11 ms·

Face-recognition technology is the new norm

jedimastert 7y ago
Question: do we know if police are using "find this face in a crowd" software or "log all faces and compare them to all people". The former is the same as was happening before only faster.
- whateveracct 7y ago
  Sometimes, "what was happening before but faster" alone is what can cause something to cross the line of legality (philosophically.)
  - jedimastert 7y ago
    > Sometimes, "what was happening before but faster" alone is what can cause something to cross the line of legality (philosophically.) Not that I don't believe you, but I can't think of any examples off of the top of my head. Can you give me one?
    - nerdponx 7y ago
      It used to be expensive (in both time and money) to track people's movements. Now cell phone carriers (as well as Google, Apple, and a few other companies) can do it trivially.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - rhcom2 7y ago
      Automated license plate readers spring to mind. The police have been noting license plates forever, automate it and suddenly now you have a database that tracks everyone's movements.
    - curryst 7y ago
      One that comes to mind is the Supreme Court enforced ban on creating a firearms registry. Firearms dealers are required to retain sales records with serial numbers for some amount of time (I don't have the number handy, it's several years) so technically the data exists currently. However they have ruled that it would be illegal to centralize that data for easier access. Another is those automated speeding cameras. In several states they are unable to write tickets without a police officer present. My understanding is that this means the machine operates the same way and still writes tickets, the officer just has to be there as a "witness" and play phone games or whatever while the machine works. The end effect is the same, but the law requires an officer to be a witness to the crime in order to generate tickets.
      - enjo 7y ago
        Medical Marijuana states often have similar laws. A registry of people with medical access exists, but it becomes illegal to exfiltrate the data for any reason (the registry is often on one computer in a state house office somewhere).
      - snagglegaggle 7y ago
        W.r.t. the firearms registry, there does appear to be one. FFLs reported targeted and widespread harassment by the ATF as they came in and digitized purchase records onsite 2010ish to 2016ish. Some FFL holders had to threaten force to prevent the records from being removed from their premesis. So who know what other methods are used for parallel construction.
      - Animats 7y ago
        One that comes to mind is the Supreme Court enforced ban on creating a firearms registry. No, that's not the Supreme Court. That's the Firearms Owner Protection Act of 1986.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act
        curryst 7y ago
        I stand corrected, thanks!
    - grawprog 7y ago
      To be extremely literal about it. Everyone's slowly dying every day, but if you go and speed that up and kill somebody, it becomes really illegal.
    - torstenvl 7y ago
      Cell site location information was deemed a search based on the fact that it is "detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled." The speed with which law enforcement can track you with CSLI, compared to canvassing witnesses, is the key factor.
    - munificent 7y ago
      Semi-automatic firearms versus fully automatic. It's legal to own a personal killing machine, as long as it can't kill above a certain rate.
    - pyrale 7y ago
      Asymetric crypto is all about this. The only difference between the key holder and a third party is a time factor. Another exemple is the rationale for EU privacy laws. It was fine to have your history in newspapers or judicial archives, as searching for them was prohibitive. But having it searchable through computers makes it trivial for would-be employers, neighbours, etc. to find out about you, transforming any small misdemeanour in a lifetime sentence.
- vkou 7y ago
  Police have historically misused the tools available to them (the police lineup). They have historically been very resistant to oversight of this misuse. When those tools become more powerful, so does the harm caused by their misuse. A gun is just a stronger slingshot, but you'd be an idiot to give one to an eight year old child who was slingshotting windows, dogs, and cats.
- bsenftner 7y ago
  The same software can operate in either "mode". Typically there is a gallery of faces, segmented into different categories such as "police", "location staff", "people we like" and "people we don't like" and where not identified as in one or more gallery groups the face record is "general public". Almost any location that cares to use FR will have groups for "staff", "good people" and "bad people", where the "good/bad" designation is not "good/evil" but more like "we care to please these people" and "these people have caused problems in the past". The use of a "general public" "virtual group" is for things like anonymous tracking of how people travel through a location, which is useful for emergency planning and demographics. So, in general, anytime FR is in use it will attempt to identify items in the view as faces or not faces, and when a face compare against the gallery, if a match is found, report that match along with any groups the face is a member. Also note "when a match is found" that can trigger review of multiple gallery faces for a human to select between or retain as an uncertain match containing multiple gallery hits. The entire process of "what to do when any matches are found" is specific to the purpose of the FR, often specific to a gallery group the match is a member. Not all users of FR use it for "security", some use FR for enhanced hospitality, such as luxury locations use FR to identify high net worth people waiting to be serviced, and public spaces are often interested in FR for emergency planning and demographic modeling throughout different times and seasons. Beyond the security applications, FR can be used in a similar manner as web page cookies, but for physical locations.
