6 ms·

Honestly not sure what the big deal is - if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like

by ejb999 3y ago

Honestly not sure what the big deal is - if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me - plus I am certain an awful lot of people would prefer that only people that are supposed to be let in their building, are let in. Can it be abused? probably, but that is pretty much true of any technology or business process.

jollyllama 3y ago
Good doorman forgets if you slip him a tenner, unless the cops show up that week.
epc 3y ago
The doorman isn’t dumping a log of your comings and goings as well as who entered or exited with you into an unsecured s3 bucket in the cloud.
- ejb999 3y ago
  then thats the problem to fix - your landlord could also be dumping copies of your drivers license, rental application, lease and other financial data onto an unprotected s3 bucket as well - are we going to ban them from collecting that information? The solution is harsh penalties for negligence or willful misuse of customer data - not banning the technology imo.
  - epc 3y ago
    Yeah. That ship has sailed. Too many companies have been too blithe about customer data in order to blitzscale that growth curve and make their investors jump for joy. The next decade is going to be a series of overreaching regulatory baseball bats to the tech industry for abusing the trust and naiveté of the generic consumer.
    - fnimick 3y ago
      As it should be. Companies that abuse the public trust _should_ be regulated harshly.
  - tbrake 3y ago
    > The solution is harsh penalties for negligence or willful misuse of customer data - not banning the technology imo. Well since the solution (in the form of those laws) doesn't exist yet, the technology shouldn't be usable until it does.
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    It's not the landlord personally doing it though, it's third-party companies with low public visibility and no disincentive to try to monetize their data. it's harder to regulate entrenched abuses than to regulate new ones, so I see this as a perfectly valid and beneficial short term measure until we as a society can get our heads more properly around personal privacy rights in general.
  - gnopgnip 3y ago
    Current law/policies kind of does this and isn't just reactive. Like to access a tenants background check the credit bureaus require an on site survey of the landlords office with requirements for a paper shredder, a locking file cabinet or similar way to secure records, and that the space is separate from a living area.
- cde-v 3y ago
  [dead]
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Basically every single building is doing this with key fobs.
  - tzmudzin 3y ago
    Let’s not equal widespread abuse to no abuse at all.
- annexrichmond 3y ago
  as I started reading your comment I thought it was going to be about him being in the bathroom and not being able to do his job
parker_mountain 3y ago
> Can it be abused? probably, but that is pretty much true of any technology or business process. This is such an incredibly misleading statement. This is why we need legislation restricting the (ab)use of these technologies.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  I would even venture further and suggest that parent just argued for rather aggressive regulation of that space.
coldtea 3y ago
>Honestly not sure what the big deal is - if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me One difference is in the automation of recording your movements (and those of your friends) and giving easy instant access to it. I could not care less for a conscierge writing it down on a paper notebook. Another difference is that most buildings don't have a doorman to begin with.
TuringNYC 3y ago
>> Honestly not sure what the big deal is I would want assurances that it works equally well across skin types. I hate it when, say, HR sends me to a hotline and the phone cannot understand my accent. Often, automated system experiences are optimized for only some people. As a PoC, I dont want to be locked out of my own building because i'm being identified as someone else.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Or worse, automatically calling the police.
woodruffw 3y ago
One difference is occurrence: most apartments don’t have doormen, because they’re expensive (and don’t make sense for a building with just a few units, which is the majority of apartments in NYC). Even in fancier neighborhoods (UWS, UES), I’d guess that less than half the buildings have doormen. And those are neighborhoods with tall buildings with dozens of large apartments.
JustSomeNobody 3y ago
> Honestly not sure what the big deal is... Then you've already given up and accepted your new surveilled reality.
bckygldstn 3y ago
A human has a level of accuracy and decaying memory appropriate for the task of improving security for an apartment building. They’ll stop a stranger walking out with a package and keep an eye out for your abusive ex for you. They won’t remember you coming home late 6 years ago shortly after someone matching your description left an abortion clinic. They’re also human not an unaccountable automated process. They’ll let you bring home a new fling 5 nights in the same month without registering them as a tenant, and let a non-corporate delivery driver drop off a package without being registered as a SurveillanceCorp approved deliverer. The concept of doormen is dumb, but we don’t need to automate away every human interaction in our lives.
