7 ms·

Photos of Kids Are Powering Surveillance Technology

139 points by hesk 7y ago

tsumnia 7y ago
While I understand the outrage and fully understand it, I'd like to offer another reason why child faces are in use - sex trafficking. My previous research was in face recognition and mostly in artificial face aging algorithms. One of the trouble areas in that domain was predicting how child would look after X years. This is due to the elasticity of child faces. The DOD offered grants for this type of research to help thwart child abduction and sex trafficking. Obviously this was before all of these types of stories began to emerge, but I like to bring this up as an opposing ethical debate.
- stallmanite 7y ago
  Is the DOD generally involved in civilian criminal investigations?
  - CapitalistCartr 7y ago
    Not the investigation, research. They fund all sorts.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  Is sex trafficking of children really a significant problem? (Yes, everyone has heard of the Dutroux case, but the depths of that won't be plumbed by face aging algorithms.) Altogether the line of reasoning sounds like the usual hype you put into grant applications. Your line of work is highly strained hydrocarbons, so when you apply to the Department of Energy you say in the distant future you won't synthesize 100 mg, you'll prepare hundreds of tons to put it into a rocket to increase its payload.
  - tictok4 7y ago
    > Is sex trafficking of children really a significant problem? It is if you sell FUD.
  - cookie_monsta 7y ago
    I think by now it's pretty much obligatory that any defense of mass surveillance will at least mention one of child sex trafficking, drug dealing or terrorism. Bonus points are available for combinations.
    - Infernal 7y ago
      Relevant: https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I would think that at least on HN we're more sophisticated than that. Just because child trafficking, drug dealing and terrorism are abused by politicians to excuse mass surveillance, doesn't mean they aren't real problems or that surveillance tech isn't able to help with them. Reasonable people consider trade-offs, and not cast everything in light of "sides" and "defending" yours.
      - cookie_monsta 7y ago
        So we should have just a little bit of reasonable mass surveillance? I don't see how to construct a nuanced or "sophisticated" viewpoint about this.
      - matheusmoreira 7y ago
        > Reasonable people consider trade-offs Let's do that: 1. Easy to use and effective encryption for all people, even pedophiles and terrorists. 2. Backdoored untrustworthy encryption governments will almost certainly abuse in order to surveil entire populations. Number 1 sounds like a very reasonable principle to have. Governments and police forces have more than enough tools at their disposal to fight crimes. WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption and my country's police forces routinely catch child molesters that use it. They do not need and should not have a "show me everything there is to know about this guy" button that they don't even need a warrant to press. Certain things should be inviolable, even to the state, even with a warrant.
    - matheusmoreira 7y ago
  - tonto 7y ago
    You sound like such a monumental asshole, fuck you
  - barrkel 7y ago
    I'd say "child trafficking" / "child abduction" are reasonably common terms for parental custody disagreements that cross country lines.
  - derefr 7y ago
    It's not necessarily that the child was trafficked as a child. It could be that the child went missing/ran away, lived on the street or in some other bad situation for a while, and then at some point was trafficked. Or it could even be that the child was sent to a relative in another country to grow up there, the relative never took any pictures of them, they grew up there, and then were conned into some trafficking situation as an adult. Either way, the goal would still be to identify an adult victim of trafficking by the last available picture of them, which was of them as a child.
  - tzs 7y ago
    There are only approximate numbers available, but most estimates seem to be at least a million or two worldwide, and 100k or two in the US.
