I would love to have a contact lens that projected information about the people around me onto my retina. Serious question - what's dystopian about that? I realize there's often a fine line between utopian and dystopian and for me, facial recognition (especially as my vision deteriorates) seems solidly on the utopian side of the line.
Nothing is dystopian about the idea, it's the execution that will be the important part. What information are you imagining these contacts will display?
Even though I'd really like to have control over the information that concerns me, I also find it highly morally questionable to restrict others ability to see, know or remember, either naturally or technologically assisted[1]. Even for those who are unfriendly or outright malicious. That just feels unnatural to me.
And if someone shares their knowledge[2], while I fully reserve the right call them assholes if what they do caused me grief or worse, I'm also not sure it's still morally right to demand for me that they shut up.
Still, if I can apply this sort of logic to myself (i.e. I surely can decide for myself that I can't complain if my photo was published and is a part of some database), it would be plain wrong and even inhumane to apply this to anyone else. Can't impose this sort of thinking on others, especially given that the general expectation and attitude seems to be drastically different with all those "right to be forgotten" and other privacy laws and stuff (which - I'll be honest - feel just unnatural to me, but, heck, I guess I can't really argue with majority).
This damned dilemma sucks. /rant
___
[1] And where to draw a line? Glasses for poor eyesight? Pen-and-paper notetaking? PDAs (phones or whatever)? PDAs with cameras? Networked PDAs? Those sci-fi brain implants concepts that don't exist but would probably happen in the future?
[2] Given that it's about valid true facts that literally anyone who sees me in public can obtain. So this is drastically different from the restricting what others say when what they say constitutes a defamation.
Where to draw the line? How about "people you have seen"? But the line is less important than the reason for the line being where it is -- and that is about things like the principle of least authority, stability against tyrrany, whether progress is held back even a little by chilling effects, etc.
It isn't necessary to restrict others ability to see, know or remember per se, but only to prohibit the application of those powers -- by means of large computer databases collected by many people -- to particular purposes. In exactly the same sense, it isn't necessary to constrain people's ability to move their arms and hands in order to prohibit strangulation.
Perhaps your dilemma is caused by something along the lines of a tacit incorrect assumption that moral principles are not constrained by other moral principles. Can you think of a moral principle about freedoms that is not restricted in any way by harm caused to others and to society?
I think you are right to say that "it just feels unnatural" is not a good argument, but I don't think that's because you are arguing with the majority: the majority are often wrong.
I don't begrudge you projecting information on your retina about people you have seen before. The issue at hand is people you have never seen before, but whose faces have been been captured in a large database.
What's dystopian?
Mass surveillance grants power, to the public and to institutions, to control individuals. One consequence is 'chilling effects': good actions are not taken because of possible future consequences. Planning is hindered, because any action may have unpredictable consequences because of side effects caused by surveillance 'global state' (state as in data, not as in country).
I think there is a negative psychological effect on some (most?) people of being at all times under observation, retroactively, by all people.
Today's governments and today's public often err in their ethical judgements, and "the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny". Some future ones may be worse. Such large databases (and the social/legal/technical all-seeing surveillance systems we are building) would make it easier to allow bad governments to lock themselves into power more firmly, and once in power to use it in very bad ways: this is Snowden's "turnkey tyrrany".
This kind of information reduces the scope for experimentation, error, and the correction of mistakes. Because that is the source of all knowledge, that is a problem.
Of course some uses of such data will be good. But, power should be localized to prevent it being abused (the principle of least authority). Some good uses (like helping your bad vision) don't actually require the "sudo" superpower to recognize every person on the planet. All others are not worth the costs (this is a hypothesis, as are all statements I guess).
Radical transparency could be a tool for or against oppressors. If I could know as much about my government as they know about me, I think I would feel a lot safer.
We have many institutions that have evolved over centuries to correct the mistakes of governments (including ones that involve malice). Radical anything risks destabilising that most valuable knowledge: incremental change has worked remarkably well in this sphere, given time. There need to be very good reasons to throw everything up in the air - especially given radical transparency is just worse than its absence in many ways (see my earlier comments) -- really the idea has come about not because people thought it was a good idea, but because they thought it was inevitable, which it is not.