- mertd 3y ago
  Counter point: a non human won't gossip with your neighbor about you bringing an overnight fling.
  - devsda 3y ago
    Might be better than receiving personalized ads for birth control and relationship/dating advice the next morning.
- djcannabiz 3y ago
  I agree with the rest of you comment, but I am curious to know why you think the concept of a doorman is dumb
  - bckygldstn 3y ago
    In hindight, it was an unrelated and needlessly-negative statement that undermined the rest of my argument. But seeing as you asked, doormen hit some of the aspects of US culture I've struggled to adapt to as an immigrant of ~7 years including * Disproportionate fear of violence. It seems like doormen largely play the role of a security guard which is nice to have "just in case", without balancing against the mental harm of constant fear and anxiety. Let alone spending that money and mental capacity on actual problems like vehicle collisions and loneliness. * An OTT service industry. I don't want someone's fulltime job to be opening the door for me and being nice to me for tips, it makes life feel like a sales call. Ditto for hiring gardeners to leafblow your tiny lawn every week all through winter, and the server at a restaurant checking in on you every 10 minutes. It's much easier to have genuine interactions and relationships with people when they are doing a worthwhile job for a fair wage.
matsemann 3y ago
Having a doorman sounds arcane to me. Don't you just beep your key to get in? Why should I pay for someone sitting there all day watching the entrance? Will they stop my brother from coming in and watering my plants while I'm on vacation?
- tetromino_ 3y ago
  A doorman helps keep randos who intend to steal packages, jiggle door handles to check if any apartments are unlocked, or urinate and puke in the elevator from tailgating their way into the building.
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    Do people still seriously allow tailgating through locked doors these days? Unreal. When I lived in apartments I always made sure no one followed me in unless I recognized them and knew they were my neighbor or a neighbors guest I saw frequently.
    - ROTMetro 3y ago
      As a socially awkward computer geek, yes, yes people do. When your neighbor broke up with their boyfriend, did they notify everyone in the building to no longer let him follow them in like you seem to be ok with doing? Or did you just assume it was fine and let him in since you saw him come in with them before?
      - bluefirebrand 3y ago
        I once closed the door on the landlord's wife because I don't let people follow me into the building. I think I'm probably more socially awkward than you but maybe just in a different way. :)
jabroni_salad 3y ago
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/facial-recognition-tool-led-mistaken-arrest-lawyer-says-rcna64270 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/facial-recognition-too... imagine this but now you are being evicted because of "lease violations". You see the footage and none of it is of you, but they dont really care to bother with manual error correction. Oh, and do you think Ring is the only private surveillance company with a police integration?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bombcar 3y ago
A doorman costs money; upwards of 3x salary a year (as you need three if it's manned 24 hrs a day). That's a cost too high to catch people subletting illegally. A camera and an internet connection is a tiny fraction of that.
petsfed 3y ago
This is line of reasoning is a pro-tech disease: "Dangerous thing X has always been technically possible, but logistically prohibitive. Since we have not explicitly done anything to prevent thing X in the past, new technology that removes all logistical barriers to doing thing X is not at all problematic." It is a problem that our only guardrails to thing X were that human labor was too slow and costly to do it at scale. That we built no other guardrails does not imply that thing X is not a problem, nor that automating thing X at scale is no worse than doing it manually. Moreover, if the only additional guardrail you support is that every time thing X occurs, it goes to the courts, then the reasonable bad actor only needs to make the rest of their operation efficient enough to profit before they go to trial.
ironmagma 3y ago
This is borderline ignorance in this age of privacy erosion. Is someone overhearing your phone call the same as a warrantless wiretapping program?
lisasays 3y ago
If you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me So you're trusting your cheap-ass landlord to install an additional system layer reliably let you in at 2AM? You know - the same landlord couldn't figure out how to check his camera backups last time someone got mugged in the vestibule?
JohnFen 3y ago
> if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me A doorman isn't putting detailed records in a database that can be combined with other databases.

