7 ms·

"If left unchecked, she said, racially biased algorithms driving these systems risked further fueling gentrification, which threatened to, “erode what should be

"If left unchecked, she said, racially biased algorithms driving these systems risked further fueling gentrification, which threatened to, “erode what should be a diverse collective identity in the city.” I don't get this statement. If s minority already has a apartment lease, how is registering their face data leads to all of that?

MisterTea 3y ago
[flagged]
- brvsft 3y ago
  Whoa holy shit this is the kind of nuanced and intelligent discussion I come to Hacker News for. Can you write in a cyborg executioner that extrajudicially murders the black man and then gets a puff piece from the local news rewarding him for protecting the building?
perihelions 3y ago
It's explained right there in the same paragraph, - "she feared aggressive landlords could use the tech to issue petty lease violations against tenants, which could eventually lead to their eviction" Selective enforcement is a tool for capricious abuses. If you allow landlords to spy on their tenants with automated systems, passively collecting vast amounts of data, it's very easy for them to "find" an infraction if they deliberately set out to find one. It empowers petty tyrants.
- olalonde 3y ago
  What kind of violation can happen in a building lobby that leads to an eviction? I'm seriously confused. Littering?
  - jackson1442 3y ago
    - violation of guest policies (having too many or staying too long) - if you hook up a decibel meter, being too loud - loitering - allowing someone to tailgate etc.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    The main one landlords are interested in is people illegally subletting. So if the person/people going into your apartment every day for three months are not you or on your lease, then they evict you.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  As if the landlords didn't already know their renters were in minority groups. Your fear is no different than if the landlord had surveillance cameras in public areas of the property, recording 24/7... which they absolutely should anyway.
  - fwlr 3y ago
    With the 24/7 surveillance camera setup, the cost to the landlord of gathering enough violations to evict minority tenants is “watch all recorded video from all cameras, looking for the target”. Facial recognition allows landlords to start with a target in mind and have the technology filter an arbitrary amount of data for just the moments when the target is on camera. The tech removes that O(n) search where n is hours recorded, which was the dominating factor making it impractical, and crucially was the only thing that made pervasive recording correspondingly more expensive to mine for violations.
    - brvsft 3y ago
      Cameras can just recognize humans, so a lot of the N hours can be removed simply by detecting human activity and without using facial recognition. It's still quite practical. I have cheap Wyze cameras that allow me to do this. It would also be trivial to pore through those videos and just pick out the ones where the human has dark skin if I'm a racist landlord. The thing is, I agree with people against this simply on the principle that the landlord shouldn't be able to use facial recognition on tenants without their permission, and the landlord also shouldn't be able to use that lack of agreement to withhold a lease in the first place. But the race-reductionist arguments being used to prop up this position come off as sophistry. I don't think a landlord in NYC of all places is going to waste time targeting black people that they already gave a lease to an apartment, rather than just targetting shitty tenants. The cameras will probably be able to find people littering in the building, for example. Those are the people you target if the plan is to start kicking people out of the building to improve it.
      - fnimick 3y ago
        > It would also be trivial to pore through those videos and just pick out the ones where the human has dark skin if I'm a racist landlord. Yes, but you can't do it at scale. Automation via facial recognition makes it cheap. That's the problem. I have no problem with an individual person remembering the face of another individual person - I have a problem with a system that allows a landlord to pick out every interaction with any person they choose after the fact for the entire term of the data collection.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
2rsf 3y ago
Maybe this? but then it has nothing to do with face recognition but with any kind of renovation: > he saw it as a sneaky attempt to jack up prices in a gentrifying area and force people like him out. “They were trying to find ways to expedite ways of flushing people out of the building and then try to market new flipped-over apartments to gentrifiers,” Rogers told Gizmodo.
woodruffw 3y ago
Facial recognition is well known to have racial biases with respect to accuracy. If the building I’m currently renting in suddenly decides that I’m not a legitimate visitor some random percent of the time, then I’m very likely to move and go somewhere that isn’t going to do that to me. That percentage doesn’t have to be very high; it just has to be higher than a key, which has a success rate approaching 100%. Edit: forgot to mention: it’s also somewhat common for a building’s owner to change beneath its tenants, with the new owner enacting policies that are clearly intended to flush to old (and therefore less profitable) tenants out. Cameras that track the activities of tenants and make them feel unwelcome would typify this kind of policy, even before any racial bias in the technology itself.
hbossy 3y ago
System records all people smoking on the staircase. The smoking tenant is evicted. New non-smoking tenants pay more. Old tenant can't sue the landlord over his eviction being racially-driven.

