xkcd.com/1425/
- croddin 11y ago
  Here is the discussion for "Suddenly, a leopard print sofa appears": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749660
domrdy 11y ago
Watching Minority Report the other day, this reminds me of the automated retina scans in the movie. Really creeped me out when Tom Cruise was walking through a mall, gets picked up by the scanners and they start shooting targeted advertising at him.
- finance-geek 11y ago
  Tangent: I always chuckle at how prescient Minority Report was on some aspects, yet they didn't envision network storage or wireless communication -- do you remember at how they would transfer small glass disks all the time...how burdensome. LOL.
cvwright 11y ago
I agree with the general idea put forth by the article. This is an important issue, and the future could bring a lot of bad things if we (as a society) are not careful. Schneier makes it sound pretty scary. For a general audience, this is probably good. It takes a lot to make your average Joe start paying attention to something new. But on a technical level, I can't help wondering, how realistic is the scenario he describes? Or, maybe the better question is, how immediate is the threat of universal face recognition? If we know what time horizon we're working with, maybe we can be better prepared. I think Schneier makes some substantial logical leaps in the article that make it sound like automatic, ubiquitous facial recognition is a more urgent issue than it really is. For example, he goes from this > Today in the US there's a massive but invisible industry that records the movements of cars around the country. Cameras mounted on cars and tow trucks capture license places along with date/time/location information ... to this > This could easily happen with face recognition. with no supporting evidence for how this feat of engineering will be accomplished. Recognizing letters and numbers on a license plate is one thing. Recognizing faces at random angles with random occlusions, hats, eyeglasses, makeup, etc., is quite another thing. I found a couple of papers from CMU and UCF a couple of years ago where they look at the problem of recognizing people in photos at "web scale" [1]. The recall/precision rates of the algorithms they tested are pretty decent, but they're still pretty far from the dystopian future described in the article. [1] http://enriquegortiz.com/wordpress/enriquegortiz/research/face-recognition/webscale-face-recognition/ http://enriquegortiz.com/wordpress/enriquegortiz/research/fa...
jpatokal 11y ago
So are we actually there yet? I was under the impression that, while face recognition has evolved to the point that face matching against a limited group of people (say, your Facebook friends) is feasible, we're still a long ways off from being able to put a face-scanner in a crowd in NYC and have it spot the 1 suspect among 10 million without a totally ridiculous rate of false positives.
- rm999 11y ago
  This should be a top comment - this kind of tracking is not possible at scale and probably won't be for a long time. Identifying a person in a group of 100s/1000s has been a solved problem for decades. Consistently identifying a single person from a database of 100Ms/billions of people who are constantly gaining weight, growing facial hair, etc is impossible with today's technology; false positives will become an exponentially bigger problem as you increase the candidate space. Perhaps one day increased camera resolutions will allow trackers to identify something humans can't, like retinal scans. This would allow cameras to basically "fingerprint" people, and will be super creepy.
  - IanCal 11y ago
    I think that actually as you increase surveillance the problem gets simpler. If you're always in view of a camera then I can simply track your motion and I only need to recognise you once. Given that I've seen you in your car, I can already narrow things down significantly. > Consistently identifying a single person from a database of 100Ms/billions of people I don't need to, there aren't billions of people who are likely to be at the closest ATM to your house. > constantly gaining weight, growing facial hair, etc But I see you several times every single day. > false positives will become an exponentially bigger problem as you increase the candidate space. To be honest, I think that this is the most likely thing to scare people, that you won't be allowed to fly because a computer made a mistake and everyone trusts it or can't override it. That the police get called when you go to pick up your son because you're the same height and rough build as a child molester who was released from prison yesterday
  - nitrogen 11y ago
