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Kudos to Google's contractor for offering this opportunity to the people who need it most. I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But

by kauffj 7y ago

Kudos to Google's contractor for offering this opportunity to the people who need it most. I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I would even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. This article also mentions that the contractor may have lied to or misled the homeless, which is deplorable. But the behavior described by the title itself is nothing objectionable. The fact that many will object is a phenomenon I've seen called "Copenhagen Ethics": https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/ https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

chooseaname 7y ago
Giving $5 to a homeless person doesn't help them.
blub 7y ago
$5 isn't much. Why not post here a picture and 3d scan of your face as a token of good will? It could help some start-ups that need such a face for demo purposes or other experiments.
- username90 7y ago
  Giving up your HN privacy is different than selling a scan of your face that anyone can already find with a simple Google search on Facebook or Linkedin.
- matz1 7y ago
  I think most people, Including me, trust google/fb more than random people on hn.
tobib 7y ago
> I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. Would you really? My gut feeling tells me that's not the case for most people for privacy or ethical reasons. Just because those people are poor, we expect them to have lower privacy or ethical standards. The link you posted has the following example, I think you're referring to that > BBH Labs was an exception – they outfitted 13 homeless volunteers with WiFi hotspots and asked them to offer WiFi to SXSW attendees in exchange for donations. In return, they would be paid $20 a day plus whatever attendees gave in donations. That's completely different. Offering Wifi has zero long term effects. It's providing people with a "business opportunity" that wouldn't have access to it otherwise. Giving someone 5 bucks for their face picture (or other biometrics) is totally different and has long term negative effects.
- aantix 7y ago
  I don’t think most people care about privacy all that much. Most live publicly with their faces on display for all to see and others taking it a step further, participating in Facebook alongside billions of others. It doesn’t scream facial identity being a major concern.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    I think most people actually care quite a lot. That people live their lives accepting that their faces are on display is not evidence otherwise, since there is literally no other option. Participating Facebook is also not evidence otherwise -- at most, it's evidence that people are willing to trade privacy in some circumstances (and I think even that's a bit of a stretch), but I'll bet that most Facebook users would object to having their privacy invaded without their consent -- which means they care about privacy.
    - matz1 7y ago
      Then what would you accept as proof/evidence ?
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        A couple of solid independent studies would go a long way.
        candiodari 7y ago
        Okay ... half of experimental psychology papers are about giving people some small amount of money, or even just some token or just a chance to tell their story for filling out a questionnaire, sometimes extra credit is involved, or incarceration is involved (in psychiatric care) which is where I start having serious ethical problems with it. Questionnaires where they reveal things, often associated with at least a way to contact them for an interview, but sometimes with name and everything, usually is psychiatric settings (where people are often incarcerated without any proof, trial or any of that I might add). Things like whether they stole from their employer. Whether they ever used violence to obtain sex. They often ask children, homeless, prisoners, patients ... other groups with perceived or real precarious situations. (things that would never pass an ethical review board for, say, medicine) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.5694/j.1326-5377.2005.tb07082.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.5694/j.1326-5377.... https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.91.10.1679 https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.91.1... https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-07467-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-07467-001 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1020007004436 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1020007004436 So yes, I would say that a lot of people are willing to give up a LOT more privacy than a face picture for a small reward.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