I think there are good reasons to expect the current ongoing disaster that is computer security will one day be fixed. Then, radical surveillance will still be with us, but radical transparency will operate in one direction: from those in power to everybody else.
Until then, especially in a society that is showing signs of starting to lose the means for criticism of bad ideas, extreme surveillance does not imply that the same data will be collected and stored about everybody or every institution. The UK government has already introduced data transparency laws. It makes special exceptions for... government. Even though they might eventually be caught, your local population of bureaucrats, with easy access to every detail of your life, will have an asymmetric information and legal power advantage over you, and adding information amplifies that asymmetry. Massive data leaks are still surprisingly infrequent. If we had regular Snowdens across government, what makes us think we know that would be a net good, a general purpose cure-all nostrum for government?
Meanwhile, the rest of population, given data, are happy to "know" the moral truth as they see it about other people and impose their own tyranny without due process (see e.g. Jon Ronson's "So you've been publicly shamed"). And corporations -- but they are discussed often enough that I don't want to add anything now.
Not to speak of progress, planning, and the morality of imposing "radical transparency" on other people.
Dystopia is Russian past. In a lot of ways it is so much more free country than the US. Imagine no tax on private software development as a business. This is what Russia have!
This is plain incorrect. Software development (all-Russian classifier of types of economic activities code 72.20) is taxed here, just as any other business. /offtopic
> You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our prior permission.
Rate Limiting on the Graph API [1];
> Your app can make 200 calls per hour per user in aggregate.
The Graph API terms, and end-user terms are lengthy, I'm sure someone else could better answer this, but I don't believe a developer would get away with it via the API, due to the rate limit, and a raw-HTTP image scraper would not be possible due to the randomly named images Facebook assigns.
Facebook doesn't allow this, but even if they did, there are many laws in place in western countries regarding photographs of people in public, that would make creating and/or using such an app illegal.
Kabakov says the app could revolutionise dating: “If you see someone you like, you can photograph them, find their identity, and then send them a friend request.” The interaction doesn’t always have to involve the rather creepy opening gambit of clandestine street photography, he added: “It also looks for similar people. So you could just upload a photo of a movie star you like, or your ex, and then find 10 girls who look similar to her and send them messages.”
Sounds like neither of the founders has been on a date lately.
Waving an electronic nose around is even more inconspicuous.
Now you could have an app that would match the current odors smelled around and your state of mind, and automatically match them with a database to point you to people giving you good feelings.
How do they get the data, is it just because that Russian network allows scraping?
I had an idea like this before, actually I think it might even work with just descriptions (no photographs needed). Like if you see a stranger on a train - you don't need that many bits of information to identify them. But you need the data of all people living in a city...
But you have to select the bits very carefully for that population. If you're playing "Bitwise Guess Who?" against Moscow's population, there are going to be many combinations of bits that result in zero matches (ethnicity: African, hair color: red, eye color: blue, height: 4 feet) and many combinations of bits that result in many matches (ethnicity: Slavic, hair color: blonde, eye color: blue, height: 5'8")
My initial thought was that privacy conscious people will begin to partially cover their face, but I can see where technologies like these are headed: given a full body image, they can match height / body mass and reduce the possible number of matches. It could even learn what clothes you wear and match even further. Given a small enough sample, it's won't be that difficult (for a machine) to create a graph of where your possible movements. Scary!
You could probably get a prosthetic and/or active device of some sort that would eventually teach you a consistent new way of walking.
People also claim to have learned new ways of walking through posture exercise like Alexander Technique or Irene Dowd's work, although I don't know if those are big enough changes to be visibly different.
The thing is, if they're tracking your gait they're also tracking a bunch of other details about you. Even if you learn a new walk, if you don't change anything else they'll realize that's your new walk.
You'd have to maintain different personas, with different outfits, postures, gaits, cell phones..and still hide the fact that your phones, if you use any, probably connect to a lot of the same towers & networks. And those personas would still be tracked, even if separately. Sounds like an awful lot of tradecraft for the average citizen.