- hevi_jos 7y ago
  This is a fallacy. The fallacy of using Quality statements in order to negate Quantity. An earthquake of level 10.0 is just like an earthquake of level 4.0, only longer and bigger. A flooding is just like normal raining, only with more rain. In most situations a big change in quantity makes all the difference, like in this case. If police forces analyze 20000 people a year,mostly criminals in criminal scenes, it is completely different than analyzing millions, mostly normal people.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    "An explosion is just a chemical reaction, only fast".
- noitsnot 7y ago
  I know the government was, meaning I'm not sure if they still are now, without getting too specific. I'm not sure if that included the police, though.
raxxorrax 7y ago
Just sign our newsletter and we tell you how you are tracked... I cannot really condemn this attempt.
mLuby 7y ago
Let's say you're arrested (so fingerprinted, DNA-swabbed, mug-shotted, etc) but then not charged or convicted. Is there a way to get those records expunged? (IMO the innocent—and maybe those who've served their sentence—ought to be able to do this.)
- itronitron 7y ago
  This doesn't answer your question, but it is important to keep in mind that being arrested is not a crime.
  - tdfx 7y ago
    It's treated as such for a wide variety of things. Condo associations use arrest records as red flags for potential residents. Any arrest record removes your status with the global entry programs with CBP. I'm sure there's many more I'm not even familiar with. Even when you're completely exonerated, the arrest record haunts you until you can expunge it.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  A lot of good it does, when more and more states are requiring fingerprints to get a driver's license. The various governments want the data, and are simply taking it from a progressively-larger set of people. It's obviously not equal in severity, but the "First they came..." poem certainly applies here. They are simply rolling this out in stages: first in the most "sensitive" spots, such as airports. Then it will be most federal buildings, or other "high-security" locations. Then it will be routine.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Giving your fingerprints is already pretty mandatory for all the French citizens, and now the government is pushing for face recognition to be used as the default identification system... (meanwhile, centralized databases on all the citizens were illegal just a couple decades ago !)
    - 7y ago
umvi 7y ago
> Our privacy, our right to anonymity in public Who says these are rights? I agree free speech is a right, but who (legally) grants me the right to privacy and anonymity in public? Does me recognizing someone in public violate their right to anonymity?
- egdod 7y ago
  It’s a fair point. Where does the “reasonable expectation of privacy” end?
  - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    When you leave your house and/or are in plain view that does not require tress-passing. This stuff has already been decided. Remember the "Streisand" effect? If you step out in public, anyone can record you or take your photo. Including a government agency. What is going to be interesting is what public entities (agencies) are restricted from doing with said data. I don't see laws being passed restricting everyone from doing facial ID matches (namely private citizens or companies). Nor would I want them. I think it is a hard thing for people to conceptualize that you do not have a bubble of privacy everywhere you go. In certain places (home) you do. Not much elsewhere.
    - homonculus1 7y ago
      There is a reasonable expectation to not be face-tracked in public just like there is a reasonable expectation for everyone not to be followed 24/7 by undercover officers. In the past law enforcement did have to be told not to do the latter, since it's a total waste of resources, but now the former is cheap enough to actually happen and administrators want the new tech on their resumes. Current precedent is out of date. Free society depends on the people's ability to bend and break unjust laws. It cannot survive the ossification of mass surveillance.
- einpoklum 7y ago
  Privacy is a recognized legal right, anonymity in public isn't. But government spying on people in public is forbidden in many/most world states. Specifically in the US, amendment IV to the constitution says: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" Key phrase: "Unreasonable searches".
mike_hock 7y ago
> Congress must declare a national moratorium on the use of face-recognition technology until legal restrictions limiting its use and scope can be developed. > America’s future is closer to a Chinese-style surveillance state than we’d like to think. Uh, yeah, whatever. I mean, it's not like I disagree or anything. But it's not like surveillance is only just now becoming a problem, right? Go and roll back the surveillance state revealed by Snowden that would have been a wet dream of the USSR. Roll that back to before Bush II and put a moratorium on that shit. America's PRESENT. IS. A Chinese-style surveillance state. China is a perpetual preview of what will follow in the so-called "free" world in 3-5 years.
- umvi 7y ago
  > America's PRESENT. IS. A Chinese-style surveillance state. Maybe in cities, but my rural town just barely got stop light cameras, so I highly doubt this is true of rural America. Plus, use of the surveillance is more reactive than proactive. In China it is proactive. Drive around in a car with a taiwanese flag bumper sticker and the secret police will disappear you in the night. In America no one will bother looking at the footage unless a bank robbery happened and your car was the getaway car.
  - z3c0 7y ago
