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Face recognition is being banned, but it’s still everywhere
- darkwater 5y agoLooks like it's being deployed more everyday, rather. For example, a document-less airport experience pilot[1] is being tested in Barcelona (Spain) [1] https://identityweek.net/josep-tarradellas-barcelona-el-prat-airport-launches-facial-recognition-trial/ https://identityweek.net/josep-tarradellas-barcelona-el-prat...
- flimflamm 5y agoShould police collect iPhones away in those cities where face recognition is banned?
- ben_w 5y agoThat depends what the law says. Some of the pressure here is to stop the police themselves from using the tech, I wouldn’t know if any given law prevents personal use.
- onethought 5y agoIt’s a government ban. Not a generalised ban.
- flimflamm 5y agoSorry, I am out side of US. What's the difference?
- lajamerr 5y agoGovernment ban means banned for use by government officials/entities. So it doesn't really apply to the general public or corporations(Unless the corporation specifically has a contract with the same requirements to do work on behalf of the government)
- bayindirh 5y agoYou should also collect Sony Alpha cameras too. Many of them have a preferential focus feature which uses face recognition. You add up to five faces, prioritized, and it focuses to them if it recognizes in the crowd of people.
- namibj 5y agoTIL, and this sounds actually rather useful. Do you have information on which ones would support that? Especially in the range a curious hacker (who else is HN for?) would be interested in.
- bayindirh 5y agoIt's especially useful in crowd gatherings, group photos and such. I think it's rather designed for concerts, weddings, etc. My A7-III has it. Since it uses Eye-AF and Face-AF pipelines (it generates a face model from the photo you take for that feature only), it needs AI autofocus stack inside the camera. A7-C should have it, maybe latest APS-C lines (6600 for example) have it. Sony's AF tech is insane. Point to a person with sunglasses, and it marks the eye instantaneously. What the actual sorcery?
- novok 5y agoWell the goal is to recognize a face, not to match a specific face to a specific person. So you can train an AF model to to center focus on the center of the sunglasses. Even with the 'track these specific faces' features, since your still not trying to unique identify someone, the model can latch on to generic features like "red sunglasses, brown skin, surgical mask & this general shape".
- sib 5y agoWow - didn't know about this preferential focus feature. Sounds extremely useful...
- raverbashing 5y agoFace detection (that is, only identifying a face in a picture) is not face recognition (identifying the person behind the face).
- 1cvmask 5y agoLondon is the surveillance capital of the world: London is often called the CCTV capital of the world, and for good reason. The city is home to hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras, and the average Londoner is caught on CCTV 300 times a day. https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-london/ https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-lo... Facial recognition software is being integrated now into this network. No one seems to mind at all. It seems that the same is in most of the rest of the world.
- ricardobayes 5y agoNot everywhere though, in Spain it's illegal to film the street. "In Spain, the law protects the rights of citizens to use public spaces, which is free from interference (Clavell et al., 2012)" If you want to live a functioning non-Orwellian society, move here.
- andy_ppp 5y agoSpain seems really competent right now compared to the UK, they even have a digital nomad visa for people outside the EU. With remote working being mainstream going forward I'm certainly going to consider somewhere with more sunshine and less harsh winters...
- dmje 5y agoThe other easier option (although doesn't solve the sunshine problem..) is moving out of cities into rural areas. Very few cameras where we live in Cornwall.
- _vr9d 5y agoIf you do video calls through teams or similar when working remotely, internet speed would be a big issue, coupled with the abandon of a lot of rural areas in spain
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- danuker 5y agoThe network effects of large databases lead to an imbalance of power between surveillance and sousveillance: a personal face recognition DB will never match a government one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance As such, we can not, say, catch not-so-publically-known but well-connected public officials where they should not be.