The problem is, this doesn't scale. While this could be acceptable for a person some may call a "tinfoil-hatter", it's certainly unreasonable to think of general population to walk with rocks in their shoes and heads masked.
But then what if 'people walking with rocks in their shoes' can be detected (which doesn't seem to complicated to me)? You'd be instantly suspicious and stand out even more.
Now I don't know vkontakte, but facebook at least let users tag their photos with who's on them. That should be pretty good training data for a machine learning algorithm, so your profile photo is not necessarily needed.
Facebook has the capability to do these types of visual searches internally and they've almost certainly shared some of those tools with the US gov. Remember, Facebook took money from In-Q-Tel (the CIA's VC fund) and have close ties with lots of three letter agencies.
In a way, what's happening in Russia is better for society because it means the general public is aware of the technology and it's implications. Here in the US we presume we have a lot more privacy that we actually do.
Not really. Many of these people are being found because they're in the background of one person's photo untagged, and they're in the foreground of a friend's photo and tagged. The person in the picture may not even know there are any pictures of them on the internet and they need not have posted any photos themselves.
To be honest, speaking solely about personal image recognition, I think Facebook isn't worse than any other public web site (which can be scrapped and are scrapped). And RMS has his photos on his own, and many others. His image is already public and well-known.
(Still, if one respects the person it makes sense to respect what they ask for. But that's a separate thing.)
Just having a photo on the 'net isn't enough. A photo must be tagged. Tagging usually requires a social network profile, and I think all mainstream social networks don't conceal the fact one was tagged.
So, if you search for yourself and don't see any photos of you - all chances are you're somewhat "safe". For a time being.
(A good thing about photo tagging is that a lot of tags go on memes and random pics just to gain the tagged person's attention. This must generate some noise.)
> Tagging usually requires a social network profile
I don't think this is true. Tagging with a reference to a social network profile requires a social network profile, but just like you can tag a bear "the bear," you can tag a photo with someone's name without them knowing, being on the site, or even being alive.
If you have a profile, it's most likely there will be a link rather than just a text note. And the value of text notes ("here's John") is generally much less than of a profile link.
Still - you're correct - it's well possible that someone tags a photo with a full identity information - and that person won't know it. But I think it's quite uncommon.
Facebook and Google have been able to do this for years, and you used to be able to also using their platforms.
For Facebook, does anyone remember when they released their auto-tagging feature, it would tag people who weren't your friends too? They quickly removed it when it started auto-tagging random people in pictures you took in public.
For Google, this was an initial feature of one of their mobile apps (I forget which), which they removed because people were creeped out by it.
This will backfire. Institutions (large corps as well as police & intelligence orgs) think they want this information to use for 'precrime' projects and also to use as evidence in court.
However -- bureaucracy has always been vulnerable to its own overreach. An invasive legal system is a tax on productivity & innovation. If laws are society's immune system, an invasive police state is a society with an autoimmune disorder.
Tiny countries that can offer alternative systems will become destinations for a new generation of skilled or wealthy expats. Delaware offers benefits to corporations; Estonia is offering benefits to tech expats; this phenomenon will increase.
it's not a russia issue, it's an everywhere issue. snowden stuff aside, police just got caught installing automatic listeners in california. texas police are trading license plate capture data to camera makers in exchange for free LPR equipment.
Private companies are using surveillance technology on their employees and on their users.
If it's an everywhere issue, then I doubt that it will result in e.g. mass migration towards the few places that won't do it; people have shown in practice that they do not "vote with their feet" (or with revolutions) unless the abuse escalates to either very severe state violence or very severe economic hardship.
Sure, a minority of idealists will do so, but in the thousands, not in the millions. That doesn't matter in the large scale - to do so, it would have to match something like the jewish and other refugee flow from central europe in 1930ies. Currently, for every talented person that would consider leaving USA for political reasons, there are ten or hundred talented people that would rather come to USA for economic reasons, even if their current country doesn't do much or any surveillance.
The primary issue isn't the fact that people will leave, it's their reason for leaving -- surveillance-based policing makes life uncertain and work inefficient. Top-down societies will fail whether or not their innovators jump ship.