    I think the "no one is looking" argument is valid, but can be damaging in the long run. The same line of reasoning was applied to the Snowden Leaks by those who wanted to spin it as a "nothingburger". The reason nobody is looking is because it requires a lot of money to build the systems that can derive facts from data while "no one is looking". As advances continue to be made in ML, then the visual data most people are currently taking for granted will become more easily parsed systematically. A system that pre-processes and stores all the recorded locations of a given list of faces is competely possible by today's standards. A database of mugshots and a continuous stream of CCTV data is all you'd really need to get started.
    - mtgx 7y ago
      Nobody is looking...but our algorithms alert us whenever you might be doing anything "suspicious" and can put you on automatic blacklists. Here is just a hint of what the government might consider suspicious: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141024/14222128933/guidelines-who-might-be-suspicious-too-nervous-too-calm-blending-standing-out-its-all-suspcious.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141024/14222128933/guide... Also nobody is looking...but anyone could be looking anytime they want, and without a warrant. With the latest 6-year FISA 702 extension, the FBI is now allowed to look at all mass surveillance data before it has to go to a judge. Alerting the judge about their spying on any specific person is only required when they decide to build a case against that person. You can imagine the thousand ways in which this can and will be abused over the years. I mean, even NSA agents were running a "LOVEINT" program - who knows what kind of self-interest programs the FBI agents are running. And even in the face of that Obama was shameless enough to say "there have been no abuses" - just like he did when he pardoned Bush's torturers from the CIA, but that's a whole other topic for another day.
lasagnaphil 7y ago
Data-driven classification systems has made automatic encoding of technical images into symbolic form possible and in great efficiency. This will bring a fundamental, unprecedented change in society we have never experienced before. People need to start looking more at the political and philosophical aspects of images to understand what data-driven AI system does and can be used in nefarious ways. If you want a more in-depth analysis of how classification systems performed on people can have wild consequences, and that it cannot be fixed by just tweaking the algorithms or methodologies, Excavating AI is a great article on it (https://www.excavating.ai/ https://www.excavating.ai/)
_iyig 7y ago
I disagree with the premise that facial recognition technology is inherently evil, and that there should be a blanket ban on its use by law enforcement. For example: Imagine a system where facial recognition technology supplements, but does not replace, manual recognition. Isn’t it better to guide mugshot lookups with the best available technology rather than wasting hundreds of hours on manual searching? Without treating automatic results as final and authoritative, can’t they still be used to drastically hasten manual look-ups?
- mjevans 7y ago
  When most people hear "mug shots", they think of photos taking during incarceration: a database of photos from when someone has been convicted of a (implied serious) crime and is being jailed for it. (trivial crimes usually having a monetary and/or community service sentence) The issue at hand is about those who should be presumed to be innocent. The many who are in a crowd, the majority that are probably not at all related to whatever search is happening. I've read science fiction where the opposite extreme happens. Where there's an AI that implicitly interfaces with everyone at all times, but it isn't a surveillance nor advertising state. If anyone does actually do a crime there's an actual sentient witness, no need to track down video, and that witness is also able to get help on the way right away. Further there's no backlog of unprocessed data, no file of all of the various normal day to day things that really aren't important. I could go for a future with benevolent partner AI(s) and no actual surveillance state even though there are cameras and microphones everywhere. I can also see some public spaces (schools, courtrooms, other places people are required to mingle) having observation and storage for a limited (days/weeks) time for manual review in the case of reported incidents. However the power as it currently stands is much more likely to be used for leveraged persecution and partial enforcement against specific people, and classes of people (IE not rich), rather than for all the people.
  - _iyig 7y ago
    >However the power as it currently stands is much more likely to be used for leveraged persecution and partial enforcement against specific people, and classes of people (IE not rich), rather than for all the people. I don't see how this is any more or less true of facial recognition than other evidence-gathering technology. >The issue at hand is about those who should be presumed to be innocent. The many who are in a crowd, the majority that are probably not at all related to whatever search is happening. Maybe so, but the laws which are getting passed and proposed as a result of all this journalism are much more broad: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-bans-use-of-facial-recognition-14101253.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-bans-use... https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/19/20812032/bernie-sanders-facial-recognition-police-ban-surveillance-reform https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/19/20812032/bernie-sanders-f...
xupybd 7y ago
I don't like this tech in the hands of the state but I'm more worried about criminal use of this. I think we're going to see a massive increase in extortion as people are able to collect large amounts of data on people based on facial recognition. Sure now it's expensive and slow. But it's going to get cheaper and quicker. I'd recommend trying to avoid anything that can link your face to your identity being public and online. Sextortion is a big thing at the moment. Who knows what will be next when facial recognition becomes available to the same scammers.
