There is another problem with such technology that is missing from this long article. Facial recognition et al. also excludes those with physical disabilities. For example, some people have facial injuries that make it impossible and/or painful for them to look “straight” in a mirror. A reason why, for instance, I abhorre the 3D movies is that I can’t take my wife in movies because she lost binocular vision. We are creating a society where technology is used to filter out people that can’t conform to a given physical standard. I find it revolting and we hackers should fight to our last breath against it.
Edit: typo
Movies in 3D might not be accessible to everyone, but that doesn't mean it should be accessible noone. I agree to your general point, but not this specific one.
I understand what you mean. I should have explained that my temper flares when 3D is the only option offered, or when the 2D option is given at impossible hours.
As I commented on the other reply, I wasn't aware that this was a problem. Personally, I really dislike 3D movies and wouldn't go to one unless invited.
While you're absolutely right in a general sense, the local theatres here (and most likely elsewhere too) simply don't license the 2D-version of some movies, thus preventing myself and other people who only see in 2D for whatever reason from watching those movies.
That's actually quite unusual. As of last year, 3D tickets accounted for less than a third of the tickets sold for 3D movies: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/is-golden-ag... (They cite about one-third 3D, but they're counting box gross, and 3D tickets are usually about... +20% price?)
Speaking anecdotally from when I worked in a theater, somewhere around one in five people either can't watch 3D movies (motion sickness or similar) or simply don't benefit (no depth perception). Parties of four or more would almost always go to a 2D showing, because of the likelihood that somebody would veto 3D.
Please excuse my ignorance. Is 3D a worse experience for people with monocular vision, beyond having to wear the glasses for no benefit? I would imagine it just automatically degrades to 2D.
I have the same question! If it doesn't degrade quickly (edit: nicely), I bet you could do a crowdfunded campaign to produce glasses that show the same eye (side?) to both eyes. I'd support it.
I will try to convey what only disabled people can convey to the best of my abilities. First, with one image you lose a lot of luminosity with the glasses on. Without the glasses, off course, it is unwatchable. Furthermore, and more subtle, many people like my partner have /partial/ paralysis, so they have trained their brain in a certain way to compensate for the fact that they have partial binocular vision. The 3D effect don’t tolerate that since they rely on two images precisely engineered to trick your binocular vision « brain algorithm ». All this put together make 3D movies a «no-go » for people with monocular or partial binocular vision.
Edit: Typo and better explanation of the « trick »
I don't really get your point, a lot of existing things are "no-go" for people with disabilities. Skiing is impossible if you can't use your legs. Going to the movie is pretty much a no-go if you're blind (I know audiodescription exists for some movies)
There should be options for people with disabilities of course, and AFAIK 2D movies still exists and are not going to die anytime soon.
But what are you debating for ? Do you want a global ban on 3D because it can not be enjoyed by everyone ?
I believe this technology should be put under control because it is not only a tool of mass control, but also a discriminatory tool. I gave example of this trend taking a personal example. Having to choose to go to a different theater because there is no 2D at the chosen time is discriminatory.
I must also kindly reject your example. You can ski without legs. Ski slopes are actually a very good counter example: everybody who can pay a lift can go.
It’s a different question that I do not addressed, but I do not believe a ban will work. It’s better to regulate and put checks and balances in place. At least IMHO.
Because of exotropia[0], I have extremely limited binocular vision. I have had several surgeries to keep my eyes from drifting off to the side but essentially all of my distance vision comes from size and context clues. Driving at night is difficult because it's hard to compare the sizes of headlights.
I (obviously) don't watch 3D movies too often. When the technology first came out, it was really bad and gave me not-quite-headaches, not-quite-nausea when wearing glasses. It's better now but I don't get nearly the effect that the movie makers are going for and some of the more blatant effects (like things jumping out of the screen) end up looking weird and off-putting -- like getting half an image and stuff.
Perhaps the facial recognition written in undergraduate or even graduate classes does not handle physical disabilities (I think you're talking about non-standard faces, in this context.) Actual professional FR systems must handle conventional appearances, as well as individuals with birth defect deformities, significant facial scarring from injury such as fire, facial tattoos and jewelry, as well as outright attempts to disguise. When talking society population, the proportion of people with non-conventional appearances is significant. BTW, I'm lead engineer of a leading FR system.