- GuB-42 5y agoObviously, a government has more power and more means than an individual. But when it comes to databases, individuals have access to ridiculously large databases too. With Facebook and Google you can peek into the private life of most people, even the police does it because there is more data there than in their own files. And I am just talking about ordinary access. Not what Facebook and Google can do as a company. Add a bit of social engineering and crowdsourcing and no one is safe if enough people want to find them. There have been some pretty impressive "doxing" in the past. And staying off social media is pretty hard if you want to live a normal life. You may not have a Facebook account but your friends do, you may find your picture on your company website, maybe even in a local newspaper. And officials are no different, if they want to live normally, they are going to be exposed.
- andy_ppp 5y agoIt was suggested in the early 2000s that a face could be tracked moving across London by the security services. What do we think, was it possible then? I have to assume by now they have intent monitoring everywhere and can probably tell when someone is doing things like planning a bombing etc.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoWell, the Independent claimed in 2004 that the average Briton is caught on camera 300 times a day. [0] Since London probably has more than the average number of cameras per area, even if we wind the clock back 3-4 years, I suspect the answer is yes. --- [0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/how-average-briton-is-caught-on-camera-300-times-a-day-5354728.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/how-avera...
- antihero 5y agoWhich is an amazing number yet the MET seem incapable of solving most crimes.
- bruce343434 5y agoSo why is that? Isn't this amount of surveillance basically a god tool?
- marginalia_nu 5y agoIt's a very large haystack.
- zo1 5y agoBecause it's apparently taboo and dystopian to perform facial recognition and surveillance to help victims. Most of those cameras' and their recordings go into the void instead of some sort of central database that can be used for tracking criminals.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
- surajs 5y agoEverything is touching everything
- bigodbiel 5y agoPre-crime facial recognition surveillance is authoritanism. Post-crime facial recognition of surveillance is investigative process. The cat is out of the bag, the only thing that prevents it's inevitable abuse is strict legal framework for its implementation
- nirui 5y ago> strict legal framework for its implementation And that might turn this technology into something that only big company can afford, artificially created a pro-monopoly environment. The problem is complex.
- pessimizer 5y agoNot really. I don't mind there being a near-monopoly on facial recognition software if it takes a large company to handle the needed guidelines and potential liabilities.
- sailfast 5y agoOne doesn’t mind until it turns on one, typically. It’s all fine until the monopoly stops operating in good faith and it’s too late to stop it.
- Jarwain 5y agoWell that's what the strict legal framework is for, right? To ensure ethical operation instead of relying on good faith?
- voakbasda 5y agoYou have presupposed that said monopoly will not have already bought the necessary legislation required to maintain its position through regulatory capture. The current system positively rewards monopolies in most sectors.
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- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoI believe that the efforts to ban technologies such as this one are futile. Pandora's boxes can only be opened, never closed.
- andrepd 5y agoThat's a cop-out. Regulation can happen, of course, if there's political will for it.
- nopenopenopeno 5y agoEven with all our efforts, murder still happens, so I guess it’s time to throw the towel in on that as well.
- eunos 5y ago"We need to live with surveillance"
- earthnail 5y agoWe banned mines, too, and it‘s been fairly successful. Not 100%, sure, but just imagine a world were mines weren’t banned, and what Europe and the US would look like, and you know the ban was very effective.
- trasz 5y agoMost countries banned mines, but not US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty
- bsenftner 5y agoNote the immature (on purpose?) nature of some of these bans: some ban the local government only, some ban only one city of a multi-city district, and nearly all of them leave the option of hiring a private agency (with zero pubic oversight, because they are private) to do the FR for them. And that private agency happens to be owned by the step-son of one of the law makers. This type of legal nonsense is everywhere they are trying to regulate facial regulation.
- toper-centage 5y agoThe annoying part is that there's no opt out. And when there is, it's obscure (you can express that to the staff), and makes you look hella suspicious.
- tartoran 5y agoI see us wearing masks as a more general trend in the future. That would probably mess with all facial recognition systems
- Spooky23 5y agoAgreed. My guess is that post pandemic, mask advocacy will flip to more reactionary elements as well.
- Nextgrid 5y agoGait analysis/recognition covers that.