- SN76477 7y ago
  I believe that a heavily survived society is doomed to insanity. The constant pressure to look good, feel good, make sure information doesnt get out will become a massive mental crisis. We can already see the edges of this with Facebook envy and other similar mental health issues on the rise.
  - jcims 7y ago
    >survived typo?
    - no_one839083 7y ago
      Probably “surveilled”
      - SN76477 7y ago
        Yea, thanks... too late to fix it.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    Or people stop giving crap and realize everyone's got dirt on everyone anyway, and stop giving too much thought. The Chinese political system is like this, everyone's corrupt but it's ok because everyone's doing it. Until one day when the bigger guy doesn't like you and starts pursuing corruption charges against you. Then it's a matter of who has more connections (with the chief of police, or the judiciary). Which seems like jungle law but with lawyers...
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
With most all of these privacy and anonymity stories, we're told of the types of data collected, then the type of group taking the data, then the reason the data is collected. Finally, there's some promise of the strict guidelines on how it is planned to be used. The tech community needs to start calling bullshit on these kinds of stories. Once data is collected, it's collected. It, for all intents and purposes, exists forever. So it's impossible for the group taking the data to promise what the data might or might not be used for. And that's assuming that the group is the only one who ever owns the data. In a world of ultra-high speed internet, that's almost preposterous. It's not if, it's when the data gets out. Once it gets out, it's everywhere. While I understand that traditional property fits into a format like this, data does not. Trying to pretend that it does? In my opinion it's doing a great disservice to the readers.
Uhuhreally 7y ago
this is probably flawed logic but how are things today different from say 4000 years ago in a city where the ruler might employ local people known to have a good memory for faces to provide their services ?
- uoaei 7y ago
  1. People were (are) not able to remember more than maybe 5000 faces. 2. Each person back then would know their data is being collected, and exactly which kinds, because they are present and engaged when it happens. 3. We can sort of, kind of trust humans and sort of, kind of predict their decisions because we're not that different. We are nowhere near that stage yet with computers. We also know that putting that sort of information into people's hands, with the economy we have today, incentivizes misuse.
pvaldes 7y ago
And finally we found an utility to wasp stings, trolling this Sauron's eye system for fun and profit On the other hand for some people addicted to lip implants the system will need a perpetual and constant fine-tuning and upgrading (that will divert resources just to adjust the eyelid position and nose shape). I don't see plastic cirugy being forbidden in a near future if we take in mind the number of rich clients that use it.
dawg- 7y ago
I was flying to Germany from Atlanta earlier this year. I enter the international terminal, start waiting in the security line. As I get to the front there is this little screen with a camera on top and a TSA logo on it. There's a sign on it that says something to the effect that it must register my biometric profile, to prevent terrorism, I guess. I think there was an option not to consent and still make it through security, but the instructions seemed to be purposefully unclear. If they make it unclear, they know that 99.9% of people will not bother to ask questions. They know how stressful airport security is in the first place and how people just want to shut up and make it through the line and not miss their flight, and they use that as an advantage. I consider myself to be more informed and concerned about digital privacy issues than a vast majority of people, just like most of you who will be reading this comment. Even so, in the moment I gave in and let the stupid thing scan my face. And now my face is somewhere in a server at the Pentagon probably. The social engineering around it made it very hard to figure out whether or not there was any real risk of resisting it or asking questions. I was with my wife and we didn't want to miss our flight. I applaud the person who in the same situation would have turned around and walked out of the airport and skipped their expensive, non-refundable trip to Europe. But when my big moment came to be a heroic activist for digital privacy rights, I wasn't the same person I am when complaining about Facebook and Google on the internet. Oh well, I guess travel is how we learn about ourselves, right? And that's exactly why facial recognition is going to become completely ubiquitous without much fuss at all. The risks are too abstract for most people to really care in the moment, even if they know the issue fairly well. Real social movements don't gain momentum until people's lives are directly impacted - and the issues are just too nuanced, and the whole infrastructure of surveillance too byzantine, for people to really want to take action.
- MrMember 7y ago
  It was the same with opting out of the backscatter scanners when they started rolling them out. They had signs up saying you could opt out and instead receive an "enhanced" pat down, but TSA would make a big deal about it. They'd shout "We have an opt out!", pull you aside, and you'd have to wait for someone to be available to pat you down (which was itself an unpleasant experience). The vast majority of people don't want to go through that and just accept the scanner. These days I don't even know if it's still possible to opt out. I haven't seen a sign saying you can in ages.