vorg 11y ago
When surveillance systems are put in place and collected information stored for later use, irrespective of whether it's a personal, business, or government system, the people who get themselves in control of them will use the surveillance and/or information to steal from, preach to, discredit, and/or wear down the target/s, all of which ultimately equate to benefiting in some way at the target's expense. There's no such thing as unused surveillance capacity or unused collected information.
msellout 11y ago
Where's the line that separates generic image recognition from facial recognition? Forget corporations for a moment and think about your own rights as a programmer. I want to tinker with image-similarity scores by downloading random images from the internet and comparing with a photo I just took in a public place. Oops, my photo just so happened to have a stranger's face that matches a photo in my database and that filename contains the person's name. Should that be illegal? Consider the effects of a legal requirement to have an "opt-in" for facial recognition software. That was what the "consumer advocates" thought should be a minimum standard. Large corporations with trusted brands might be able to run such an effort, but any startup certainly could not. Regulating what software I can write is a slippery slope. Compare facial recognition with encryption. If there's regulation for recognition software, then regulation for encryption will be coming right after. The worst-case scenario in my mind is if the federal government has a monopoly on any kind of software. Our best defense against a government/corporate monopoly on surveillance is not to ban it, but to democratize it.
- PostOnce 11y ago
  What you can do in your own time is one thing, what you can do commercially is another. Encryption is something you do by yourself or with another consenting party, facial recognition is something you do to someone else without their permission and possibly use for nefarious purposes. There's nothing wrong with outlawing certain activities from the commercial sphere, or any sphere. It's not an assault on your freedom, its protection of my privacy? It's illegal to stalk and harass people in person or over the phone. It's illegal to serve people undercooked food or raw milk or whatever. It's illegal to breach HIPAA. Are you next going to say its terrible that you can't access my medical records for your startup? How about security cameras and genitalia recognition in the bathrooms at restaurants, is that cool too?
  - msellout 11y ago
    It's illegal to stalk and harass, it's not illegal to make phone calls. The issue is not facial recognition, it's the misuse. I'm all for gun control, not gun ban. Cameras in the bathroom? Fine. Whatever. If that's the new normal, then I guess I'll get over it. Are you saying that will now be legalized? I'm pretty sure we don't need any new laws to prevent cameras in changing rooms. The "scary" scenarios that have been described in the other threads are already illegal for other reasons -- harassment, redlining (racial profiling), spam, etc.
caskance 11y ago
You show your face automatically everywhere you go. Expecting other people not to look is folly. It's no different from the idiocy around fingerprints.
gglitch 11y ago
My default interpretive framework when I read something like this is, of course, nearly hysterical paranoia and sociopolitical despair. And, speaking as objectively as possible, I think those are not invalid responses. However, for the moment, I'm instead trying to imagine sociology/psychology of the first generation to grow up native to this environment, and I admit that it's fascinating to think about. What will the teenagers be like who grow up expecting to be identified and known everywhere they go, by friend and foe alike? How will it affect manners, speech, courtship rituals, expectations for entertainment/education/employment? Etc. So strange.
pms 11y ago
It is a scary vision. However, the scary part seems to come not so much from the increasing data availability, but rather from the increased likelihood of discriminatory uses of such data. Enforcing non-discriminatory uses of data sounds like a hard problem to tackle, especially if we realize how diverse is the space of possible missuses (e.g., in law enforcements, business, and politics) and that this problem affects both humans and computer systems. As hard as this problem sounds, the article provides a great motivation for research that defines computationally what "discriminatory" means, as well as for the research aiming to design systems (both human and computer) that are privacy-protecting and non-discriminatory.

