10 ms·

I had a similar thought last time I was in an airport for an international flight and instead of scanning my boarding pass and looking at my passport they just

• Zigurd 2y ago
  This reminds me of the early days of applying speech recognition. Some use cases were surprisingly good, like non-pretrained company directory name recognition. Shockingly good and it fails soft because there are a small number of possible alternative matches. Other cases, like games where the user's voice changes due to excitement/stress, were incredibly bad.
• dylan604 2y ago
  > Quickly they showed me a video of my entire time with all my movements at the airport so they could pinpoint the employee. This is just as interesting as it is creepy, but that's the world we live and this is hacker news. So, how quickly was was quickly. You made your report, they get the proper people involved, and then they show you the video. How much time passed before you were viewing the video? For someone that plays with quickly assembling an edited video from a library of video content using a database full of cuepoints, this is a very interesting problem to solve. What did the final video look like? Was it an assembled video with cuts like in a spy movie with the best angles selected in sequence? Was it each of the cameras in a multi-cam like view just starting from the time they ID'd the flight you arrived on? Did they draw the boxes around you to show the system "knew" you? I'm really curious how dystopian we actually are with the facial recognition systems like this.
  • eschneider 2y ago
    Those sorts of systems run in realtime. They neither know (or care) who you are. They work by identifying people and pulling out appearance characteristics (like blue coat/red hair/beard/etc) and hashing them in a database. After that, it's straightforward to track similar looking people via connected cameras, with a bit of human assistance.
  • Animats 2y ago
    Here's a marketing video for a multi-camera tracking system which does just that.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07inDETl3LQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07inDETl3LQ
    • na4ma4 2y ago
      the stock footage they used looked like it came from Person of Interest.
  • UltraSane 2y ago
    This tech isn't new. My company uses Axis cameras and Axis has some pretty advanced video analytics software https://www.axis.com/en-us/products/analytics https://www.axis.com/en-us/products/analytics It records the license plates of all cars entering and leaving the parking lots. You can associate names to faces which we do for all employees and the system automatically records when people enter and leave buildings. You can even just tell it to find all people with a blue shirt in a particular camera in a time window. It can automatically detect people shouting.
  • sho 2y ago
    > I'm really curious how dystopian we actually are No idea how widespread it is, but in Singapore airport the system is tightly integrated. You are "tagged" when you check in, and "tagged out" as you board, with your appearance associated with your intended flight details. If you miss your flight or otherwise spend too much time in the secure zone, you are highlighted in the system and will eventually be approached. Arriving passengers are also given a time limit to take their next action, be it clear immigration or enter transit, and lingering will also trigger a response. All in the name of safety and security but I can't help but feel a measure of discomfort with it all.
• CalRobert 2y ago
  Making it opt-out instead of opt-in means that that vast majority of people won't care, or have better things to do. You don't have to have your photo taken to enter the US if you're a citizen, but who wants to deal with the hassle? And on and on it goes.
  • onetokeoverthe 2y ago
    wrong. photo taken at sfo inbound customs. go ahead and decline while the cop is holding your passport.
    • dessimus 2y ago
      > holding your passport. When my spouse and I crossed through US customs this past spring, they called us by our names and waved us on before even getting our passports out to hand to the customs officer. This was at BWI, fwiw.
      • jamiek88 2y ago
        Customs or immigration?
        • dessimus 2y ago
          CBP. We are citizens, and were returning from a trip.
      • dawnerd 2y ago
        They do that with kiosks and the app. It can be a bit hectic with global entry.
    • jamiek88 2y ago
      Customs or immigration?
      • CalRobert 2y ago
• onetokeoverthe 2y ago
  a bit after 911 i figured the airport dystopia would eventually ooze out. after soaking deep within the nextgen. rub my jeans sailor. no 3d xrays for me.
• sema4hacker 2y ago
  Twenty (!) years ago I got home from a drug store shopping trip and realized I had been charged for some expensive items I didn't buy. I called, they immediately found me on their surveillance recording, saw the items were actually bought by the previous person in line, and quickly refunded me. No face recognition was involved (they just used the timestamp from my receipt), but the experience immediately made me a fan of video monitoring.
