5 ms·

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

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 4y ago
What kind of violation can happen in a building lobby that leads to an eviction? I'm seriously confused. Littering?
- jackson1442 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
      - brvsft 4y ago
        > 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. If that's the case, then why bring race into it? The racial aspects of the argument infers that such law would only be put in place, in spirit, to protect the privacy of minorities, and not anyone else.
        4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

olalonde 4y ago

What kind of violation can happen in a building lobby that leads to an eviction? I'm seriously confused. Littering?

jackson1442 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
    - brvsft 4y ago
      > 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. If that's the case, then why bring race into it? The racial aspects of the argument infers that such law would only be put in place, in spirit, to protect the privacy of minorities, and not anyone else.
      - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]