o_p 7y ago
This, if $0 + not giving face instead of $5 was a superior choice, the homeless would have chosen it, but they didnt.
- tengbretson 7y ago
  That argument applies equally well to buying kidneys from homeless people for $20. I hope we agree that that's bad.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Oh come on, surely you must realize that selling limited copyright to a digital likeness of your face is much different than selling a literal body part.
    - tengbretson 7y ago
      Of course it's different. It's obviously different. That doesn't make "if it was a bad exchange they wouldn't do it" a good argument in support of either of those examples.
  - pliny 7y ago
    If you allowed people to sell their kidneys the market price would definitely be a lot higher and the trade in kidneys between homeless people and sick people would leave both groups a lot better off. Today you have one group dying in the street and the other dying waiting for a transplant.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      And if a few homeless people die from transplant complications, hey they volunteered! And now we can stop investing in social welfare because a steady supply of homeless bodies improves the health of the middle class! The world is not linear, it has feedback effects.
- JustSomeNobody 7y ago
gbanfalvi 7y ago
What if it was one dollar instead of five? It would have saved hundreds of thousands for Randstad. Or if google is paying for it and this feature motivates 1% more people to buy the phone, they could be making a lot of money. I bet loads of homeless would be fine with $1 for a snapshot. How does the outcome differ for all these homeless people in this case? What if they could have bargained for $10 or even more instead? I don’t think either company would even blink at the sum, but many desperate people out there would be a lot better off. I agree with you that some observers are never going to be satisfied and to them there’s always more an individual or a company can do. There is definitely an observer effect. Similarly, If we took my line of questioning all the way to an absurd extreme, the best outcome would be if all these people got permanent shelter, jobs, and a stable life. But we can’t expect companies with profit targets to do this them. Nobody would feel bad about this exchange, but it would be pretty unrealistic. So i guess I need to reframe my original question. Why do certain exchanges feel ok while other ones leave a sour taste in everybody’s mouth? To me it seems like the answer is because the exchange felt unfair. Both parties stand to benefit but, instead of doing something genuinely beneficial for both, the party in power offered the (almost) bare minimum. That sense of unfairness is multiplied when you contextualize the exchange as Very Large Business vs. Small Homeless Person. Similarly the link to the phenomenon discusses our role as observers, but it doesn’t discuss the parties’ roles in the exchanges. They’re not only observers, they’re also actors. The people performing the homeless study could, for example offered something to the control group at the completion of the experiment.
andrerm 7y ago
> which is deplorable. But There is always a but
- weberc2 7y ago
  The period is important. Lying to homeless is deplorable, full stop. But incorporating homeless faces into your training data is not objectionable.
phjesusthatguy3 7y ago
You're selling yourself short. Google, et al, want to use my likeness to facilitate database lookups. They are welcome to a perpetual, exclusive license of that data at a quarter of a trillion USD. They know how to get in touch with me; I'm 100% serious.
jakelazaroff 7y ago
The issue is not that the contractor only marginally helped these people. It’s that they exploited a massive power imbalance in order to reap a vastly larger reward than they offered. “Copenhagen Ethics” really just strikes me as a rhetorical tool to defend exploitation. “What, just because I offered this person a job I have to pay them a minimum wage?”