by ejb999 3y ago

jollyllama 3y ago

Good doorman forgets if you slip him a tenner, unless the cops show up that week.

epc 3y ago

The doorman isn’t dumping a log of your comings and goings as well as who entered or exited with you into an unsecured s3 bucket in the cloud.

ejb999 3y ago
then thats the problem to fix - your landlord could also be dumping copies of your drivers license, rental application, lease and other financial data onto an unprotected s3 bucket as well - are we going to ban them from collecting that information? The solution is harsh penalties for negligence or willful misuse of customer data - not banning the technology imo.
- epc 3y ago
  Yeah. That ship has sailed. Too many companies have been too blithe about customer data in order to blitzscale that growth curve and make their investors jump for joy. The next decade is going to be a series of overreaching regulatory baseball bats to the tech industry for abusing the trust and naiveté of the generic consumer.
  - fnimick 3y ago
    As it should be. Companies that abuse the public trust _should_ be regulated harshly.
- tbrake 3y ago
  > The solution is harsh penalties for negligence or willful misuse of customer data - not banning the technology imo. Well since the solution (in the form of those laws) doesn't exist yet, the technology shouldn't be usable until it does.
- nerdponx 3y ago
  It's not the landlord personally doing it though, it's third-party companies with low public visibility and no disincentive to try to monetize their data. it's harder to regulate entrenched abuses than to regulate new ones, so I see this as a perfectly valid and beneficial short term measure until we as a society can get our heads more properly around personal privacy rights in general.
- gnopgnip 3y ago
  Current law/policies kind of does this and isn't just reactive. Like to access a tenants background check the credit bureaus require an on site survey of the landlords office with requirements for a paper shredder, a locking file cabinet or similar way to secure records, and that the space is separate from a living area.
cde-v 3y ago
[dead]
Gigachad 3y ago
Basically every single building is doing this with key fobs.
- tzmudzin 3y ago
  Let’s not equal widespread abuse to no abuse at all.
annexrichmond 3y ago
as I started reading your comment I thought it was going to be about him being in the bathroom and not being able to do his job

parker_mountain 3y ago

> Can it be abused? probably, but that is pretty much true of any technology or business process. This is such an incredibly misleading statement. This is why we need legislation restricting the (ab)use of these technologies.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
I would even venture further and suggest that parent just argued for rather aggressive regulation of that space.

coldtea 3y ago

>Honestly not sure what the big deal is - if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me One difference is in the automation of recording your movements (and those of your friends) and giving easy instant access to it. I could not care less for a conscierge writing it down on a paper notebook. Another difference is that most buildings don't have a doorman to begin with.

TuringNYC 3y ago

>> Honestly not sure what the big deal is I would want assurances that it works equally well across skin types. I hate it when, say, HR sends me to a hotline and the phone cannot understand my accent. Often, automated system experiences are optimized for only some people. As a PoC, I dont want to be locked out of my own building because i'm being identified as someone else.

nerdponx 3y ago
Or worse, automatically calling the police.

woodruffw 3y ago

One difference is occurrence: most apartments don’t have doormen, because they’re expensive (and don’t make sense for a building with just a few units, which is the majority of apartments in NYC). Even in fancier neighborhoods (UWS, UES), I’d guess that less than half the buildings have doormen. And those are neighborhoods with tall buildings with dozens of large apartments.

