11 ms·

Facial recognition is really scary. This was recently demonstrated for Russia's Facebook, VKontakte, when a service appeared that let you look up people on that

Facial recognition is really scary. This was recently demonstrated for Russia's Facebook, VKontakte, when a service appeared that let you look up people on that site by photo. So people started looking up the profiles of random subway passengers, outing sex workers to their families and friends, etc.

proksoup 11y ago
Scary, but inevitable, no? As technology improves, it's hard to imagine regulations keeping pace with preventing this sort of thing ... And even if they did, then it would only be used by criminals and governments (while I may call it criminal, they would likely exclude themselves from any such regulation), and I'm not sure that situation (criminals and governments being the only users of the technology) is a better situation than the technology being available to all. Is it?
- pjc50 11y ago
  Why do you think European data protection directive rules won't work here?
  - proksoup 11y ago
    I was not familiar with those, perhaps they will. Very fascinated reading about them now. I guess I don't follow the specifics, ... to give an example of my confusion, a journalist can't livestream a protest without blurring out the faces of the protestors?
    - pjc50 11y ago
      That's fine, because simply a face is not at the moment considered to be personal data and there's a general exemption for news reporting and livestreaming is not 'data retention' (and I think not 'data processing' either, for the purposes of the directive. Maintaining a facial recognition database however is definitely not allowed without appropriate consent: http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/7/3964550/facebook-deletes-european-facial-recognition-data http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/7/3964550/facebook-deletes-eu...
- Razengan 11y ago
  And that, in turn, could eventually be countered by the technology that allows anyone to easily modify their appearance any way they want, however many times they want. But then..of course, all such services will be required by governments to keep a complete record of a person's "appearance history." Enter the black market, a la Minority Report.
  - proksoup 11y ago
    A Scanner Darkly is maybe relevant here too.
    - dsfuoi 11y ago
      For the scramble suit to work, publicly available 'mixing' stations would have to be available, which would work like a black box, you could only surveil input and output. And exits from your house would have to somehow be connected to those stations, or have your house change locations randomly. The latter could work if houses were mostly in form of larger modular worldwide-compatible shipping containers. Also no windows, we would have VR.
  - zardo 11y ago
    I doubt it, unless you drop your entire life at the same time it shouldn't be too hard to associate the new face with the old identity. And then there are other ways to identify a person. Like how they move.
- saturncoleus 11y ago
  If you have ever watched the TV show Black Mirror, it does an exploration of what it would be like to have instant access to know everything about a person by looking at them. The technology becomes a commodity and results in the destruction of personal relationships rather than a dystopian big brother society. It seems to me that is a much more likely future than a criminal and government oppression future. Is one of them inevitable? Probably, but not any more than our present is someone else's future.
  - rpgmaker 11y ago
    That is similar to the outcome that Asimov explores in The Dead Past[1] and like you he lets the government off the hook very easily, like it is a benevolent entity that won't exploit the technology already in the hands of the masses when we know this to be untrue. If technology reaches a point where it disrupts all personal relationships the government wouldn't be far behind creating the dystopian "big brother" society you speak of (which depending who you ask may have already been built). [1] http://www.rednovels.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html http://www.rednovels.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html
  - AndrewKemendo 11y ago
    Seems like you are implying that the stability of relationships is based on a lack of knowledge about someone. In which case that speaks more towards the frailty of relationships rather than a problem of information.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  As technology improves, it's hard to imagine regulations keeping pace with preventing this sort of thing ... I don't really see why. The main risks with modern big data storage and mining technologies mostly come from the "big" part. A single random person passing you in the street and seeing you out and about for a few seconds probably isn't much of a threat to you. A casual photo in someone's family holiday album where you were in the background probably isn't much of a threat to you either. Nor is a snapshot from a CCTV camera in a store where you shopped. On the other hand, a few thousand such records in electronic form, all uploaded to the same site that is systematically scanning them, extracting all the metadata that went with each of them, and then correlating all of that with other data that can identify you from your face... That is a threat to you in all kinds of ways. However, the only organisations capable of posing such a threat are those that have access to sufficiently large amounts of data. There aren't actually very many of those. Governments and essential services that you use often are one category. In a way, this is the trickiest area ethically, because there is obvious scope for abuse of large data sets and there are obvious security risks to keeping such data at all, but sometimes these organisations also have legitimate reasons for processing such data. The parts of governments that operate in the public eye, which is most of them, probably aren't going to break whatever rules we decide are