Question: do we know if police are using "find this face in a crowd" software or "log all faces and compare them to all people". The former is the same as was happening before only faster.

whateveracct 7y ago
Sometimes, "what was happening before but faster" alone is what can cause something to cross the line of legality (philosophically.)
- jedimastert 7y ago
  > Sometimes, "what was happening before but faster" alone is what can cause something to cross the line of legality (philosophically.) Not that I don't believe you, but I can't think of any examples off of the top of my head. Can you give me one?
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    It used to be expensive (in both time and money) to track people's movements. Now cell phone carriers (as well as Google, Apple, and a few other companies) can do it trivially.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - rhcom2 7y ago
    Automated license plate readers spring to mind. The police have been noting license plates forever, automate it and suddenly now you have a database that tracks everyone's movements.
  - curryst 7y ago
    One that comes to mind is the Supreme Court enforced ban on creating a firearms registry. Firearms dealers are required to retain sales records with serial numbers for some amount of time (I don't have the number handy, it's several years) so technically the data exists currently. However they have ruled that it would be illegal to centralize that data for easier access. Another is those automated speeding cameras. In several states they are unable to write tickets without a police officer present. My understanding is that this means the machine operates the same way and still writes tickets, the officer just has to be there as a "witness" and play phone games or whatever while the machine works. The end effect is the same, but the law requires an officer to be a witness to the crime in order to generate tickets.
    - enjo 7y ago
      Medical Marijuana states often have similar laws. A registry of people with medical access exists, but it becomes illegal to exfiltrate the data for any reason (the registry is often on one computer in a state house office somewhere).
    - snagglegaggle 7y ago
      W.r.t. the firearms registry, there does appear to be one. FFLs reported targeted and widespread harassment by the ATF as they came in and digitized purchase records onsite 2010ish to 2016ish. Some FFL holders had to threaten force to prevent the records from being removed from their premesis. So who know what other methods are used for parallel construction.
    - Animats 7y ago
      One that comes to mind is the Supreme Court enforced ban on creating a firearms registry. No, that's not the Supreme Court. That's the Firearms Owner Protection Act of 1986.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act
      - curryst 7y ago
        I stand corrected, thanks!
  - grawprog 7y ago
    To be extremely literal about it. Everyone's slowly dying every day, but if you go and speed that up and kill somebody, it becomes really illegal.
  - torstenvl 7y ago
    Cell site location information was deemed a search based on the fact that it is "detailed, encyclopedic, and effortlessly compiled." The speed with which law enforcement can track you with CSLI, compared to canvassing witnesses, is the key factor.
  - munificent 7y ago
    Semi-automatic firearms versus fully automatic. It's legal to own a personal killing machine, as long as it can't kill above a certain rate.
  - pyrale 7y ago
    Asymetric crypto is all about this. The only difference between the key holder and a third party is a time factor. Another exemple is the rationale for EU privacy laws. It was fine to have your history in newspapers or judicial archives, as searching for them was prohibitive. But having it searchable through computers makes it trivial for would-be employers, neighbours, etc. to find out about you, transforming any small misdemeanour in a lifetime sentence.
vkou 7y ago
Police have historically misused the tools available to them (the police lineup). They have historically been very resistant to oversight of this misuse. When those tools become more powerful, so does the harm caused by their misuse. A gun is just a stronger slingshot, but you'd be an idiot to give one to an eight year old child who was slingshotting windows, dogs, and cats.
bsenftner 7y ago
The same software can operate in either "mode". Typically there is a gallery of faces, segmented into different categories such as "police", "location staff", "people we like" and "people we don't like" and where not identified as in one or more gallery groups the face record is "general public". Almost any location that cares to use FR will have groups for "staff", "good people" and "bad people", where the "good/bad" designation is not "good/evil" but more like "we care to please these people" and "these people have caused problems in the past". The use of a "general public" "virtual group" is for things like anonymous tracking of how people travel through a location, which is useful for emergency planning and demographics. So, in general, anytime FR is in use it will attempt to identify items in the view as faces or not faces, and when a face compare against the gallery, if a match is found, report that match along with any groups the face is a member. Also note "when a match is found" that can trigger review of multiple gallery faces for a human to select between or retain as an uncertain match containing multiple gallery hits. The entire process of "what to do when any matches are found" is specific to the purpose of the FR, often specific to a gallery group the match is a member. Not all users of FR use it for "security", some use FR for enhanced hospitality, such as luxury locations use FR to identify high net worth people waiting to be serviced, and public spaces are often interested in FR for emergency planning and demographic modeling throughout different times and seasons. Beyond the security applications, FR can be used in a similar manner as web page cookies, but for physical locations.
hevi_jos 7y ago
This is a fallacy. The fallacy of using Quality statements in order to negate Quantity. An earthquake of level 10.0 is just like an earthquake of level 4.0, only longer and bigger. A flooding is just like normal raining, only with more rain. In most situations a big change in quantity makes all the difference, like in this case. If police forces analyze 20000 people a year,mostly criminals in criminal scenes, it is completely different than analyzing millions, mostly normal people.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  "An explosion is just a chemical reaction, only fast".
noitsnot 7y ago
I know the government was, meaning I'm not sure if they still are now, without getting too specific. I'm not sure if that included the police, though.