177 points by dthal 11y ago

Also available on his blog instead of Forbes' terrible website https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_face_.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_fac...

shostack 11y ago

How poignant given the end of the 3rd episode of Heroes Reborn that I just saw last night (don't worry, I won't spoil its awesomeness).

iamcurious 11y ago

I no longer know what to do about this problem. I'm convinced surveillance is here to stay and that making it illegal will only serve to hide the microphones. I'm still extremely grateful for those who fight for privacy, is just that I don't see how we can win. Not knowing how to treat the cause, I'm at least trying to treat the symptoms. We might not be able to stop them from seeing our secrets, but we might very well stop them from making us feel ashamed and from blackmailing us.

hackuser 11y ago
> surveillance is here to stay and that making it illegal will only serve to hide the microphones. Certainly it's here to stay, but so is murder, theft, fraud, and many other things. We want to maximize the leverage and tools people have to fight it.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  Unfortunately you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I don't think there's a real way to fight this in the age of networks and cameras in every pocket. There are many good uses for the ability to instantly recognize and identify anybody from a crowd, as well as bad ones. Probably the easiest way to frustrate these things would be the simplest; only go out in public with substantial facial features obscured or altered. The degree to which tools with diverse uses, some of which may be bad, should be regulated is always a matter of serious controversy (cf. firearms). Whether it's legal or not, this tech will be used, so we need to get people to accept that and learn to recognize and frustrate its usage, instead of trying to deprive the populace of the tools that provide the function, which is ultimately futile.
  - baobabaobab 11y ago
    http://cvdazzle.com/ http://cvdazzle.com/ I don't know how well obscuring facial features will really work. There might just be too much information. Partially obscured face, body dimensions, clothing, location, time... I think it might be a loosing battle.
    - anigbrowl 11y ago
      Who wants to do that every day? Also, how long before we can out-calculate it? Right now we can already match things like gait patterns and multiple biometrics (eg height, relative length of limbs) well enough for many purposes using probabilistic systems (eg your metrics match 3 people but the other two are on different continents so I'm 99% certain it's you).
  - jodrellblank 11y ago
    Probably the easiest way to frustrate these things would be the simplest; only go out in public with substantial facial features obscured or altered. Sorry, going out hidden means you're a terrorist. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/sites/sbs.com.au.news/files/styles/full/public/burqa.jpg http://www.sbs.com.au/news/sites/sbs.com.au.news/files/style... http://www.barenakedislam.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/29548827_400x400.jpg http://www.barenakedislam.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/295... http://qz.com/324805/china-has-just-banned-the-burqa-in-its-biggest-muslim-city/ http://qz.com/324805/china-has-just-banned-the-burqa-in-its-... ('authorities in the Xinjiang city of Karamy barred anyone wearing burqas, niqabs, hijabs or simply “large beards” from taking public buses.') https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering ('The key argument supporting this proposal is that face-coverings prevent the clear identification of a person, which is both a security risk, and a social hindrance within a society which relies on facial recognition and expression in communication.') Or a potential criminal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws "Germany - [..]you may not disguise your identity in public meetings such as demonstrations so the police are able to identify you." "Russian Federation - it is prohibited to wear masks and any other means of hiding identity during public events"
  - 11y ago
JupiterMoon 11y ago
I think that it has to get worse before it gets better. In the UK there is so much apathy and general fear of the nebulous 'terrorists' that surveillance is broadly supported. I hope that our children's generation will be able to free themselves from the terrible world we are building them.
marincounty 11y ago
I'll let the NSA surveillance me because I don't have the power to stop it on my own. I will not let a corporation/individual do the same if I can spot the devises they use, or the hear they are surveilling me. The small changes I made are: I don't shop at Home Depot as much as I used to. I walk out of any store that has too many cameras. I don't shop at stores that a require membership picture. I never had a big presence on the Internet, so I didn't need to delete to many real name/identifiable ip accounts. I think their are small ways we can fight. The problem I see is most people think, "I'm not doing anything wrong, I really don't care."--with the exception of HN members. I have actually looked into ways to defeat facial recognition, but everything I looked into might bring more attention to myself than doing nothing. I do understand the big hoodie though. To be honest, I've never liked my picture taken. As a Photographer, I don't take people's pictures like I used to; it just rude, and shows poor manners these days. (I did look into a hat with IR lights on the brim. It seems to work now, but looks like new cameras will be able to defeate the lights, and there's always the establishment that says no to hats?)
euske 11y ago
As much as I hope this is wrong, I think the logical consequence would be a transition from an imbalanced one-to-all surveillance society to an all-to-all surveillance society, i.e. everyone knows everyone else's secret. If we can't take the surveillance part back, all we can do is to equalize it. I don't know myself if this is dystopian or not. I'd just feel very uncomfortable, but maybe that's what a society really is.
analyst74 11y ago
Surveillance technologies themselves is also a tool, dangerous one. It's only bad when wielded by bad characters. The problem, I feel, is lack of transparency, what exactly is the government collecting, and how they are being used, etc. Once those information are made public, then we can allow the judiciary system to decide on a case by case level what is allowed and what is not.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

eps 11y ago
It's actually mentioned in the article.

hackuser 11y ago

A HN contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end-users, that will make them aware of this issue and persuade them that it is important to them. Vote up the best ones. [EDIT: The goal is to persuade them about its dangers, not sell them something based on it] That elevator pitch is key. I have extensive knowledge about this issue but have a hard time coming up with it; I need to be prepared. Change only will come through political pressure, and that requires public awareness. I had lunch recently with a journalist from a prominent publication, someone very well informed, and they told me that widespread surveillance wasn't real, a sort of urban myth. Organizations like the EFF have been unsuccessful and I think that's because they don't generate mass public awareness. It's up to us to create it, and we need a pitch. EDIT: [deleted]