MisterTea 3y ago

[flagged]

brvsft 3y ago
Whoa holy shit this is the kind of nuanced and intelligent discussion I come to Hacker News for. Can you write in a cyborg executioner that extrajudicially murders the black man and then gets a puff piece from the local news rewarding him for protecting the building?

perihelions 3y ago

It's explained right there in the same paragraph, - "she feared aggressive landlords could use the tech to issue petty lease violations against tenants, which could eventually lead to their eviction" Selective enforcement is a tool for capricious abuses. If you allow landlords to spy on their tenants with automated systems, passively collecting vast amounts of data, it's very easy for them to "find" an infraction if they deliberately set out to find one. It empowers petty tyrants.

olalonde 3y ago
What kind of violation can happen in a building lobby that leads to an eviction? I'm seriously confused. Littering?
- jackson1442 3y ago
  - violation of guest policies (having too many or staying too long) - if you hook up a decibel meter, being too loud - loitering - allowing someone to tailgate etc.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The main one landlords are interested in is people illegally subletting. So if the person/people going into your apartment every day for three months are not you or on your lease, then they evict you.
zdragnar 3y ago
As if the landlords didn't already know their renters were in minority groups. Your fear is no different than if the landlord had surveillance cameras in public areas of the property, recording 24/7... which they absolutely should anyway.
- fwlr 3y ago
  With the 24/7 surveillance camera setup, the cost to the landlord of gathering enough violations to evict minority tenants is “watch all recorded video from all cameras, looking for the target”. Facial recognition allows landlords to start with a target in mind and have the technology filter an arbitrary amount of data for just the moments when the target is on camera. The tech removes that O(n) search where n is hours recorded, which was the dominating factor making it impractical, and crucially was the only thing that made pervasive recording correspondingly more expensive to mine for violations.
  - brvsft 3y ago
    Cameras can just recognize humans, so a lot of the N hours can be removed simply by detecting human activity and without using facial recognition. It's still quite practical. I have cheap Wyze cameras that allow me to do this. It would also be trivial to pore through those videos and just pick out the ones where the human has dark skin if I'm a racist landlord. The thing is, I agree with people against this simply on the principle that the landlord shouldn't be able to use facial recognition on tenants without their permission, and the landlord also shouldn't be able to use that lack of agreement to withhold a lease in the first place. But the race-reductionist arguments being used to prop up this position come off as sophistry. I don't think a landlord in NYC of all places is going to waste time targeting black people that they already gave a lease to an apartment, rather than just targetting shitty tenants. The cameras will probably be able to find people littering in the building, for example. Those are the people you target if the plan is to start kicking people out of the building to improve it.
    - fnimick 3y ago
      > It would also be trivial to pore through those videos and just pick out the ones where the human has dark skin if I'm a racist landlord. Yes, but you can't do it at scale. Automation via facial recognition makes it cheap. That's the problem. I have no problem with an individual person remembering the face of another individual person - I have a problem with a system that allows a landlord to pick out every interaction with any person they choose after the fact for the entire term of the data collection.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

2rsf 3y ago

Maybe this? but then it has nothing to do with face recognition but with any kind of renovation: > he saw it as a sneaky attempt to jack up prices in a gentrifying area and force people like him out. “They were trying to find ways to expedite ways of flushing people out of the building and then try to market new flipped-over apartments to gentrifiers,” Rogers told Gizmodo.

woodruffw 3y ago

Facial recognition is well known to have racial biases with respect to accuracy. If the building I’m currently renting in suddenly decides that I’m not a legitimate visitor some random percent of the time, then I’m very likely to move and go somewhere that isn’t going to do that to me. That percentage doesn’t have to be very high; it just has to be higher than a key, which has a success rate approaching 100%. Edit: forgot to mention: it’s also somewhat common for a building’s owner to change beneath its tenants, with the new owner enacting policies that are clearly intended to flush to old (and therefore less profitable) tenants out. Cameras that track the activities of tenants and make them feel unwelcome would typify this kind of policy, even before any racial bias in the technology itself.

hbossy 3y ago

System records all people smoking on the staircase. The smoking tenant is evicted. New non-smoking tenants pay more. Old tenant can't sue the landlord over his eviction being racially-driven.