JustSomeNobody 3y ago

> Honestly not sure what the big deal is... Then you've already given up and accepted your new surveilled reality.

bckygldstn 3y ago

A human has a level of accuracy and decaying memory appropriate for the task of improving security for an apartment building. They’ll stop a stranger walking out with a package and keep an eye out for your abusive ex for you. They won’t remember you coming home late 6 years ago shortly after someone matching your description left an abortion clinic. They’re also human not an unaccountable automated process. They’ll let you bring home a new fling 5 nights in the same month without registering them as a tenant, and let a non-corporate delivery driver drop off a package without being registered as a SurveillanceCorp approved deliverer. The concept of doormen is dumb, but we don’t need to automate away every human interaction in our lives.

mertd 3y ago
Counter point: a non human won't gossip with your neighbor about you bringing an overnight fling.
- devsda 3y ago
  Might be better than receiving personalized ads for birth control and relationship/dating advice the next morning.
djcannabiz 3y ago
I agree with the rest of you comment, but I am curious to know why you think the concept of a doorman is dumb
- bckygldstn 3y ago
  In hindight, it was an unrelated and needlessly-negative statement that undermined the rest of my argument. But seeing as you asked, doormen hit some of the aspects of US culture I've struggled to adapt to as an immigrant of ~7 years including * Disproportionate fear of violence. It seems like doormen largely play the role of a security guard which is nice to have "just in case", without balancing against the mental harm of constant fear and anxiety. Let alone spending that money and mental capacity on actual problems like vehicle collisions and loneliness. * An OTT service industry. I don't want someone's fulltime job to be opening the door for me and being nice to me for tips, it makes life feel like a sales call. Ditto for hiring gardeners to leafblow your tiny lawn every week all through winter, and the server at a restaurant checking in on you every 10 minutes. It's much easier to have genuine interactions and relationships with people when they are doing a worthwhile job for a fair wage.

matsemann 3y ago

Having a doorman sounds arcane to me. Don't you just beep your key to get in? Why should I pay for someone sitting there all day watching the entrance? Will they stop my brother from coming in and watering my plants while I'm on vacation?

tetromino_ 3y ago
A doorman helps keep randos who intend to steal packages, jiggle door handles to check if any apartments are unlocked, or urinate and puke in the elevator from tailgating their way into the building.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  Do people still seriously allow tailgating through locked doors these days? Unreal. When I lived in apartments I always made sure no one followed me in unless I recognized them and knew they were my neighbor or a neighbors guest I saw frequently.
  - ROTMetro 3y ago
    As a socially awkward computer geek, yes, yes people do. When your neighbor broke up with their boyfriend, did they notify everyone in the building to no longer let him follow them in like you seem to be ok with doing? Or did you just assume it was fine and let him in since you saw him come in with them before?
    - bluefirebrand 3y ago
      I once closed the door on the landlord's wife because I don't let people follow me into the building. I think I'm probably more socially awkward than you but maybe just in a different way. :)

jabroni_salad 3y ago

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/facial-recognition-tool-led-mistaken-arrest-lawyer-says-rcna64270 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/facial-recognition-too... imagine this but now you are being evicted because of "lease violations". You see the footage and none of it is of you, but they dont really care to bother with manual error correction. Oh, and do you think Ring is the only private surveillance company with a police integration?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bombcar 3y ago

A doorman costs money; upwards of 3x salary a year (as you need three if it's manned 24 hrs a day). That's a cost too high to catch people subletting illegally. A camera and an internet connection is a tiny fraction of that.

petsfed 3y ago

This is line of reasoning is a pro-tech disease: "Dangerous thing X has always been technically possible, but logistically prohibitive. Since we have not explicitly done anything to prevent thing X in the past, new technology that removes all logistical barriers to doing thing X is not at all problematic." It is a problem that our only guardrails to thing X were that human labor was too slow and costly to do it at scale. That we built no other guardrails does not imply that thing X is not a problem, nor that automating thing X at scale is no worse than doing it manually. Moreover, if the only additional guardrail you support is that every time thing X occurs, it goes to the courts, then the reasonable bad actor only needs to make the rest of their operation efficient enough to profit before they go to trial.

ironmagma 3y ago

This is borderline ignorance in this age of privacy erosion. Is someone overhearing your phone call the same as a warrantless wiretapping program?

lisasays 3y ago

If you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me So you're trusting your cheap-ass landlord to install an additional system layer reliably let you in at 2AM? You know - the same landlord couldn't figure out how to check his camera backups last time someone got mugged in the vestibule?

JohnFen 3y ago

> if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me A doorman isn't putting detailed records in a database that can be combined with other databases.