JupiterMoon 11y ago
www.cantheyseemydick.com
- fsargent 11y ago
  More like "Do they know that it's MY dick?"
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    Yes they do.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Link for the lazy: https://cantheyseemydick.com/ https://cantheyseemydick.com/
- zardo 11y ago
  How reliably does dick pic recognition work at this point?
  - JupiterMoon 11y ago
    Very well if you use one of the many popular email or messaging services which does not use end-to-end encryption to send it or one of the popular cloud service providers that does not encrypt to data on your computer first to store it.

joe_the_user 11y ago

I'm not sure what "good as a person" means in the context of large scale facial recognition. I know software is now scoring as people on various standard AI tests. But most people couldn't recognize a million other people correctly. The situation is kind of odd. It's like how engineering a car to drive automatically in a variety of controlled situations which might represent 90% of the normal driving. They are still nowhere near ready to drive on real roads. The supposed advantages are perverse; Face recognition with a 1% false positive rate can translate one fugitive to 10 or 100 false arrests of random people. A store clerk knowing your name when you walk in the store is mostly creepy and wouldn't help sales - the store that had their clerks saying goodbye by name to credit card holds a few years back have stopped. So, benefits? Changes? The article is kind of light on the whole subject.

hackuser 11y ago
> store clerk knowing your name when you walk in the store is mostly creepy and wouldn't help sales Saying your name might be creepy (but maybe people will become accustomed to it). Knowing your identity I think would certainly help sales, the same way it does when you shop online.
- joe_the_user 11y ago
  Knowing your identity I think would certainly help sales, the same way it does when you shop online. How? I suppose you could have store change it's stock based on who it knows has visited it. But that sounds cumbersome and speculative. The store might find itself removing the things people like to buy from that store and stocking things people prefer to buy from other stores and so wind-up selling less. Kind of like when things I've searched for on amazon reappear as Facebook ads. It don't click through and buy 'cause I've already decided on whether or not to get them.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    I'm surprised to find questions like this on HN. These are fundemental concepts that drive SV; while I don't expect the world to understand I expect it here.

electricblue 11y ago

This article is a bit alarmist. I agree that government entities using this technology as a tool of oppression is definitely bad & going to happen somewhere but I'm not worried about the shop clerk knowing my political affiliation because there is zero profit motive there. You're talking about a truly massive database of customer info joined with facial info obtained...how? Is the DMV gonna start giving away my license to Home Depot? Is facebook going to torpedo their business by selling this info? I doubt it! Second, why would they want it? to creep me out when I walk into their store?

hackuser 11y ago
> Is the DMV gonna start giving away my license to Home Depot? IIRC this already happens and businesses can buy DMV databases. > Is facebook going to torpedo their business by selling this info? Many businesses collect and sell this information. Where do all these online businesses, who charge users nothing, get their revenue? [EDIT: More simply said, that info arguably is the basis of the Internet economy] > why would they want it? To discriminate. They may offer different products or prices. They may discriminate because you are gay or transgender, because of your ethnic background, or because of your religious (e.g., Muslims) or political affiliation (e.g., communist, right-wing extremist, etc.). This can happen in more serious situations too, such as when dealing with government, law enforcement, or in employment situations. Certainly such discrimination has been widespread for centuries and is today. Why would it be any different when they have new tools?
- electricblue 11y ago
  Seems like a massive amount of effort just to be a dick. They get all the info they could ever want from customer loyalty cards, this is a redundant and frankly useless waste of money.
  - gknoy 11y ago
    I think it's unwise to underestimate your fellow humans' propensity to "be a dick", as you put it, even if they don't gain anything more than the satisfaction of treating others poorly. Facial recognition + a database allows POWERFUL and fine grained discrimination! Imagine being able to know ${Things} about people -- via analytics / The Internet -- whenever any prospective customer comes into your store. You could refuse to do business with gay people, divorcees, adulterers, married people, transgender people, politicians, members of the opposing political party or religion, or even police officers with X number of complaints. You could exclude people from the wrong side of town, or who didn't go to the right schools, or whose parents were (or who themselves are) illegal immigrants. Many of these things are Probably Legal (some are likely not), but most of them strike me as unjust treatment of others. The technology allows frightening things, and there are MANY people who would do so right now if given the ability. (Religious and political boundaries are one such place where people are quite willing to do so.) I only touched on business owners. Now imagine that roving bands of jerks (or criminals) got their hands on the same technology or data, and could tell who was a stranger in town, or was more vulnerable than others, or fit their desired target criteria. It's pretty scary, and I'm sure that within ten years we'll hear stories of such abuse happening.