    - mLuby 7y ago
      > A 2016 study by the Center for Court Innovation found that between 8,900 and 10,500 children, ages 13 to 17, are commercially exploited each year in this country. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/01/30/sex-trafficking-column/1073459001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/01/30... > In 2001, UPenn released a study conducted in 17 cities across the United States [in which] they estimated as many as 300,000 American youth may be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation at any time. However, the actual number of children involved in prostitution is likely to be much smaller: over 10 years only 827 cases a year had been reported to police departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_States#Commercial_sexual_exploitation_of_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_... Estimates differ wildly because many feel actual reports dramatically undercount reality. IMO even one is too many, but exaggerating does more harm than good.
  - anigbrowl 7y ago
    Is sex trafficking of children really a significant problem? You know I think there's a middle ground between being adamantly opposed to mass surveillance and taking child sex trafficking seriously. I personally know people (plural) that this has happened to and it's pretty irritating to see that issue cavalierly dismissed for argumentative purposes or tech cred points.
jonas21 7y ago
So... people specifically opted in to release their photos under a Creative Commons license, and now they're outraged that people are using the photos under the terms of the license? And some of them chose a license that required attribution, and now they're outraged that the photos are attributed to them?
- EricE 7y ago
  Read the article more closely - at least one person they interviewed specifically assigned it the non-commercial Creative Commons license which means pictures shouldn't be used for things like what mega face is doing (clearly for commercial purposes!)
  - Mathnerd314 7y ago
    They're using it for academic research, which is noncommercial by some definitions. The companies that used it only used it to participate in the competition.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- cj 7y ago
  “people specifically opted in to...” Do you say the same of yourself when you sign up for a random online service and blindly check the “Accept TOS” checkbox? Contracts and licenses are sometimes tricky to unequivocally enforce when one party entered into the contract or granted a license by mistake, unknowingly, etc.
  - jonas21 7y ago
    On Flickr (where the photos came from), the default license is "All Rights Reserved". To apply a Creative Commons license, you need to go into a menu and select the license you want from a list. So that's why I said they "specifically opted in".
aaron695 7y ago
I get it's 14 years ago, but you can't hide behind 'I didn't know' anymore. I don't even care about Creative Commons licensing. If you put a photo of a child in a public place with unlimited copies that it's possible for anyone in the world to grab and do what they want with, you can't complain when they do that. I guess you can complain, but zero sympathy. Things you publish on the internet are available in the bedrooms, homes, some prisons and asylums of conman, thieves, paedophiles, madmen, teens and republicans. And half the publish platforms allow them to directly reply back to you. When you put your photo or opinion in the bathroom of a cannibalistic murderer who's yet to be caught, what do you expect?
herf 7y ago
It's a mistake to think that checking a box that says "CC" means you actually had permission to issue a license. If you're selling stock photos, you need written consent for everything in the photo--artwork, brands, people. Interestingly, parents can give consent for their kids to be in a photograph, but these same identifiers can be used years later to identify the adults in the photos. A related question is this: do pre-trained classifiers reveal any personally-identifying information? Or are they only statistics about many, many faces?