ethically appropriate and codify through laws or official regulations, though. Another major category is services you deal with regularly. If you shop at a store and they use surveillance technology for legitimate security purposes, that's one thing. If you shop at a store that is part of a larger organisation and the members of that organisation pool their footage and analyse it for other purposes such as customer tracking and marketing as well, that's a bit different. But again, there are relatively few organisations with the ability to collect, store and process large enough volumes of data to pose a significant general threat to privacy. It seems unlikely that these organisations would try too hard to push the boundaries on what is permitted, if the rules are reasonably clear and the penalties for breaking them significant. The really shady category, IMHO, is the organisations that collect large amounts of data about you by getting other people to provide it. The moment your friend installs a social network's app on their phone and gives it (intentionally or otherwise) permission to upload and scan the data from their phone, the social network also has your phone number and so on. Of course, in places like the EU where there are stronger data protection and privacy laws, the legality of doing so has been challenged several times. But the greatest con the likes of Facebook ever pulled in building their massive databases was solving the scalability and jurisdictional problems by getting almost everyone to spy on each other for them. Even if you choose not to participate yourself, at their scale there will be dozens if not hundreds of people helpfully providing a very detailed set of data about you to Facebook anyway, with Facebook actively encouraging them to do so. Moreover, unlike the case with your own government or services you physically visit or use in person, social networks and the like operate internationally and aren't necessarily subject to the same data protection controls, as long as they can rig it so that they aren't actually the ones transferring personal data out of a controlled area, which of course they also solve by getting your friends to do it for them. What all of these cases have in common is that they are big organisations dealing with lots of people. The data mining and mass surveillance aspects typically only work as a significant threat to privacy at large scales. And if they're big enough to do that, and not secretive enough to literally hide behind special laws in the way that government security services do, they're also big enough to be actively monitored for compliance and if necessary penalised for non-compliance by regulatory authorities.
rvense 11y ago
I really don't like having my picture taken anymore. You don't where it's going to end up. I also do wonder how much infrastructure would need to be added in a country that already has a lot of video surveillance (like the UK) to implement a "find this person" feature, where you could just feed it a photo and it would go looking at all camera feeds.
- pjc50 11y ago
  I kind of assume they have that already. Or have tried to build it and failed due to the usual IT project management issues.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    The interesting thing about the Snowden releases was just how good GCHQ where technically, goes to show that when government wants to do IT projects it can, I guess that shows where their priorities lie at least.
- saturncoleus 11y ago
  Getting your picture taken kind of puts you on the defensive, but that probably isn't going away. You have to be able to go outside, go to the bank, go to work, and go to the grocery store. Each of those places are going to have cameras up for their own peace of mind. The alternative would be to not go out and enjoy life, which is the worse of the two options.
  - Jill_the_Pill 11y ago
    There is always niqab.
    - dsfuoi 11y ago
      Maybe we are the primitive ones.
      - 11y ago
sametmax 11y ago
That's not the scary part. The scary part is that people are feeding the facebook DB with pictures, and many more data. They did it, they are doing it, and will keep it up, despite everything we told them. The scary part is that nobody cares.
- untog 11y ago
  That's the entirely expected part. I don't know exactly which "we" you're referring to, but the tech scene in general absolutely did not warn people about the dangers of uploading these photos, on the contrary, they encouraged it. I don't think it's reasonable to expect "everyday" people to know the dangers here. There hasn't been any education, so you can't say "nobody cares". Nobody is aware.
  - Mendenhall 11y ago
    That sort of the amazing part to me. Even on hacker news with very educated people they dont talk much about all the ways its possible to abuse it. I think much of the tech scene is making money off it so no one says much about all the ways such info can be abused.
    - Spooky23 11y ago
      It's pretty hard to really critique FB here. There's wide respect for their technical prowess and achievements. It's odd to me that they don't attract the ire the Microsoft did in the old days. They are far more dangerous.
  - teaneedz 11y ago
    He has it right - nobody cares. Even when people are made aware, they still don't care. Look at the security debacle of Snapchat, not to mention its lack of ethics. Even when the issues were exposed, the majority of users didn't care. Same with FB privacy. It's not just a matter of awareness. You have to almost throw a wrench at people to wake the majority up.
  - teaneedz 11y ago

proksoup 11y ago

Scary, but inevitable, no? As technology improves, it's hard to imagine regulations keeping pace with preventing this sort of thing ... And even if they did, then it would only be used by criminals and governments (while I may call it criminal, they would likely exclude themselves from any such regulation), and I'm not sure that situation (criminals and governments being the only users of the technology) is a better situation than the technology being available to all. Is it?