So do I. Give your local movie theater a call and ask if they have 2d glasses. My local theater does and it's a godsent. (it's basically just 3d glasses except with the left lens twice)
Don't forget to figure out where they go to eat, where they work, where their lover(s) lives, where their children go school, where they go shopping, where they get a haircut, and whether they jaywalk. All for the last 12 months. I'm sure we can find something in there to persecute them for.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
The argument to ban or regulate "facial recognition technology" seems futile. It's not (necessarily) some highly complicated secret software available to a limited number of organizations that could keep it under wraps - currently, any decent CS undergraduate student could make a passable facial recognition system as a study project if they really wanted to, using only generic, freely available image processing / machine learning resources (i.e. nothing specific to facial recognition that could be regulated or restricted). Sure, it won't be as good as state-of-art systems, and it will take enough time so they likely won't bother unless someone wants it bad enough to pay for a bunch of weeks of work, but it'll be sufficient for all the bad outcomes described in the article.
The barrier of entry is just too low. If a few pictures of your face are floating online, many people can make a system that will somewhat accurately try to detect your face; the best the regulation can do is to specify that organizations will not use facial recognition even if they trivially could.
I absolutely agree with this. I myself implemented the Facenet paper with minor modifications as an undergrad project which started the face recognition revolution. If one has proper data, a neat prototype can be developed even on a decent i5 system in under a couple of hours. You don't even need GPUs because of pertained model. The tech in this domain is really cheap and readily available out there.
The point of legislation isn't to prevent people from doing something, but to create some consequences and make it so you can't be too brazen about it. For example, speed limits don't stop people from speeding, but they do reduce it. Those who speed will be more vigilant around corners watching for cops and this has some improvement on safety. Arguing that you shouldn't have speed limits just because it's too easy for anyone to speed so you can't have 100% enforcement misses the point.
Speed limits are a bad example. Unless you've got Orwellian enforcement most people go however fast they feel is reasonable for the conditions (which just so happens to usually not be that much more than the speed limit) and enforcement is basically a lottery with a large negative reward.
In my experience drivers tend to keep the speed limit in mind regardless. If the drive is a 45 mph road, straight line, low traffic, and high visibility most drivers will still cap out around 70 mph. This is because depending on how fast you are going, in the small chance you do get pulled over the difference between going 70 and going 90 could be the difference between a warning and winding up with a high fine and multiple points on your license [1].
Even if it is a lottery, if you lose your penalty is determined by the sliding scale of how reckless you were. That is a major factor in how fast drivers feel is reasonable.
With facial recognition, the farther along we go the frequency of its use will increase. However having the equivalent of a sliding scale of punishment could be useful.
Did the police department use facial recognition to try and identify who broke into a store? O.K.
Did the police department use facial recognition to preemptively surveil a high crime rate area and identify and keep track of everyone that goes to that area? Warning.
Did the police department use facial recognition to identify minorities and keep track of their activity across the city? The police department is banned from using facial recognition in the future and if caught again will face punishment on a case by case basis.
The main arguments of the article about why a ban would be needed are about using the technology for oppression by some local government. If they'd like to follow the suggestions of this article, they can simply voluntarily choose to abstain from using it; but if they don't choose to do so, then the rest of the world banning the technology won't make a difference.
Since local governments in the U.S. have no sovereignty, the states to which they belong can certainly impose bans that would prevent them from using facial recognition technology. The federal government probably could do so as well, using the commerce clause.
Any ban would be pointless. "Facial recognition" stopped being about faces some time ago, and now the more advanced systems look at everything from the shoulder tops on up - additional information from the shoulders, neck, ears, and so on provide additional discerning characteristics.
If "facial recognition" were banned, organizations would just start ignoring the face and proceed with other characteristics. The world of biometrics is huge, and the whole reason facial recognition is the biometric people pick on is because it is the easiest for laypeople to grasp.
This is article is nearly obsolete fear propaganda. We're getting wise to this crap, as the fear card is being played far too often, it's become the boy who cried wolf.
Regulating the storage and processing of private biometric data might be a more realistic approach than regulating technology - that database of millions of people's faces is pretty much the only boundary between recognizing your ten friends and mass surveillance; the tech is quite similar but the data matters a lot.
Yeah but this seems like a kind of pointless side-channel. Let's just assume that by the time this hits legislation the restriction will be on applying facial recognition and storing data on people's faces. Yeah we know you can implement it, we all did the coursera course on convnets.