philbarr 11y ago

Walk into a store, and the salesclerks will know your name. - they already do once you scan your store card The store’s cameras and computers will have figured out your identity, - store card and looked you up in both their store database and a commercial marketing database they’ve subscribed to. - store card again. They’ll know your name, - store card salary, - if you entered it and if you didn't lie when you filled out your store card form interests, - if you entered them and your didn't lie when you filled out your store card form what sort of sales pitches you’re most vulnerable to, - if the "deep data" / AI is actually correct and how profitable a customer you are. - store card Maybe they’ll have read a profile based on your tweets and know what sort of mood you’re in. - MAYBE. assuming the AI is anywhere near correct. Maybe they’ll know your political affiliation or sexual identity, - MAYBE, probably wrong. both predictable by your social media activity. - PROVE THIS. And they’re going to engage with you accordingly, perhaps by making sure you’re well taken care of or possibly by trying to make you so uncomfortable that you’ll leave.

tjr 11y ago
RMS has been advocating against using store cards for years. I guess in-store facial recognition could thwart the privacy efforts of people like him? (To some degree?)
- 15155 11y ago
  Unless he's using cash, make no mistake, his purchases are being tracked in some capacity. Why do you need a store card when a credit/debit card track has more than enough information to identify? - Card number (useful on its own as an identifier) - Name (not perfect, decent secondary info) Granted, these don't generally make for a super-continuous history on someone, but they're pretty decent for the average person for a year or two. Also, if you make any returns at one of these stores that you've previously used a CC, your real state-issued ID will be correlated with your purchases (via your CC). Also, if you do any online shopping with a retailer and use the same cards in the store: instant correlation. Checks? Necessarily correlated with DL and account numbers, even better than CCs. Outside of cash: there're just too many ways to establish purchase histories for most individuals.

ksenzee 11y ago

As someone with prosopagnosia (neurological inability to recognize faces) I find this incredibly frustrating. My everyday life would be immensely easier with assistive tech that told me the names of everyone I see. And now that the technology exists to develop such a useful device, what do we get instead? Mass societal surveillance.

devindotcom 11y ago
Alas the first application of much cutting-edge technology is in the service of authority. I hope you are at least a bit comforted by the fact that the technology is making its way slowly to you.
dougmany 11y ago
I am no expert on this but the article suggested that the database of named photos was the hardest part to obtain for an individual. Since you would (probably) most value a database of people you have met before, a self generated database would be a good start to gaining access to this technology.
- ksenzee 11y ago
  Right, I could definitely train existing facial recognition software on a database of people I've met. The problem is delivery; when I need this information, I'm not sitting at a computer. I need some kind of device, with a camera and a way to feed me the person's name real time, that I can reasonably wear in public without looking like a walking server closet. That's hard to hack together (just ask the Glass team).
cantrevealname 11y ago
That would be the killer app for Google Glass. Not just for your situation, but for salesmen, customer service reps, security guards, politicians, or anyone who needs to recognize lots of people, recall names, and bring up an instant profile about the person standing in front of them. (Granted, even this application has serious overtones of societal surveillance.) EDIT: Anyone care to speculate on why Google Glass doesn't do this? Surely the processing capability is there.

bitL 11y ago

Anyone can suggest brands for high quality fake mustaches and asymmetric sunglasses? ;-)

devindotcom 11y ago

There was a comic recently that had a main character who had little emitters constantly blasting his face with IR radiation, so it would just turn up as an overexposed blob on surveillance cameras. Of course all they need is an IR filter to combat this, but the idea is fun.

jaxb 11y ago
an episode of Almost Human had 'anti-camera spray' that did this, as well. maybe a comic was based on that?