139 points by hesk 7y ago

While I understand the outrage and fully understand it, I'd like to offer another reason why child faces are in use - sex trafficking. My previous research was in face recognition and mostly in artificial face aging algorithms. One of the trouble areas in that domain was predicting how child would look after X years. This is due to the elasticity of child faces. The DOD offered grants for this type of research to help thwart child abduction and sex trafficking. Obviously this was before all of these types of stories began to emerge, but I like to bring this up as an opposing ethical debate.

stallmanite 7y ago
Is the DOD generally involved in civilian criminal investigations?
- CapitalistCartr 7y ago
  Not the investigation, research. They fund all sorts.
HarryHirsch 7y ago
Is sex trafficking of children really a significant problem? (Yes, everyone has heard of the Dutroux case, but the depths of that won't be plumbed by face aging algorithms.) Altogether the line of reasoning sounds like the usual hype you put into grant applications. Your line of work is highly strained hydrocarbons, so when you apply to the Department of Energy you say in the distant future you won't synthesize 100 mg, you'll prepare hundreds of tons to put it into a rocket to increase its payload.
- tictok4 7y ago
  > Is sex trafficking of children really a significant problem? It is if you sell FUD.
- cookie_monsta 7y ago
  I think by now it's pretty much obligatory that any defense of mass surveillance will at least mention one of child sex trafficking, drug dealing or terrorism. Bonus points are available for combinations.
  - Infernal 7y ago
    Relevant: https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I would think that at least on HN we're more sophisticated than that. Just because child trafficking, drug dealing and terrorism are abused by politicians to excuse mass surveillance, doesn't mean they aren't real problems or that surveillance tech isn't able to help with them. Reasonable people consider trade-offs, and not cast everything in light of "sides" and "defending" yours.
    - cookie_monsta 7y ago
      So we should have just a little bit of reasonable mass surveillance? I don't see how to construct a nuanced or "sophisticated" viewpoint about this.
    - matheusmoreira 7y ago
      > Reasonable people consider trade-offs Let's do that: 1. Easy to use and effective encryption for all people, even pedophiles and terrorists. 2. Backdoored untrustworthy encryption governments will almost certainly abuse in order to surveil entire populations. Number 1 sounds like a very reasonable principle to have. Governments and police forces have more than enough tools at their disposal to fight crimes. WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption and my country's police forces routinely catch child molesters that use it. They do not need and should not have a "show me everything there is to know about this guy" button that they don't even need a warrant to press. Certain things should be inviolable, even to the state, even with a warrant.
  - matheusmoreira 7y ago
- tonto 7y ago
  You sound like such a monumental asshole, fuck you
- barrkel 7y ago
  I'd say "child trafficking" / "child abduction" are reasonably common terms for parental custody disagreements that cross country lines.
- derefr 7y ago
  It's not necessarily that the child was trafficked as a child. It could be that the child went missing/ran away, lived on the street or in some other bad situation for a while, and then at some point was trafficked. Or it could even be that the child was sent to a relative in another country to grow up there, the relative never took any pictures of them, they grew up there, and then were conned into some trafficking situation as an adult. Either way, the goal would still be to identify an adult victim of trafficking by the last available picture of them, which was of them as a child.
- tzs 7y ago
  There are only approximate numbers available, but most estimates seem to be at least a million or two worldwide, and 100k or two in the US.
  - mLuby 7y ago
    > A 2016 study by the Center for Court Innovation found that between 8,900 and 10,500 children, ages 13 to 17, are commercially exploited each year in this country. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/01/30/sex-trafficking-column/1073459001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/01/30... > In 2001, UPenn released a study conducted in 17 cities across the United States [in which] they estimated as many as 300,000 American youth may be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation at any time. However, the actual number of children involved in prostitution is likely to be much smaller: over 10 years only 827 cases a year had been reported to police departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_States#Commercial_sexual_exploitation_of_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_... Estimates differ wildly because many feel actual reports dramatically undercount reality. IMO even one is too many, but exaggerating does more harm than good.
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  Is sex trafficking of children really a significant problem? You know I think there's a middle ground between being adamantly opposed to mass surveillance and taking child sex trafficking seriously. I personally know people (plural) that this has happened to and it's pretty irritating to see that issue cavalierly dismissed for argumentative purposes or tech cred points.

jonas21 7y ago

So... people specifically opted in to release their photos under a Creative Commons license, and now they're outraged that people are using the photos under the terms of the license? And some of them chose a license that required attribution, and now they're outraged that the photos are attributed to them?

EricE 7y ago
Read the article more closely - at least one person they interviewed specifically assigned it the non-commercial Creative Commons license which means pictures shouldn't be used for things like what mega face is doing (clearly for commercial purposes!)
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  They're using it for academic research, which is noncommercial by some definitions. The companies that used it only used it to participate in the competition.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cj 7y ago
“people specifically opted in to...” Do you say the same of yourself when you sign up for a random online service and blindly check the “Accept TOS” checkbox? Contracts and licenses are sometimes tricky to unequivocally enforce when one party entered into the contract or granted a license by mistake, unknowingly, etc.
- jonas21 7y ago
  On Flickr (where the photos came from), the default license is "All Rights Reserved". To apply a Creative Commons license, you need to go into a menu and select the license you want from a list. So that's why I said they "specifically opted in".

aaron695 7y ago

I get it's 14 years ago, but you can't hide behind 'I didn't know' anymore. I don't even care about Creative Commons licensing. If you put a photo of a child in a public place with unlimited copies that it's possible for anyone in the world to grab and do what they want with, you can't complain when they do that. I guess you can complain, but zero sympathy. Things you publish on the internet are available in the bedrooms, homes, some prisons and asylums of conman, thieves, paedophiles, madmen, teens and republicans. And half the publish platforms allow them to directly reply back to you. When you put your photo or opinion in the bathroom of a cannibalistic murderer who's yet to be caught, what do you expect?

herf 7y ago

It's a mistake to think that checking a box that says "CC" means you actually had permission to issue a license. If you're selling stock photos, you need written consent for everything in the photo--artwork, brands, people. Interestingly, parents can give consent for their kids to be in a photograph, but these same identifiers can be used years later to identify the adults in the photos. A related question is this: do pre-trained classifiers reveal any personally-identifying information? Or are they only statistics about many, many faces?