  • WalterBright 2y ago
    I was talking with an employee at a grocery store, who told me that management one day decided to review the surveillance footage, and fired a bunch of employees who were caught pilfering.
    • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago
      I had a friend who was a checker at a large local chain, and before shift one day he popped into the security office (he was friends with the head of security) to say hi, and they had every camera in the front of the store trained on the employee working the customer service desk. Someone got fired that day.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
      Surprising how common it is. The first hardware I ever designed on the job was a device to detect employee theft.
      • WalterBright 2y ago
        I'm not in the least surprised. People steal from businesses routinely, it's all part of the anti-business mentality. Case in point - one time the cash machine on the bank exterior disbursed an extra 20 to me. I counted it carefully, sure enough, an extra one. So I went around to the other side, went in, and handed it to the teller with an explanation. She about fell over in shock. It's kinda sad, actually.
  • maccard 2y ago
• 1659447091 2y ago
  > and no one will care because it already happens to them at the airport, so why make a fuss about it at the grocery store or on a public sidewalk. You may be overestimating how many unique/different people travel through airports, especially more than once or twice to notice the tracking. People who travel once or twice total in their life by air, (are usually easy to spot), far more concerned with getting through a confusing hectic situation then noticing or even knowing that using facial recognition is new and not simply a special thing (because 9/11). And, the majority of Americans have travelled to zero or one country, last time I saw numbers on it. That country is usually Mexico or Canada where they drive (or walk). I think once it starts trying to hit close to home where people have a routine and are not as stressed by a new situation and have the bandwidth to--at a minimum--take a pause, will ask questions about what is going on.
  • highcountess 2y ago
    I’m thinking it will only be a matter of time before (if it’s not already the case) that things like self-checkout systems that do HQ faces level video for facial recognition and identification, akin to any number of dystopian novels/movies where some protagonist cannot move around without face covering because there are scanners, or even something like Idiocracy where the public is so conditioned that they immediately report someone who does not obey the government regime’s requirement to have some barcode.
  • interludead 2y ago
    Is there a tipping point where familiarity leads to normalization, or does it instead give people the clarity to resist?
    • tim333 2y ago
      Also there's the possibility people aren't particularly bothered by it as long as it gets used for reasonable purposes, to catch the bad guys. My main annoyance with surveillance in London is it wasn't good enough to catch the bastards who snatched my phone. From a practical point of view to avoid getting caught if you look at the phone snatchers, they wear hoodies, balaclava type cycle masks and generic black tracksuit like clothing. If you look at the photos of the NYC shooter he slipped up in not wearing a balaclava type mask and in having distinctive clothing and backpack.
• dathinab 2y ago
  The thing with you example is that there is a "time and location bound context" due to which the false positive rate can be _massively_ reduced. But for nation wide public search the false positive rate is just way to high for it to work well. Once someone managed to leave a "local/time" context (e.g. known accident at known location and time) without leaving too many traces (in the US easy due to wide use of private cars everyone) the false positive rate makes such systems often practically hardly helpful.
  • bigiain 2y ago
    No too sure modern private cars are all that good at letting you avoid leaving time/location traces.
• gleenn 2y ago
  I seriously pisses me off that they make the font so small on the opt-out signage and you get told by a uniform to stare at the camera like you have no choice. Everything you don't fight for ends up getting taken.
  • foxglacier 2y ago
    I tend to just stop and read the fine print for things that might matter or if I have the time, even if I'm holding up a queue. I've spent several minutes at the entrance gate to a parking building because of the giant poster of T&Cs. I ask librarians to find books for me because the catalogue computer has a multi-screen T&C that I can't be bothered reading. I've turned away a customer from by business because their purchasing conditions included an onerous indemnification clause which they refused to alter. I discovered you don't need ID to travel on local flights because the T&C led me to calling the airline who gave me a password to use instead. I've also found several mistakes in T&Cs that nobody probably notices because nobody reads them.
• jillyboel 2y ago
  Thank you for giving us this dystopian future, AI bros
• Buttons840 2y ago
  I think the best we can hope for is that government officials are subject to more surveillance than regular people. Everyone is going to have at least some surveillance.