raxxorrax 7y ago

Just sign our newsletter and we tell you how you are tracked... I cannot really condemn this attempt.

mLuby 7y ago

Let's say you're arrested (so fingerprinted, DNA-swabbed, mug-shotted, etc) but then not charged or convicted. Is there a way to get those records expunged? (IMO the innocent—and maybe those who've served their sentence—ought to be able to do this.)

itronitron 7y ago
This doesn't answer your question, but it is important to keep in mind that being arrested is not a crime.
- tdfx 7y ago
  It's treated as such for a wide variety of things. Condo associations use arrest records as red flags for potential residents. Any arrest record removes your status with the global entry programs with CBP. I'm sure there's many more I'm not even familiar with. Even when you're completely exonerated, the arrest record haunts you until you can expunge it.
big_chungus 7y ago
A lot of good it does, when more and more states are requiring fingerprints to get a driver's license. The various governments want the data, and are simply taking it from a progressively-larger set of people. It's obviously not equal in severity, but the "First they came..." poem certainly applies here. They are simply rolling this out in stages: first in the most "sensitive" spots, such as airports. Then it will be most federal buildings, or other "high-security" locations. Then it will be routine.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Giving your fingerprints is already pretty mandatory for all the French citizens, and now the government is pushing for face recognition to be used as the default identification system... (meanwhile, centralized databases on all the citizens were illegal just a couple decades ago !)
  - 7y ago

umvi 7y ago

> Our privacy, our right to anonymity in public Who says these are rights? I agree free speech is a right, but who (legally) grants me the right to privacy and anonymity in public? Does me recognizing someone in public violate their right to anonymity?

egdod 7y ago
It’s a fair point. Where does the “reasonable expectation of privacy” end?
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  When you leave your house and/or are in plain view that does not require tress-passing. This stuff has already been decided. Remember the "Streisand" effect? If you step out in public, anyone can record you or take your photo. Including a government agency. What is going to be interesting is what public entities (agencies) are restricted from doing with said data. I don't see laws being passed restricting everyone from doing facial ID matches (namely private citizens or companies). Nor would I want them. I think it is a hard thing for people to conceptualize that you do not have a bubble of privacy everywhere you go. In certain places (home) you do. Not much elsewhere.
  - homonculus1 7y ago
    There is a reasonable expectation to not be face-tracked in public just like there is a reasonable expectation for everyone not to be followed 24/7 by undercover officers. In the past law enforcement did have to be told not to do the latter, since it's a total waste of resources, but now the former is cheap enough to actually happen and administrators want the new tech on their resumes. Current precedent is out of date. Free society depends on the people's ability to bend and break unjust laws. It cannot survive the ossification of mass surveillance.
einpoklum 7y ago
Privacy is a recognized legal right, anonymity in public isn't. But government spying on people in public is forbidden in many/most world states. Specifically in the US, amendment IV to the constitution says: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" Key phrase: "Unreasonable searches".

mike_hock 7y ago

> Congress must declare a national moratorium on the use of face-recognition technology until legal restrictions limiting its use and scope can be developed. > America’s future is closer to a Chinese-style surveillance state than we’d like to think. Uh, yeah, whatever. I mean, it's not like I disagree or anything. But it's not like surveillance is only just now becoming a problem, right? Go and roll back the surveillance state revealed by Snowden that would have been a wet dream of the USSR. Roll that back to before Bush II and put a moratorium on that shit. America's PRESENT. IS. A Chinese-style surveillance state. China is a perpetual preview of what will follow in the so-called "free" world in 3-5 years.