I think the difference is not in how many people you can recognize, but what you do with the information.
* All existing laws should protect children, and protect people from discrimination. It should prevent the disclosure of health records. (So no AR apps that let you see who has what disease)
* The main concern is tracking people's location and movements and taking photographs and tagging people on social media sites.
* Some potential benefits are reducing crime and a "call parents" app that lets you call the parents of a misbehaving child without actually identifying the child to the person who has the app.
>> It's not (necessarily) some highly complicated secret software available to a limited number of organizations that could keep it under wraps - currently, any decent CS undergraduate student could make a passable facial recognition system as a study project if they really wanted to, using only generic, freely available image processing / machine learning resources (i.e. nothing specific to facial recognition that could be regulated or restricted).
Well, stealing candy from a baby, or robbing an old woman is not hard to do either; anyone could do it, with even less skill than "a decent CS undergraduate student". Yet, it is illegal to do so and there will definitely be consequences to any such attempt.
In other words- something doesn't need to be hard to do, in order for it to be illegal, neither are there fewer consequences for performing illegal acts that are easy, rather than hard.
Governments, you know, those people you're counting on to make it illegal and catch ... themselves ? Are the primary users of facial recognition, as anyone who's gone through customs in any EU country can tell you.
Those very same governments are also the main problem with censorship, and of course, their agents (police, politicians, ...) have proven time and time again that they can't be trusted with a stick [1], and don't follow the law.
And this is ignoring the fact that governments frequently see themselves as exempted for the law. In many cases, they build this into the laws in the first place.
So what exactly are you proposing we do ? If governments use this, who really cares who else is abusing it ?
I didn’t see any egregious violence or breach of trust by the officers in ur video. Maybe I’m biased cus the cops where I live routinely send people to the icu or coroner for just being in the vicinity of a cop
I believe the idea is to ban the use of facial recognition by international agreement, in the same way that chemical and biological weapons, landmines and cluster munitions are banned (or at least controlled). The safeguarding of such a treaty is then left to some supra-national organisation, such as the UN, etc.
In any case, I don't understand what you propose we do. Governments can fail to uphold their own laws. Should we do away with all laws? And then- what? A life of total lawlessness is better than one where laws are sometimes broken by government?
What a load of horse shit. The factual statements are overwhelmed by the ambiguous fear, Fear FEAR metaphors in this clearly manipulative, telling the ignorant how to think article. The gist of his whole point is "feature creep" and a collection of unrelated other technologies he's throwing into his reasons because they sound scary. Idiotic.
Oppression always fails in the long run because the conditions that spawn the oppression always eventually pass, and oppressive regime has to keep justifying itself.
For instance, slavery was long on the way out of the US by the time of the Civil War. As we kept expanding west-ward, the new states had exactly zero economic incentive to turn people into livestock. The South could get away with political shenanigans only as long as it could maintain its voting bloc. Expansion made that impossible, and the only solution became a war.
If the war hadn't happened though, we would have seen a managed transition. Legislation tailored at reining in slavery would have slowly made the practice increasingly untenable and the economic aspect would have gotten managed out over time. In fact, it was already happening.
To generalize, oppression seeks out a local maximum, eventually society finds a higher peak, and the oppression only lasts as long as it takes for the rest of society to build a wide enough bridge so that people on the lower hill can just walk over to the bigger hill. Or, you know, a war.
It's true that oppression fails in the long run but it's also true that we all die in the long run. There are plenty of examples where oppression lasted long enough to make the lives of generations of people miserable. So we shouldn't just say "This too shall pass"
I may not sure how this comment helps with the current situation where people think that tools like facial recognition will lead into oppression.
Are you saying we shouldn't worry because that oppression will fail in another 50-100 years? Let's just make sure the end of that oppression is well managed ?
I'm saying that if you want to actually solve a problem, a more sober outlook on the reasons why that problem is even a thing is going to be far more useful than impassioned, but undirected action.
The author of the piece is calling for a ban on facial recognition tech. At what level should this ban be placed? Just the US? The Anglo world? Anglo-Europe? Worldwide? China seems to be leading the push here, and they don't seem to be all that interested in human rights arguments originating from the West.
I know that nobody here really wants to deal with China's focus on collectivism over individualism, but it really does deserve a discussion. China has been grappling with the task of governing its immense population for thousands of years. How do you draw the line between governance and oppression?
