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I think many comments here are missing a bigger picture context of how this data is problematic. Not speaking law here, speaking my personal mental model of eva

I think many comments here are missing a bigger picture context of how this data is problematic. Not speaking law here, speaking my personal mental model of evaluating the risk/ethics of facial recognition in personal security devices. Building a local profile of faces observed on a single person’s property isn’t problematic for me. In order for the police to search it, they have to issue a very specific warrant for a specific addresses’ surveillance data. Its also anonymous by default - while you have the face, the data is local and isn’t attached to any “network” of facial recognition software. Its not being used to track people moving from house to house, or business to business, to build a “model” of their behavior to manipulate them. It’s specifically “what footage do I have locally of this face?” which can be extremely helpful when securing a home. This is in stark contrast to what I worry companies like Google do (Facebook has been caught doing it): building shadow profiles of non-users that track behaviors across all places their face shows up (surveillance footage, personal photos of other users, etc.). This is a network of information consolidated into a single point. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public, but I do believe you should have a reasonable expectation that people aren’t stalking your every move across many properties and aggregating that data into a single source law enforcement can get access to with a single warrant.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
I think they're more similar than you think, definitely along the same continuum. This isn't an argument for why this data collection is ok however, I'll actually take the more radical stance that even the local face recording is unethical or at least pointless and possibly harmful. > “what footage do I have locally of this face?” which can be extremely helpful when securing a home. How? What mechanism of security is strengthened here? Almost certainly your only use case for this data is handing it over to the police to apply their facial recognition systems to it. Which they have because of homeowners like you, I guess. It's the same surveillance apparatus as in your google case except more manual and less efficient. If it shouldn't exist at all, a bad version of it also shouldn't exist.
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  “Send me a push notification for every novel face detected” “Alarm if any face other than these 5 are detected on an indoor camera between the hours of 10pm and 8am” “I want to review all footage of the nanny from the past week since they spend time alone with my children” “Show me all footage of myself inside the house in the last 15 minutes because I have no idea where I set my keys down” “I just heard a window break at 2am, which cameras are detecting motion so my wife can avoid them to get the kids out while I do the opposite to buy them some time”
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Several of those are still currently science fiction and the rest are the same cop shit google wants to do to all of us, except you're the cop and you're only doing it to your family and employees. It's not better. It doesn't matter whether it's a paternalistic police state or literally you, dad, sitting in the seat of the panopticon. It's bad for the psyche of everyone surveilled in this way and it shouldn't be done. The fantasy that you'll use this in an emergency is the same one gun owners use to justify their decisions, and just as likely to come true.
    - r3trohack3r 4y ago
      There is a difference between the power that comes with the centralization of surveillance into a panopticon (by the state or a business) and localized home surveillance. There is also a difference in how consent works in those cases. > The fantasy that you’ll use this in an emergency Knowing how many people are in my home and where they are at 2am seems like information that would be extremely helpful. You’ll need to share data to backup your stance that I’m doing home security wrong. I’d love to learn how to do it better. Let’s not derail this into a conversation about guns, we can save that disagreement for another day.
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  > Which they have because of homeowners like you, I guess. All of my security cameras are isolated on my network. They do not exchange packets with the public internet. They can not phone home to the manufacturer. If law enforcement has footage from my surveillance system, it’s because they have a warrant or because I willingly handed the footage over to them after someone made a bad decision on my property.
ajross 4y ago
Notably Facebook has been building AI profiles of face recognition from its users' photos for more than a decade now. Yet no Texas lawsuit. It's important to recognize the clear political angle here too. Paxton sees Google as an enemy whereas Facebook is closer to "his team" (or at least relies for more of its revenue on his team). And I get how this comment will be taken, but it would be good for all the HN libertarians to introspect and think a bit on whether they really want to get their "stronger enforcement of personal internet privacy standards" via "extended use of state power against political enemies". Seems like both of those are slippery slopes. I know which one I personally fear more.
- thetrb 4y ago
  What are you talking about? There is a Texas lawsuit about this against Meta: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/texas-facebook-facial-recognition-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/texas-facebook...
- selwynii 4y ago
  FB shut down facial recognition last year. I'm waiting to see other companies follow suit. Apple? https://about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-recognition/ https://about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-reco...
  - donkey-hotei 4y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted.
cromwellian 4y ago
But these profiles can be built on the fly. Imagine you host photos but have no biometric profiles. The police show up with a warrant and this warrant demands you run a search for all faces that match a given face and turn over the resulting images to the court. If such a search algorithm exists, the court might be able to order you or an outside forensics company to use it. So basically to prevent police being able to do this you have to prevent hosting non-end to end encrypted photos. That’s a significantly reduced service capability.
- vineyardmike 4y ago
  > demands you run a search for all faces that match a given face and turn over the resulting images to the court. Hopefully a court would reject that warrant as being too broad, but either way the compute to do this would be really expensive for any not-large company, or even a large company if they regularly get these requests.
  - scarface_74 4y ago
    You give the US justice system way too much credit. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-warrants-reverse-search-warrants-police-google https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...
  - cromwellian 4y ago
    The compute wouldn’t be that high as long as you had a way of scoping it down. If the police limited it to a handful of accounts of to a geo-fenced time of day, it would be quite tractable. The police have already used such geo-fenced warrants before.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