umvi 7y ago
> America's PRESENT. IS. A Chinese-style surveillance state. Maybe in cities, but my rural town just barely got stop light cameras, so I highly doubt this is true of rural America. Plus, use of the surveillance is more reactive than proactive. In China it is proactive. Drive around in a car with a taiwanese flag bumper sticker and the secret police will disappear you in the night. In America no one will bother looking at the footage unless a bank robbery happened and your car was the getaway car.
- z3c0 7y ago
  I think the "no one is looking" argument is valid, but can be damaging in the long run. The same line of reasoning was applied to the Snowden Leaks by those who wanted to spin it as a "nothingburger". The reason nobody is looking is because it requires a lot of money to build the systems that can derive facts from data while "no one is looking". As advances continue to be made in ML, then the visual data most people are currently taking for granted will become more easily parsed systematically. A system that pre-processes and stores all the recorded locations of a given list of faces is competely possible by today's standards. A database of mugshots and a continuous stream of CCTV data is all you'd really need to get started.
  - mtgx 7y ago
    Nobody is looking...but our algorithms alert us whenever you might be doing anything "suspicious" and can put you on automatic blacklists. Here is just a hint of what the government might consider suspicious: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141024/14222128933/guidelines-who-might-be-suspicious-too-nervous-too-calm-blending-standing-out-its-all-suspcious.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141024/14222128933/guide... Also nobody is looking...but anyone could be looking anytime they want, and without a warrant. With the latest 6-year FISA 702 extension, the FBI is now allowed to look at all mass surveillance data before it has to go to a judge. Alerting the judge about their spying on any specific person is only required when they decide to build a case against that person. You can imagine the thousand ways in which this can and will be abused over the years. I mean, even NSA agents were running a "LOVEINT" program - who knows what kind of self-interest programs the FBI agents are running. And even in the face of that Obama was shameless enough to say "there have been no abuses" - just like he did when he pardoned Bush's torturers from the CIA, but that's a whole other topic for another day.

lasagnaphil 7y ago

Data-driven classification systems has made automatic encoding of technical images into symbolic form possible and in great efficiency. This will bring a fundamental, unprecedented change in society we have never experienced before. People need to start looking more at the political and philosophical aspects of images to understand what data-driven AI system does and can be used in nefarious ways. If you want a more in-depth analysis of how classification systems performed on people can have wild consequences, and that it cannot be fixed by just tweaking the algorithms or methodologies, Excavating AI is a great article on it (https://www.excavating.ai/ https://www.excavating.ai/)

_iyig 7y ago

I disagree with the premise that facial recognition technology is inherently evil, and that there should be a blanket ban on its use by law enforcement. For example: Imagine a system where facial recognition technology supplements, but does not replace, manual recognition. Isn’t it better to guide mugshot lookups with the best available technology rather than wasting hundreds of hours on manual searching? Without treating automatic results as final and authoritative, can’t they still be used to drastically hasten manual look-ups?

mjevans 7y ago
When most people hear "mug shots", they think of photos taking during incarceration: a database of photos from when someone has been convicted of a (implied serious) crime and is being jailed for it. (trivial crimes usually having a monetary and/or community service sentence) The issue at hand is about those who should be presumed to be innocent. The many who are in a crowd, the majority that are probably not at all related to whatever search is happening. I've read science fiction where the opposite extreme happens. Where there's an AI that implicitly interfaces with everyone at all times, but it isn't a surveillance nor advertising state. If anyone does actually do a crime there's an actual sentient witness, no need to track down video, and that witness is also able to get help on the way right away. Further there's no backlog of unprocessed data, no file of all of the various normal day to day things that really aren't important. I could go for a future with benevolent partner AI(s) and no actual surveillance state even though there are cameras and microphones everywhere. I can also see some public spaces (schools, courtrooms, other places people are required to mingle) having observation and storage for a limited (days/weeks) time for manual review in the case of reported incidents. However the power as it currently stands is much more likely to be used for leveraged persecution and partial enforcement against specific people, and classes of people (IE not rich), rather than for all the people.
- _iyig 7y ago
  >However the power as it currently stands is much more likely to be used for leveraged persecution and partial enforcement against specific people, and classes of people (IE not rich), rather than for all the people. I don't see how this is any more or less true of facial recognition than other evidence-gathering technology. >The issue at hand is about those who should be presumed to be innocent. The many who are in a crowd, the majority that are probably not at all related to whatever search is happening. Maybe so, but the laws which are getting passed and proposed as a result of all this journalism are much more broad: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-bans-use-of-facial-recognition-14101253.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-bans-use... https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/19/20812032/bernie-sanders-facial-recognition-police-ban-surveillance-reform https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/19/20812032/bernie-sanders-f...

xupybd 7y ago

I don't like this tech in the hands of the state but I'm more worried about criminal use of this. I think we're going to see a massive increase in extortion as people are able to collect large amounts of data on people based on facial recognition. Sure now it's expensive and slow. But it's going to get cheaper and quicker. I'd recommend trying to avoid anything that can link your face to your identity being public and online. Sextortion is a big thing at the moment. Who knows what will be next when facial recognition becomes available to the same scammers.