Look at the shenzhen special economic zone in china; it evolved into something special because entrepreneurs were able to act without extreme government control at every step.
It's forgiveness vs permission. It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, i.e. it's more efficient. But surveillance-based law creates a permission society. Opportunities to fail or break the rules are also opportunities to succeed. You can't say 'we're only going to allow you to run the experiments that will work'.
Bigger countries can pressure smaller countries to adopt their invasive legal system, unless it benefits the most powerful people like for example tax havens. I don't think there are so many countries that we can afford natural selection to take place.
Anyway, What is the relation between this app and legislation? As I see it this app is perfectly legal right now, even if I don't like it.
This feels like the makings of an off-line equivalent of a supercookie - people that visited X-store must be interested in Y-goods, plus you can cross-ref your customer data with such a database and create a deep profile. You don't need a social network corpus for that, though one would make matching and new customer identification easier.
And unless you are into serious plastic surgery, there isn't really a clear cookies button with this tech.
EDIT: a.k.a. the Minority Report billboard/storefront that changes based on people around it.
Same works for any kind of identification of interests, including political - if your CCTV network captures faces of people who attended an opposition rally, you get to match them to other venues, spot patterns and recognize leaders/organizers.
Customer tracking's already a big thing, except for using a personal tracking devices (like mobile phones; based on identifiers their radios scream out loud) instead of facial/gist recognition.
Not to say your favorite taxi or banking app may include some unadvertised extras that cough "improves your customer experience" by enhancing your device screams.
As well as apps listening to human-inaudible signals to identify TV content being viewed.
Most of these have some sort of counter-measures, such as being able to turn off features of the phone. The facial thing is both universal and very hard to "disable".
It's going to play out just like in the anti-spam/anti-virus domain. Someone is going to develop a face-CAPTCHArizer service that throws bitmaps at a photo to make life difficult for commonly used face-recognition and feature extraction algorithms.
Upload a photo, toggle a true/false positive control, get your online-safe photo back. Looking forward to an announcement on HN.
fuck this. services like this one are not some inevitable result of having high technology. if they are, then governments tracking the movements of every citizen with face recognizing security cameras is inevitable as well. its ok because it stops terrorism, right? no. i think it needs to come to a halt. laws must be enacted. the sanctity of our privacy must be protected deliberately now that it is not protected by barriers of technical infeasibility.
So. You want prevent, through the use of force and the rule of law, private citizens from taking photographs of people in public places and comparing those photographs with a voluntarily provided corpus?
Enforcing such rules would take nothing short of a totalitarian state.
There was no privacy when we lived in villages, and we will return to that state in the mid-term future. The anonymity of the modern metropolis and the accompanying sensation of privacy in our day-to-day lives is but a temporary aberration in the history of the human experience.
Do not get used to it. It is not long for this world.
Can you explain why it's necessary to prevent people doing those things, or to impose a totalitarian state, in order to prevent identification of random citizen x by random citizen y?
It seems what's actually needed to prevent that is controls on the creation and use of large databases in order to identify faces (except under some list of acceptable uses). People who work in IT often express disbelief that laws like that could work. In fact, factors that humans understand like scale and intent are an important part of law, and laws written in those terms are commonplace.
Re villages: another thing commonplace in the past was brutal violence. In the past, it was obvious that brutal violence was inevitable. Then, we made it illegal, and it largely stopped. We should do that again, in this case.
He he, no, they aren't. The difference is that in public there's much room for opportunistic, untargeted data collection, which is a lot more creepy under the right (wrong?) circumstances than targeted or random surveillance over my private spaces.
I'm more worried about untargeted collection of data because it produces a larger data set, which can be used to data-mine all sorts of juicy tidbits about people's lives.
One nice mashup of that Face.com and Facebook APIs was the "AutomaticDJ": the computer will start playing the favorite music of the person in front of the PC, great for parties:
It will be interesting to see how this further affects our society as public anonymity starts really going away. I have been reading The Great Gatsby. There was an interesting moment in the book where Gatsby shows the main character a medal from the war as well as a photo of him in Oxford.