- donkarma 5y agowait until you put a pebble in your shoe
- spicybright 5y agoI'd actually love to see if gait recognition gets screwed up by changing someones shoes (pebbles, extra size up, uneven platform height, etc)
- reaperducer 5y agoGait analysis/recognition covers that. My wife has a hundred pairs of heels of varying heights and widths. Good luck with that.
- ordiel 5y agoAs I heard "somewhere", 'now that they have forced you to wear a mask, dont remove it ;)' (I know the profiling works even whit only the eye section yet you get the gist)
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago"I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can so I can..." avoid an automated surveillance state.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- pueblito 5y ago> CBP says it has processed more than 100 million travelers using face recognition and prevented more than 1,000 “imposters” from entering the US at air and land borders. I wonder how many of those 1000 were incorrectly bounced back
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoThe software only flags people for manual review. It’s not an automatic software-only rejection.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y agoIf a selection process is screwed at the outset, I don't think one can generally un-screw it with any amount of post-hoc analysis or manual review.
- karaterobot 5y agoYour comment seems unrelated to the comment you're responding to. That comment is about automatic rejection, not selection. But speaking of selection, there is no perfect process in any system involving humans, so whether it's a flawed facial recognition algorithm, or a biased, tired, overworked human doing it, having a manual review step and post-hoc analysis is pretty useful.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y agoMy point is that by the time a biased selection happens, much of the damage to the overall process is already irreversible. If the algorithm is biased (and I'm not saying it is, just that it's valid to ask the question), making the final decision manual is more of a fig leaf than an actual fix.
- diebeforei485 5y agoAt least at airports, CBP never bounces anyone back at the first instance. At the immigration counters, the dude either lets you in or sends you to secondary.
- 14 5y agoIf they ban facial recognition then companies will start using other tech like gait recognition. So are we wanting to ban facial recognition or is it something more like the right to not be tracked(if that even is a right). I think we need to establish what our end goal is because you know clever companies will find a way around such restrictions and find other creative ways. They will use shoe detection instead or something maybe not as accurate but enough to get them around the law but still detect a percentage of criminals. Or jewelry detections or tattoo or whatever isn’t banned by law.
- petermcneeley 5y agoThis is the same issue I have with 'right to repair' laws. When you create a tangle of specific laws banning or regulating specific things all that you really have done is created a world where he who has the most lawyers wins. What is the end goal with banning face recognition? I think this is all about asymmetry of information.
- midjji 5y agoSwitching from defending the right to privacy to the right to not be exploited due to power/information asymmetry would solve a great many problems.
- fortran77 5y agoI don't care too much about face recognition for check in. But I don't like it for bag drop. If it mis-matches me, I may never see my bag again!
- kotaKat 5y agoHell. Walmart's security DVRs by Verint all have facial recognition enabled on the firmware, along with other security analytics options.
- reaperducer 5y agoThe apartment building I lived in from 2009-2010 had facial recognition. When you walked through the main lobby, your face appeared on a screen for the inside doorman so he could grant you access to the elevator lobby. It also showed your name, apartment number, and lease end date. That was over a decade ago. I can't imagine what new tech must look like.
- latchkey 5y agoI just flew to Dubai and back. On the way in, they scanned my face at the immigration counter. On the way out, you go through a locked turnstile that scans your face and won't open until it recognizes you. It took about 2 seconds for the doors to open. Pretty amazing and creepy at the same time.
- ctdonath 5y agoCan’t stop a idea whose time has come.
- wintorez 5y agoOnce the genie is out of the bottle...
- midjji 5y agoSeems rather obvious to me that will remain the case. Both encryption and face recognition software rely on math and programming simple enough that a single person can make a functional one in less than a year from scratch. However, if using existing open source frameworks anyone can put it together either in a few days, though collecting a face database takes slightly longer, though in most cases anyone with an existing app of some kind can very easily collect the data largely automatically. Arguably I would not trust an encryption framework put together like that, but when it comes to face recognition I would. So the question of if governments will be able to prevent non-sanctioned face recognition systems from the public sphere is rather similar to the question of if they are able to prevent the use of non-sanctioned encryption. How is that going these days?