gkfasdfasdf 11y ago

Perhaps the niqab (face-veil) will see a rise in popularity...

tormeh 11y ago
Nah, turns out that modern AI techniques are better than the brain at certain things. In this instance, the brain has huge amounts of volume dedicated to recognizing faces. AI don't have that same preference for faces; we can make AI recognize using any feature, including seemingly unlikely ones such as gait. A driverless car with no windows would probably do it, but then again the car itself will probably be bugged a la Samsung TVs.
caskance 11y ago
Sounds like a boring half-measure. Let's shoot for full-scale personal holography. Look however you want, whenever you want.

on_ 11y ago

There was a great discussion I wont be able to find about this recently on HN after an article about a zebra/leopard patterned couch. Thwarting an image id algorithim is not difficult and the researcher came on and spoke about the problems in the space similar to this xkcd[0] comic. It is a super complex problem to solve. How far away are we? It is like the turing test, everytime someone gets close the term is redefined. It is certainly coming, maybe reasonable models in ~5 years publicly acknowledged. What can someone really do to prevent it? Short of making an account every few months with a lot of your data but different pictures, what american doesnt have a photo that has been published on the internet? Even if you dont have facebook, someone you know does. The tech will take a while to dev and refine, and longer to deploy at scale, but I can't think of a scalable solution to this. [0]http://xkcd.com/1425/ http://xkcd.com/1425/

croddin 11y ago
Here is the discussion for "Suddenly, a leopard print sofa appears": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749660

domrdy 11y ago

Watching Minority Report the other day, this reminds me of the automated retina scans in the movie. Really creeped me out when Tom Cruise was walking through a mall, gets picked up by the scanners and they start shooting targeted advertising at him.

finance-geek 11y ago
Tangent: I always chuckle at how prescient Minority Report was on some aspects, yet they didn't envision network storage or wireless communication -- do you remember at how they would transfer small glass disks all the time...how burdensome. LOL.

cvwright 11y ago

I agree with the general idea put forth by the article. This is an important issue, and the future could bring a lot of bad things if we (as a society) are not careful. Schneier makes it sound pretty scary. For a general audience, this is probably good. It takes a lot to make your average Joe start paying attention to something new. But on a technical level, I can't help wondering, how realistic is the scenario he describes? Or, maybe the better question is, how immediate is the threat of universal face recognition? If we know what time horizon we're working with, maybe we can be better prepared. I think Schneier makes some substantial logical leaps in the article that make it sound like automatic, ubiquitous facial recognition is a more urgent issue than it really is. For example, he goes from this > Today in the US there's a massive but invisible industry that records the movements of cars around the country. Cameras mounted on cars and tow trucks capture license places along with date/time/location information ... to this > This could easily happen with face recognition. with no supporting evidence for how this feat of engineering will be accomplished. Recognizing letters and numbers on a license plate is one thing. Recognizing faces at random angles with random occlusions, hats, eyeglasses, makeup, etc., is quite another thing. I found a couple of papers from CMU and UCF a couple of years ago where they look at the problem of recognizing people in photos at "web scale" [1]. The recall/precision rates of the algorithms they tested are pretty decent, but they're still pretty far from the dystopian future described in the article. [1] http://enriquegortiz.com/wordpress/enriquegortiz/research/face-recognition/webscale-face-recognition/ http://enriquegortiz.com/wordpress/enriquegortiz/research/fa...

jpatokal 11y ago

So are we actually there yet? I was under the impression that, while face recognition has evolved to the point that face matching against a limited group of people (say, your Facebook friends) is feasible, we're still a long ways off from being able to put a face-scanner in a crowd in NYC and have it spot the 1 suspect among 10 million without a totally ridiculous rate of false positives.