• UltraSane 2y ago
  You have zero expectation of privacy in public
  • crooked-v 2y ago
    There's a huge difference between the historical intent of that principle and the way that these days everyone in a given space can be exhaustively recorded and tracked 24/7.
    • hibikir 2y ago
      The availability of cheap sick is what makes the lack of privacy naturally different. There was a time where a police department could identify a suspect, talk to a judge, and then had that person followed for a while, dedicating multiple people to the efforts. With enough cameras and disk space, you now identify a person, and they were pre-followed for who knows how long. Then again, it depends on where you are. One could have thought that finding a specific guy in NYC after you had him on camera at a given time would be easy, but they aren't so easy to locate immediately.
    • wpietri 2y ago
      For sure, and I think a key change here is asymmetry. Previously in public I'd have a reasonable chance of knowing that somebody was watching or following me. Between cameras, networks, and high-capacity recording, that's all out the window. I'd feel much better about if we heavily surveilled the use of surveillance. E.g., every access is recorded both in terms of metadata and in terms of generating video of whoever's looking. And if I'm in something they're looking at, I get notified (barring temporary legal exceptions for open investigations and the like).
  • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    This saying isn't even true. Many countries have cultural expectations and legal structures providing some level of privacy in public. The very first GDPR fine issued stemmed from a business security camera that needlessly recorded people on the sidewalk.
• ct0 2y ago
  The individual tracking systems were getting secretly installed at a local to me state school about 10 years ago. It's got to be pretty advanced by now.
• nobody9999 2y ago
  >why make a fuss about it at the grocery store or on a public sidewalk. Because my business is my business and nobody else's. Full stop.
  • try_the_bass 2y ago
    When you're in public or at a grocery store, it's no longer just your business, though?
    • JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
      That’s the American privacy concept. It’s different in other countries.
      • try_the_bass 2y ago
        No, that's kind of just a fact? When you're in public, you're interacting with others, meaning your actions (or lack thereof) no longer only impacts yourself. So, it stops being solely your business, and starts to become slightly others', as well.
        • nobody9999 2y ago
          >So, it stops being solely your business, and starts to become slightly others', as well. Whose? And under what circumstances? Please be specific and include appropriate legal precedents. Thanks!
          • gianjohansen 2y ago
            Depends on the state and city, there's no federal law. Madison Square Garden (notoriously) use facial recognition to ban all lawyers from their venue who work at firms engaged in active litigation against them. This was upheld in May [1][2] since in NYC you can collect biometric data for commercial use without consent as long as it's signposted and you're not selling the data [3]. [1] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2023cv03380/597620/46/ https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yor... [2] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/madison-square-garden-beats-suit-over-facial-id-system-at-venues https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/madison-square-gard... [3] https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-131254 https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYC...
• bayouborne 2y ago
  Start masking up w/a consistent alterface now, because once everyone gets base-lined, then you're going to be stopped because you don't look like you.
• Razengan 2y ago
  And the biggest problem is that all this surveillance is one-side: "they" can see everything we do but we can't see what they do.
• temporallobe 2y ago
  I just experienced one of these facial scanners in the UK while boarding a plane for the US. The thought had occurred to me that this could become the norm and that there’s nothing one could actually do about it and that we are already living in the dystopian future we feared, where no one can truly ever be anonymous. But I also wondered about various problem scenarios. If the scanner couldn’t match your face, would they deny you entry? If so, what would happen if someone had plastic surgery or some other condition that altered their face? What if this technology becomes so pervasive that your face is scanned everywhere you go? Where does any of this end?
  • bookofjoe 2y ago
    See my comment up top re: plastic surgery that alters your face.
• Gud 2y ago
  Don’t assume that this development is inevitable. Some countries have strong privacy laws, such as Switzerland.
• interludead 2y ago
  Trading-off of your biometric data for that convenience
• kccqzy 2y ago
  What you describe at the end has already happened in China. Municipalities (at least the large ones) routinely have cameras with facial recognition everywhere in public. The police has power to pull up this kind of information without warrants (it's China, so what do warrants even mean).