pjc50 11y ago
Why do you think European data protection directive rules won't work here?
- proksoup 11y ago
  I was not familiar with those, perhaps they will. Very fascinated reading about them now. I guess I don't follow the specifics, ... to give an example of my confusion, a journalist can't livestream a protest without blurring out the faces of the protestors?
  - pjc50 11y ago
    That's fine, because simply a face is not at the moment considered to be personal data and there's a general exemption for news reporting and livestreaming is not 'data retention' (and I think not 'data processing' either, for the purposes of the directive. Maintaining a facial recognition database however is definitely not allowed without appropriate consent: http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/7/3964550/facebook-deletes-european-facial-recognition-data http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/7/3964550/facebook-deletes-eu...
Razengan 11y ago
And that, in turn, could eventually be countered by the technology that allows anyone to easily modify their appearance any way they want, however many times they want. But then..of course, all such services will be required by governments to keep a complete record of a person's "appearance history." Enter the black market, a la Minority Report.
- proksoup 11y ago
  A Scanner Darkly is maybe relevant here too.
  - dsfuoi 11y ago
    For the scramble suit to work, publicly available 'mixing' stations would have to be available, which would work like a black box, you could only surveil input and output. And exits from your house would have to somehow be connected to those stations, or have your house change locations randomly. The latter could work if houses were mostly in form of larger modular worldwide-compatible shipping containers. Also no windows, we would have VR.
- zardo 11y ago
  I doubt it, unless you drop your entire life at the same time it shouldn't be too hard to associate the new face with the old identity. And then there are other ways to identify a person. Like how they move.
saturncoleus 11y ago
If you have ever watched the TV show Black Mirror, it does an exploration of what it would be like to have instant access to know everything about a person by looking at them. The technology becomes a commodity and results in the destruction of personal relationships rather than a dystopian big brother society. It seems to me that is a much more likely future than a criminal and government oppression future. Is one of them inevitable? Probably, but not any more than our present is someone else's future.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  That is similar to the outcome that Asimov explores in The Dead Past[1] and like you he lets the government off the hook very easily, like it is a benevolent entity that won't exploit the technology already in the hands of the masses when we know this to be untrue. If technology reaches a point where it disrupts all personal relationships the government wouldn't be far behind creating the dystopian "big brother" society you speak of (which depending who you ask may have already been built). [1] http://www.rednovels.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html http://www.rednovels.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  Seems like you are implying that the stability of relationships is based on a lack of knowledge about someone. In which case that speaks more towards the frailty of relationships rather than a problem of information.
Silhouette 11y ago
As technology improves, it's hard to imagine regulations keeping pace with preventing this sort of thing ... I don't really see why. The main risks with modern big data storage and mining technologies mostly come from the "big" part. A single random person passing you in the street and seeing you out and about for a few seconds probably isn't much of a threat to you. A casual photo in someone's family holiday album where you were in the background probably isn't much of a threat to you either. Nor is a snapshot from a CCTV camera in a store where you shopped. On the other hand, a few thousand such records in electronic form, all uploaded to the same site that is systematically scanning them, extracting all the metadata that went with each of them, and then correlating all of that with other data that can identify you from your face... That is a threat to you in all kinds of ways. However, the only organisations capable of posing such a threat are those that have access to sufficiently large amounts of data. There aren't actually very many of those. Governments and essential services that you use often are one category. In a way, this is the trickiest area ethically, because there is obvious scope for abuse of large data sets and there are obvious security risks to keeping such data at all, but sometimes these organisations also have legitimate reasons for processing such data. The parts of governments that operate in the public eye, which is most of them, probably aren't going to break whatever rules we decide are ethically appropriate and codify through laws or official regulations, though. Another major category is services you deal with regularly. If you shop at a store and they use surveillance technology for legitimate security purposes, that's one thing. If you shop at a store that is part of a larger organisation and the members of that organisation pool their footage and analyse it for other purposes such as customer tracking and marketing as well, that's a bit different. But again, there are relatively few organisations with the ability to collect, store and process large enough volumes of data to pose a significant general threat to privacy. It seems unlikely that these organisations would try too hard to push the boundaries on what is permitted, if the rules are reasonably clear and the penalties for breaking them significant. The really shady category, IMHO, is the organisations that collect large amounts of data about you by getting other people to provide it. The moment your friend installs a social network's app on their phone and gives it (intentionally or otherwise) permission to upload and scan the data from their phone, the social network also has your phone number and so on. Of course, in places like the EU where there are stronger data protection and privacy laws, the legality of doing so has been challenged several times. But the greatest con the likes of Facebook ever pulled in building their massive databases was solving the scalability and jurisdictional problems by getting almost everyone to spy on each other for them. Even if you choose not to participate yourself, at their scale there will be dozens if not hundreds of people helpfully providing a very detailed set of data about you to Facebook anyway, with Facebook actively encouraging them to do so. Moreover, unlike the case with your own government or services you physically visit or use in person, social networks and the like operate internationally and aren't necessarily subject to the same data protection controls, as long as they can rig it so that they aren't actually the ones transferring personal data out of a controlled area, which of course they also solve by getting your friends to do it for them. What all of these cases have in common is that they are big organisations dealing with lots of people. The data mining and mass surveillance aspects typically only work as a significant threat to privacy at large scales. And if they're big enough to do that, and not secretive enough to literally hide behind special laws in the way that government security services do, they're also big enough to be actively monitored for compliance and if necessary penalised for non-compliance by regulatory authorities.