THAT was how he proved that he went to Oxford. Nowadays, if you want to know where someone went to school you'd do a quick search and take the first thing you find. If you are more diligent you'd dig deeper.
It's also very clear that Gatsby treasures his anonymity and the reputation he's built around being mysterious.
The reason I bring this up, is that it represents (in my mind) an indicator that there is an argument to be made that public anonymity has already changed so much in the past 20 years. Granted there were still ways of verifying all of this information before it was just a lot slower.
This post just stirred up some thoughts that I had this morning while reading. The internet more drastically technology have changed our culture so much it's almost impossible to realize the effect.
Just thought I'd share some musings I had this morning that tied into the current topic.
I tried the app just now. Where is this "70% accuracy"? It just shows you a huge list of vkontakte users with the same facial features (eg a beard) and ratios between the eyes, nose and mouth etc. What is the accuracy claim based on??
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 53.7 ms ] threadRussia heading fast to dystopia is not surprising, really.
Even though I'd really like to have control over the information that concerns me, I also find it highly morally questionable to restrict others ability to see, know or remember, either naturally or technologically assisted[1]. Even for those who are unfriendly or outright malicious. That just feels unnatural to me.
And if someone shares their knowledge[2], while I fully reserve the right call them assholes if what they do caused me grief or worse, I'm also not sure it's still morally right to demand for me that they shut up.
Still, if I can apply this sort of logic to myself (i.e. I surely can decide for myself that I can't complain if my photo was published and is a part of some database), it would be plain wrong and even inhumane to apply this to anyone else. Can't impose this sort of thinking on others, especially given that the general expectation and attitude seems to be drastically different with all those "right to be forgotten" and other privacy laws and stuff (which - I'll be honest - feel just unnatural to me, but, heck, I guess I can't really argue with majority).
This damned dilemma sucks. /rant
___
[1] And where to draw a line? Glasses for poor eyesight? Pen-and-paper notetaking? PDAs (phones or whatever)? PDAs with cameras? Networked PDAs? Those sci-fi brain implants concepts that don't exist but would probably happen in the future?
[2] Given that it's about valid true facts that literally anyone who sees me in public can obtain. So this is drastically different from the restricting what others say when what they say constitutes a defamation.
It isn't necessary to restrict others ability to see, know or remember per se, but only to prohibit the application of those powers -- by means of large computer databases collected by many people -- to particular purposes. In exactly the same sense, it isn't necessary to constrain people's ability to move their arms and hands in order to prohibit strangulation.
Perhaps your dilemma is caused by something along the lines of a tacit incorrect assumption that moral principles are not constrained by other moral principles. Can you think of a moral principle about freedoms that is not restricted in any way by harm caused to others and to society?
I think you are right to say that "it just feels unnatural" is not a good argument, but I don't think that's because you are arguing with the majority: the majority are often wrong.
What's dystopian?
Mass surveillance grants power, to the public and to institutions, to control individuals. One consequence is 'chilling effects': good actions are not taken because of possible future consequences. Planning is hindered, because any action may have unpredictable consequences because of side effects caused by surveillance 'global state' (state as in data, not as in country).
I think there is a negative psychological effect on some (most?) people of being at all times under observation, retroactively, by all people.
Today's governments and today's public often err in their ethical judgements, and "the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny". Some future ones may be worse. Such large databases (and the social/legal/technical all-seeing surveillance systems we are building) would make it easier to allow bad governments to lock themselves into power more firmly, and once in power to use it in very bad ways: this is Snowden's "turnkey tyrrany".
This kind of information reduces the scope for experimentation, error, and the correction of mistakes. Because that is the source of all knowledge, that is a problem.
Of course some uses of such data will be good. But, power should be localized to prevent it being abused (the principle of least authority). Some good uses (like helping your bad vision) don't actually require the "sudo" superpower to recognize every person on the planet. All others are not worth the costs (this is a hypothesis, as are all statements I guess).
I think there are good reasons to expect the current ongoing disaster that is computer security will one day be fixed. Then, radical surveillance will still be with us, but radical transparency will operate in one direction: from those in power to everybody else.