by kauffj 7y ago

chooseaname 7y ago

Giving $5 to a homeless person doesn't help them.

blub 7y ago

$5 isn't much. Why not post here a picture and 3d scan of your face as a token of good will? It could help some start-ups that need such a face for demo purposes or other experiments.

username90 7y ago
Giving up your HN privacy is different than selling a scan of your face that anyone can already find with a simple Google search on Facebook or Linkedin.
matz1 7y ago
I think most people, Including me, trust google/fb more than random people on hn.

tobib 7y ago

> I would happily sell anyone a picture or scan of my face for $5. But I even more happily have that chance go to someone who needs it more than myself. Would you really? My gut feeling tells me that's not the case for most people for privacy or ethical reasons. Just because those people are poor, we expect them to have lower privacy or ethical standards. The link you posted has the following example, I think you're referring to that > BBH Labs was an exception – they outfitted 13 homeless volunteers with WiFi hotspots and asked them to offer WiFi to SXSW attendees in exchange for donations. In return, they would be paid $20 a day plus whatever attendees gave in donations. That's completely different. Offering Wifi has zero long term effects. It's providing people with a "business opportunity" that wouldn't have access to it otherwise. Giving someone 5 bucks for their face picture (or other biometrics) is totally different and has long term negative effects.

aantix 7y ago
I don’t think most people care about privacy all that much. Most live publicly with their faces on display for all to see and others taking it a step further, participating in Facebook alongside billions of others. It doesn’t scream facial identity being a major concern.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  I think most people actually care quite a lot. That people live their lives accepting that their faces are on display is not evidence otherwise, since there is literally no other option. Participating Facebook is also not evidence otherwise -- at most, it's evidence that people are willing to trade privacy in some circumstances (and I think even that's a bit of a stretch), but I'll bet that most Facebook users would object to having their privacy invaded without their consent -- which means they care about privacy.
  - matz1 7y ago
    Then what would you accept as proof/evidence ?
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      A couple of solid independent studies would go a long way.
      - candiodari 7y ago
        Okay ... half of experimental psychology papers are about giving people some small amount of money, or even just some token or just a chance to tell their story for filling out a questionnaire, sometimes extra credit is involved, or incarceration is involved (in psychiatric care) which is where I start having serious ethical problems with it. Questionnaires where they reveal things, often associated with at least a way to contact them for an interview, but sometimes with name and everything, usually is psychiatric settings (where people are often incarcerated without any proof, trial or any of that I might add). Things like whether they stole from their employer. Whether they ever used violence to obtain sex. They often ask children, homeless, prisoners, patients ... other groups with perceived or real precarious situations. (things that would never pass an ethical review board for, say, medicine) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.5694/j.1326-5377.2005.tb07082.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.5694/j.1326-5377.... https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.91.10.1679 https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.91.1... https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-07467-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1991-07467-001 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1020007004436 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1020007004436 So yes, I would say that a lot of people are willing to give up a LOT more privacy than a face picture for a small reward.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

o_p 7y ago

This, if $0 + not giving face instead of $5 was a superior choice, the homeless would have chosen it, but they didnt.

tengbretson 7y ago
That argument applies equally well to buying kidneys from homeless people for $20. I hope we agree that that's bad.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Oh come on, surely you must realize that selling limited copyright to a digital likeness of your face is much different than selling a literal body part.
  - tengbretson 7y ago
    Of course it's different. It's obviously different. That doesn't make "if it was a bad exchange they wouldn't do it" a good argument in support of either of those examples.
- pliny 7y ago
  If you allowed people to sell their kidneys the market price would definitely be a lot higher and the trade in kidneys between homeless people and sick people would leave both groups a lot better off. Today you have one group dying in the street and the other dying waiting for a transplant.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    And if a few homeless people die from transplant complications, hey they volunteered! And now we can stop investing in social welfare because a steady supply of homeless bodies improves the health of the middle class! The world is not linear, it has feedback effects.
JustSomeNobody 7y ago

gbanfalvi 7y ago

What if it was one dollar instead of five? It would have saved hundreds of thousands for Randstad. Or if google is paying for it and this feature motivates 1% more people to buy the phone, they could be making a lot of money. I bet loads of homeless would be fine with $1 for a snapshot. How does the outcome differ for all these homeless people in this case? What if they could have bargained for $10 or even more instead? I don’t think either company would even blink at the sum, but many desperate people out there would be a lot better off. I agree with you that some observers are never going to be satisfied and to them there’s always more an individual or a company can do. There is definitely an observer effect. Similarly, If we took my line of questioning all the way to an absurd extreme, the best outcome would be if all these people got permanent shelter, jobs, and a stable life. But we can’t expect companies with profit targets to do this them. Nobody would feel bad about this exchange, but it would be pretty unrealistic. So i guess I need to reframe my original question. Why do certain exchanges feel ok while other ones leave a sour taste in everybody’s mouth? To me it seems like the answer is because the exchange felt unfair. Both parties stand to benefit but, instead of doing something genuinely beneficial for both, the party in power offered the (almost) bare minimum. That sense of unfairness is multiplied when you contextualize the exchange as Very Large Business vs. Small Homeless Person. Similarly the link to the phenomenon discusses our role as observers, but it doesn’t discuss the parties’ roles in the exchanges. They’re not only observers, they’re also actors. The people performing the homeless study could, for example offered something to the control group at the completion of the experiment.

andrerm 7y ago

> which is deplorable. But There is always a but

weberc2 7y ago
The period is important. Lying to homeless is deplorable, full stop. But incorporating homeless faces into your training data is not objectionable.

phjesusthatguy3 7y ago

You're selling yourself short. Google, et al, want to use my likeness to facilitate database lookups. They are welcome to a perpetual, exclusive license of that data at a quarter of a trillion USD. They know how to get in touch with me; I'm 100% serious.

jakelazaroff 7y ago

The issue is not that the contractor only marginally helped these people. It’s that they exploited a massive power imbalance in order to reap a vastly larger reward than they offered. “Copenhagen Ethics” really just strikes me as a rhetorical tool to defend exploitation. “What, just because I offered this person a job I have to pay them a minimum wage?”