rvense 11y ago

I really don't like having my picture taken anymore. You don't where it's going to end up. I also do wonder how much infrastructure would need to be added in a country that already has a lot of video surveillance (like the UK) to implement a "find this person" feature, where you could just feed it a photo and it would go looking at all camera feeds.

pjc50 11y ago
I kind of assume they have that already. Or have tried to build it and failed due to the usual IT project management issues.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  The interesting thing about the Snowden releases was just how good GCHQ where technically, goes to show that when government wants to do IT projects it can, I guess that shows where their priorities lie at least.
saturncoleus 11y ago
Getting your picture taken kind of puts you on the defensive, but that probably isn't going away. You have to be able to go outside, go to the bank, go to work, and go to the grocery store. Each of those places are going to have cameras up for their own peace of mind. The alternative would be to not go out and enjoy life, which is the worse of the two options.
- Jill_the_Pill 11y ago
  There is always niqab.
  - dsfuoi 11y ago
    Maybe we are the primitive ones.
    - 11y ago

sametmax 11y ago

That's not the scary part. The scary part is that people are feeding the facebook DB with pictures, and many more data. They did it, they are doing it, and will keep it up, despite everything we told them. The scary part is that nobody cares.

untog 11y ago
That's the entirely expected part. I don't know exactly which "we" you're referring to, but the tech scene in general absolutely did not warn people about the dangers of uploading these photos, on the contrary, they encouraged it. I don't think it's reasonable to expect "everyday" people to know the dangers here. There hasn't been any education, so you can't say "nobody cares". Nobody is aware.
- Mendenhall 11y ago
  That sort of the amazing part to me. Even on hacker news with very educated people they dont talk much about all the ways its possible to abuse it. I think much of the tech scene is making money off it so no one says much about all the ways such info can be abused.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    It's pretty hard to really critique FB here. There's wide respect for their technical prowess and achievements. It's odd to me that they don't attract the ire the Microsoft did in the old days. They are far more dangerous.
- teaneedz 11y ago
  He has it right - nobody cares. Even when people are made aware, they still don't care. Look at the security debacle of Snapchat, not to mention its lack of ethics. Even when the issues were exposed, the majority of users didn't care. Same with FB privacy. It's not just a matter of awareness. You have to almost throw a wrench at people to wake the majority up.
- teaneedz 11y ago