Until then, especially in a society that is showing signs of starting to lose the means for criticism of bad ideas, extreme surveillance does not imply that the same data will be collected and stored about everybody or every institution. The UK government has already introduced data transparency laws. It makes special exceptions for... government. Even though they might eventually be caught, your local population of bureaucrats, with easy access to every detail of your life, will have an asymmetric information and legal power advantage over you, and adding information amplifies that asymmetry. Massive data leaks are still surprisingly infrequent. If we had regular Snowdens across government, what makes us think we know that would be a net good, a general purpose cure-all nostrum for government?
Meanwhile, the rest of population, given data, are happy to "know" the moral truth as they see it about other people and impose their own tyranny without due process (see e.g. Jon Ronson's "So you've been publicly shamed"). And corporations -- but they are discussed often enough that I don't want to add anything now.
Not to speak of progress, planning, and the morality of imposing "radical transparency" on other people.
Menawhile, do you have any links handy? [edit, nevermind, saw it below :)]
> You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our prior permission.
Rate Limiting on the Graph API [1];
> Your app can make 200 calls per hour per user in aggregate.
The Graph API terms, and end-user terms are lengthy, I'm sure someone else could better answer this, but I don't believe a developer would get away with it via the API, due to the rate limit, and a raw-HTTP image scraper would not be possible due to the randomly named images Facebook assigns.
---
[0] https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/advanced/rate...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/11/facebook-...
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/18/facebook-scoops-up-face-com...
Zuckerberg has an agenda: http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp...
It seems like a norm of human nature.
Sounds like neither of the founders has been on a date lately.
http://uselesspress.org/things/smell-dating/
Waving an electronic nose around is even more inconspicuous. Now you could have an app that would match the current odors smelled around and your state of mind, and automatically match them with a database to point you to people giving you good feelings.
https://billetto.co.uk/en/events/romancing-the-armpit-25-may
500,000 users and 'only' 3m searches ? That's 6 per user - way lower than what I would expect (or one of the numbers is false).
I had an idea like this before, actually I think it might even work with just descriptions (no photographs needed). Like if you see a stranger on a train - you don't need that many bits of information to identify them. But you need the data of all people living in a city...
Personal identity is not an exact science, no matter how much we would like it to be, there are always ways to fake it given the right tools.
Consider the roots of the concept: the word "person" originates from the ancient Greek persona, meaning a theatrical mask worn by actors.
Per+sona
Per: that through which
Sona: sound goes
People also claim to have learned new ways of walking through posture exercise like Alexander Technique or Irene Dowd's work, although I don't know if those are big enough changes to be visibly different.
You'd have to maintain different personas, with different outfits, postures, gaits, cell phones..and still hide the fact that your phones, if you use any, probably connect to a lot of the same towers & networks. And those personas would still be tracked, even if separately. Sounds like an awful lot of tradecraft for the average citizen.
The problem is, this doesn't scale. While this could be acceptable for a person some may call a "tinfoil-hatter", it's certainly unreasonable to think of general population to walk with rocks in their shoes and heads masked.
So, this doesn't solve the issue.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/persona#Etymology
In a way, what's happening in Russia is better for society because it means the general public is aware of the technology and it's implications. Here in the US we presume we have a lot more privacy that we actually do.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wU92eycwmxY
“Right now, our government is doing things we think only other countries do.”
(Still, if one respects the person it makes sense to respect what they ask for. But that's a separate thing.)
So, if you search for yourself and don't see any photos of you - all chances are you're somewhat "safe". For a time being.
(A good thing about photo tagging is that a lot of tags go on memes and random pics just to gain the tagged person's attention. This must generate some noise.)
I don't think this is true. Tagging with a reference to a social network profile requires a social network profile, but just like you can tag a bear "the bear," you can tag a photo with someone's name without them knowing, being on the site, or even being alive.
If you have a profile, it's most likely there will be a link rather than just a text note. And the value of text notes ("here's John") is generally much less than of a profile link.
Still - you're correct - it's well possible that someone tags a photo with a full identity information - and that person won't know it. But I think it's quite uncommon.
For Facebook, does anyone remember when they released their auto-tagging feature, it would tag people who weren't your friends too? They quickly removed it when it started auto-tagging random people in pictures you took in public.