rm999 11y ago
This should be a top comment - this kind of tracking is not possible at scale and probably won't be for a long time. Identifying a person in a group of 100s/1000s has been a solved problem for decades. Consistently identifying a single person from a database of 100Ms/billions of people who are constantly gaining weight, growing facial hair, etc is impossible with today's technology; false positives will become an exponentially bigger problem as you increase the candidate space. Perhaps one day increased camera resolutions will allow trackers to identify something humans can't, like retinal scans. This would allow cameras to basically "fingerprint" people, and will be super creepy.
- IanCal 11y ago
  I think that actually as you increase surveillance the problem gets simpler. If you're always in view of a camera then I can simply track your motion and I only need to recognise you once. Given that I've seen you in your car, I can already narrow things down significantly. > Consistently identifying a single person from a database of 100Ms/billions of people I don't need to, there aren't billions of people who are likely to be at the closest ATM to your house. > constantly gaining weight, growing facial hair, etc But I see you several times every single day. > false positives will become an exponentially bigger problem as you increase the candidate space. To be honest, I think that this is the most likely thing to scare people, that you won't be allowed to fly because a computer made a mistake and everyone trusts it or can't override it. That the police get called when you go to pick up your son because you're the same height and rough build as a child molester who was released from prison yesterday
- nitrogen 11y ago

vorg 11y ago

When surveillance systems are put in place and collected information stored for later use, irrespective of whether it's a personal, business, or government system, the people who get themselves in control of them will use the surveillance and/or information to steal from, preach to, discredit, and/or wear down the target/s, all of which ultimately equate to benefiting in some way at the target's expense. There's no such thing as unused surveillance capacity or unused collected information.

msellout 11y ago

Where's the line that separates generic image recognition from facial recognition? Forget corporations for a moment and think about your own rights as a programmer. I want to tinker with image-similarity scores by downloading random images from the internet and comparing with a photo I just took in a public place. Oops, my photo just so happened to have a stranger's face that matches a photo in my database and that filename contains the person's name. Should that be illegal? Consider the effects of a legal requirement to have an "opt-in" for facial recognition software. That was what the "consumer advocates" thought should be a minimum standard. Large corporations with trusted brands might be able to run such an effort, but any startup certainly could not. Regulating what software I can write is a slippery slope. Compare facial recognition with encryption. If there's regulation for recognition software, then regulation for encryption will be coming right after. The worst-case scenario in my mind is if the federal government has a monopoly on any kind of software. Our best defense against a government/corporate monopoly on surveillance is not to ban it, but to democratize it.

PostOnce 11y ago
What you can do in your own time is one thing, what you can do commercially is another. Encryption is something you do by yourself or with another consenting party, facial recognition is something you do to someone else without their permission and possibly use for nefarious purposes. There's nothing wrong with outlawing certain activities from the commercial sphere, or any sphere. It's not an assault on your freedom, its protection of my privacy? It's illegal to stalk and harass people in person or over the phone. It's illegal to serve people undercooked food or raw milk or whatever. It's illegal to breach HIPAA. Are you next going to say its terrible that you can't access my medical records for your startup? How about security cameras and genitalia recognition in the bathrooms at restaurants, is that cool too?
- msellout 11y ago
  It's illegal to stalk and harass, it's not illegal to make phone calls. The issue is not facial recognition, it's the misuse. I'm all for gun control, not gun ban. Cameras in the bathroom? Fine. Whatever. If that's the new normal, then I guess I'll get over it. Are you saying that will now be legalized? I'm pretty sure we don't need any new laws to prevent cameras in changing rooms. The "scary" scenarios that have been described in the other threads are already illegal for other reasons -- harassment, redlining (racial profiling), spam, etc.

caskance 11y ago

You show your face automatically everywhere you go. Expecting other people not to look is folly. It's no different from the idiocy around fingerprints.

gglitch 11y ago

My default interpretive framework when I read something like this is, of course, nearly hysterical paranoia and sociopolitical despair. And, speaking as objectively as possible, I think those are not invalid responses. However, for the moment, I'm instead trying to imagine sociology/psychology of the first generation to grow up native to this environment, and I admit that it's fascinating to think about. What will the teenagers be like who grow up expecting to be identified and known everywhere they go, by friend and foe alike? How will it affect manners, speech, courtship rituals, expectations for entertainment/education/employment? Etc. So strange.

pms 11y ago

It is a scary vision. However, the scary part seems to come not so much from the increasing data availability, but rather from the increased likelihood of discriminatory uses of such data. Enforcing non-discriminatory uses of data sounds like a hard problem to tackle, especially if we realize how diverse is the space of possible missuses (e.g., in law enforcements, business, and politics) and that this problem affects both humans and computer systems. As hard as this problem sounds, the article provides a great motivation for research that defines computationally what "discriminatory" means, as well as for the research aiming to design systems (both human and computer) that are privacy-protecting and non-discriminatory.