I think they're more similar than you think, definitely along the same continuum. This isn't an argument for why this data collection is ok however, I'll actually take the more radical stance that even the local face recording is unethical or at least pointless and possibly harmful. > “what footage do I have locally of this face?” which can be extremely helpful when securing a home. How? What mechanism of security is strengthened here? Almost certainly your only use case for this data is handing it over to the police to apply their facial recognition systems to it. Which they have because of homeowners like you, I guess. It's the same surveillance apparatus as in your google case except more manual and less efficient. If it shouldn't exist at all, a bad version of it also shouldn't exist.

r3trohack3r 4y ago
“Send me a push notification for every novel face detected” “Alarm if any face other than these 5 are detected on an indoor camera between the hours of 10pm and 8am” “I want to review all footage of the nanny from the past week since they spend time alone with my children” “Show me all footage of myself inside the house in the last 15 minutes because I have no idea where I set my keys down” “I just heard a window break at 2am, which cameras are detecting motion so my wife can avoid them to get the kids out while I do the opposite to buy them some time”
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Several of those are still currently science fiction and the rest are the same cop shit google wants to do to all of us, except you're the cop and you're only doing it to your family and employees. It's not better. It doesn't matter whether it's a paternalistic police state or literally you, dad, sitting in the seat of the panopticon. It's bad for the psyche of everyone surveilled in this way and it shouldn't be done. The fantasy that you'll use this in an emergency is the same one gun owners use to justify their decisions, and just as likely to come true.
  - r3trohack3r 4y ago
    There is a difference between the power that comes with the centralization of surveillance into a panopticon (by the state or a business) and localized home surveillance. There is also a difference in how consent works in those cases. > The fantasy that you’ll use this in an emergency Knowing how many people are in my home and where they are at 2am seems like information that would be extremely helpful. You’ll need to share data to backup your stance that I’m doing home security wrong. I’d love to learn how to do it better. Let’s not derail this into a conversation about guns, we can save that disagreement for another day.
r3trohack3r 4y ago
> Which they have because of homeowners like you, I guess. All of my security cameras are isolated on my network. They do not exchange packets with the public internet. They can not phone home to the manufacturer. If law enforcement has footage from my surveillance system, it’s because they have a warrant or because I willingly handed the footage over to them after someone made a bad decision on my property.

ajross 4y ago

Notably Facebook has been building AI profiles of face recognition from its users' photos for more than a decade now. Yet no Texas lawsuit. It's important to recognize the clear political angle here too. Paxton sees Google as an enemy whereas Facebook is closer to "his team" (or at least relies for more of its revenue on his team). And I get how this comment will be taken, but it would be good for all the HN libertarians to introspect and think a bit on whether they really want to get their "stronger enforcement of personal internet privacy standards" via "extended use of state power against political enemies". Seems like both of those are slippery slopes. I know which one I personally fear more.

thetrb 4y ago
What are you talking about? There is a Texas lawsuit about this against Meta: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/texas-facebook-facial-recognition-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/texas-facebook...
selwynii 4y ago
FB shut down facial recognition last year. I'm waiting to see other companies follow suit. Apple? https://about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-recognition/ https://about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-reco...
- donkey-hotei 4y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted.

cromwellian 4y ago

But these profiles can be built on the fly. Imagine you host photos but have no biometric profiles. The police show up with a warrant and this warrant demands you run a search for all faces that match a given face and turn over the resulting images to the court. If such a search algorithm exists, the court might be able to order you or an outside forensics company to use it. So basically to prevent police being able to do this you have to prevent hosting non-end to end encrypted photos. That’s a significantly reduced service capability.

vineyardmike 4y ago
> demands you run a search for all faces that match a given face and turn over the resulting images to the court. Hopefully a court would reject that warrant as being too broad, but either way the compute to do this would be really expensive for any not-large company, or even a large company if they regularly get these requests.
- scarface_74 4y ago
  You give the US justice system way too much credit. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-warrants-reverse-search-warrants-police-google https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...
- cromwellian 4y ago
  The compute wouldn’t be that high as long as you had a way of scoping it down. If the police limited it to a handful of accounts of to a geo-fenced time of day, it would be quite tractable. The police have already used such geo-fenced warrants before.