SN76477 7y ago
I believe that a heavily survived society is doomed to insanity. The constant pressure to look good, feel good, make sure information doesnt get out will become a massive mental crisis. We can already see the edges of this with Facebook envy and other similar mental health issues on the rise.
- jcims 7y ago
  >survived typo?
  - no_one839083 7y ago
    Probably “surveilled”
    - SN76477 7y ago
      Yea, thanks... too late to fix it.
- netsharc 7y ago
  Or people stop giving crap and realize everyone's got dirt on everyone anyway, and stop giving too much thought. The Chinese political system is like this, everyone's corrupt but it's ok because everyone's doing it. Until one day when the bigger guy doesn't like you and starts pursuing corruption charges against you. Then it's a matter of who has more connections (with the chief of police, or the judiciary). Which seems like jungle law but with lawyers...

DanielBMarkham 7y ago

With most all of these privacy and anonymity stories, we're told of the types of data collected, then the type of group taking the data, then the reason the data is collected. Finally, there's some promise of the strict guidelines on how it is planned to be used. The tech community needs to start calling bullshit on these kinds of stories. Once data is collected, it's collected. It, for all intents and purposes, exists forever. So it's impossible for the group taking the data to promise what the data might or might not be used for. And that's assuming that the group is the only one who ever owns the data. In a world of ultra-high speed internet, that's almost preposterous. It's not if, it's when the data gets out. Once it gets out, it's everywhere. While I understand that traditional property fits into a format like this, data does not. Trying to pretend that it does? In my opinion it's doing a great disservice to the readers.

Uhuhreally 7y ago

this is probably flawed logic but how are things today different from say 4000 years ago in a city where the ruler might employ local people known to have a good memory for faces to provide their services ?

uoaei 7y ago
1. People were (are) not able to remember more than maybe 5000 faces. 2. Each person back then would know their data is being collected, and exactly which kinds, because they are present and engaged when it happens. 3. We can sort of, kind of trust humans and sort of, kind of predict their decisions because we're not that different. We are nowhere near that stage yet with computers. We also know that putting that sort of information into people's hands, with the economy we have today, incentivizes misuse.

pvaldes 7y ago

And finally we found an utility to wasp stings, trolling this Sauron's eye system for fun and profit On the other hand for some people addicted to lip implants the system will need a perpetual and constant fine-tuning and upgrading (that will divert resources just to adjust the eyelid position and nose shape). I don't see plastic cirugy being forbidden in a near future if we take in mind the number of rich clients that use it.

dawg- 7y ago

I was flying to Germany from Atlanta earlier this year. I enter the international terminal, start waiting in the security line. As I get to the front there is this little screen with a camera on top and a TSA logo on it. There's a sign on it that says something to the effect that it must register my biometric profile, to prevent terrorism, I guess. I think there was an option not to consent and still make it through security, but the instructions seemed to be purposefully unclear. If they make it unclear, they know that 99.9% of people will not bother to ask questions. They know how stressful airport security is in the first place and how people just want to shut up and make it through the line and not miss their flight, and they use that as an advantage. I consider myself to be more informed and concerned about digital privacy issues than a vast majority of people, just like most of you who will be reading this comment. Even so, in the moment I gave in and let the stupid thing scan my face. And now my face is somewhere in a server at the Pentagon probably. The social engineering around it made it very hard to figure out whether or not there was any real risk of resisting it or asking questions. I was with my wife and we didn't want to miss our flight. I applaud the person who in the same situation would have turned around and walked out of the airport and skipped their expensive, non-refundable trip to Europe. But when my big moment came to be a heroic activist for digital privacy rights, I wasn't the same person I am when complaining about Facebook and Google on the internet. Oh well, I guess travel is how we learn about ourselves, right? And that's exactly why facial recognition is going to become completely ubiquitous without much fuss at all. The risks are too abstract for most people to really care in the moment, even if they know the issue fairly well. Real social movements don't gain momentum until people's lives are directly impacted - and the issues are just too nuanced, and the whole infrastructure of surveillance too byzantine, for people to really want to take action.

MrMember 7y ago
It was the same with opting out of the backscatter scanners when they started rolling them out. They had signs up saying you could opt out and instead receive an "enhanced" pat down, but TSA would make a big deal about it. They'd shout "We have an opt out!", pull you aside, and you'd have to wait for someone to be available to pat you down (which was itself an unpleasant experience). The vast majority of people don't want to go through that and just accept the scanner. These days I don't even know if it's still possible to opt out. I haven't seen a sign saying you can in ages.