For Google, this was an initial feature of one of their mobile apps (I forget which), which they removed because people were creeped out by it.
However -- bureaucracy has always been vulnerable to its own overreach. An invasive legal system is a tax on productivity & innovation. If laws are society's immune system, an invasive police state is a society with an autoimmune disorder.
Tiny countries that can offer alternative systems will become destinations for a new generation of skilled or wealthy expats. Delaware offers benefits to corporations; Estonia is offering benefits to tech expats; this phenomenon will increase.
Private companies are using surveillance technology on their employees and on their users.
If it's an everywhere issue, then I doubt that it will result in e.g. mass migration towards the few places that won't do it; people have shown in practice that they do not "vote with their feet" (or with revolutions) unless the abuse escalates to either very severe state violence or very severe economic hardship.
Sure, a minority of idealists will do so, but in the thousands, not in the millions. That doesn't matter in the large scale - to do so, it would have to match something like the jewish and other refugee flow from central europe in 1930ies. Currently, for every talented person that would consider leaving USA for political reasons, there are ten or hundred talented people that would rather come to USA for economic reasons, even if their current country doesn't do much or any surveillance.
Look at the shenzhen special economic zone in china; it evolved into something special because entrepreneurs were able to act without extreme government control at every step.
It's forgiveness vs permission. It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, i.e. it's more efficient. But surveillance-based law creates a permission society. Opportunities to fail or break the rules are also opportunities to succeed. You can't say 'we're only going to allow you to run the experiments that will work'.
Anyway, What is the relation between this app and legislation? As I see it this app is perfectly legal right now, even if I don't like it.
And unless you are into serious plastic surgery, there isn't really a clear cookies button with this tech.
EDIT: a.k.a. the Minority Report billboard/storefront that changes based on people around it.
Same works for any kind of identification of interests, including political - if your CCTV network captures faces of people who attended an opposition rally, you get to match them to other venues, spot patterns and recognize leaders/organizers.
Not to say your favorite taxi or banking app may include some unadvertised extras that cough "improves your customer experience" by enhancing your device screams.
Most of these have some sort of counter-measures, such as being able to turn off features of the phone. The facial thing is both universal and very hard to "disable".
Upload a photo, toggle a true/false positive control, get your online-safe photo back. Looking forward to an announcement on HN.
Enforcing such rules would take nothing short of a totalitarian state.
There was no privacy when we lived in villages, and we will return to that state in the mid-term future. The anonymity of the modern metropolis and the accompanying sensation of privacy in our day-to-day lives is but a temporary aberration in the history of the human experience.
Do not get used to it. It is not long for this world.
It seems what's actually needed to prevent that is controls on the creation and use of large databases in order to identify faces (except under some list of acceptable uses). People who work in IT often express disbelief that laws like that could work. In fact, factors that humans understand like scale and intent are an important part of law, and laws written in those terms are commonplace.
Re villages: another thing commonplace in the past was brutal violence. In the past, it was obvious that brutal violence was inevitable. Then, we made it illegal, and it largely stopped. We should do that again, in this case.
I'm more worried about untargeted collection of data because it produces a larger data set, which can be used to data-mine all sorts of juicy tidbits about people's lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face.com
One nice mashup of that Face.com and Facebook APIs was the "AutomaticDJ": the computer will start playing the favorite music of the person in front of the PC, great for parties:
https://github.com/gleitz/automaticdj
THAT was how he proved that he went to Oxford. Nowadays, if you want to know where someone went to school you'd do a quick search and take the first thing you find. If you are more diligent you'd dig deeper.
It's also very clear that Gatsby treasures his anonymity and the reputation he's built around being mysterious.
The reason I bring this up, is that it represents (in my mind) an indicator that there is an argument to be made that public anonymity has already changed so much in the past 20 years. Granted there were still ways of verifying all of this information before it was just a lot slower.
This post just stirred up some thoughts that I had this morning while reading. The internet more drastically technology have changed our culture so much it's almost impossible to realize the effect.
Just thought I'd share some musings I had this morning that tied into the current topic.