Even if we restrict our ban to the Anglo world or just the US, A ban on facial recognition tech can have the same kind of effect that banning psychedelics did back in the 70s. A ban means that we can't run social experiments. When we can't run social experiments, we can't actually know the effects.
To implement a ban, a war must be fought. Even if it doesn't result in physical violence, you're still telling a lot of people they can't have what they want. If facial recognition tech results in oppression, we need to understand how.
I'm sure they exist but could you name some civil rights movements that did not feature violence from one or both sides?
Your point seems to be that "all things end" but that's true of anything. It took hundreds of years and massive two world wars for Britain to be weak enough to give up its self image of being an empire and emancipate its other colonies.
Edit: Answered my own question, to some extent. Relative to even recent human history, gay marriage has gotten along pretty well. Not bloodlessly but nothing like the 1960's lynching of rights workers.
It's a question of how much violence. All dispute resolutions involve some form of it, telling one person they're not going to get what they want is absolutely a form of violence. But the violence needs to be managed, legible, and appropriate. Slavery regimes are best eliminated through compensation of the owners. The progress difference between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is directly attributable to the fact that while the Dominican Republic saw a managed transition away from slavery, Haiti saw the entire economy crumble in a revolution modeled after the French one.
It's where you start thinking "this needs to be solved, right now," that leads to senseless, irrational violence. Hang back, spend some time understanding the problem, its economics, its politics. Take action to remove the worst excesses and slowly dig the problem out in detail. There's way more historical examples of well-meaning zealotry causing more problems than it solves than there are examples of zealotry preventing bigger problems from coming to pass.
This article is a masterpiece of misdirection. It says it's top highlight is "We believe facial recognition technology is the most uniquely dangerous surveillance mechanism ever invented." And then they wave their fear hands around non-facial recognition technologies and discuss their real fear: feature creep of surveillance technologies.
The article is a masterpiece of misdirection because we are very aware that the written word in the form of explainer articles for the uninformed IS ACTUALLY THE PERFECT TOOL FOR OPPRESSION. Unless you're one of the emotionally manipulated, you realize we live in a new age where the ignorant and intellectually lazy are "farmed and harvested" for their ignorant votes, to control the laws and economies of entire nation states. This article is one such ignorance embedding article putting fear into people's heads so they can be controlled.
Well. We're governed by laws. At least... theoretically. So if we make it illegal to scan peoples' faces then, theoretically, an oppressive government can't use it against its populace.
On the flip side, you have the "good guy problem" that we normal "good" people will happily give up our rights in order to help catch bad guys.
But really... it's not a MAC address or an IP address. It's your face. What "defense" is there to facial recognition software? Even if you stay off of facebook, your friends and family will still post photos of you there and reference you and talk about you. "No man is an island" has never been more apparent.
Theory is good for books, but for life we need practical solutions.
An automated system that scans friends galleries to find my face in their galleries maybe would be helpful. Then I would see who uses my face in what context, so I can react; maybe send a polite request to remove me from the picture, set it as private, or simply remove the picture from the gallery?
Or maybe an approach based on spreading disinformation would be enough, so I could produce fake photos of my face with other randomly chosen faces from all over the internet, so that face-gathering systems will store fake relations between me and some random people?
There are lots of methods we can use to defend ourselves.
The "ban something" approach works only for parties that are willing to cooperate. But it's not the cooperative parties that we should be afraid of, it's the uncooperative ones.
You would love to have a system that scanned the world's photos and notified you automatically about people commenting on you. You don't necessarily want the government to have that same system.
I'd also add that this begs a serious question: who _do_ you trust to own the signal? A multinational corporation? A government? No one? Everyone?
Furthermore, how do you rectify disagreements over that trust? I may trust a multinational corporation (especially if I own stock in it and can vote on its directors), but you may trust your government, and our neighbor may not trust anyone.
Both of those questions need to be "solved" (if such a thing is even possible), but that's (obviously) a lot easier said than done.
What I meant was that the "bad guys" will have it and they'll exploit it. No regulation will help because they will do it illegally. I want to be able to defend against it, but I won't be able to do it if there will be regulations against using those algorithms.
So I would rather allow anyone to have access to face recognition software, than to allow using it only for illegal use. Because nobody can prevent it from being used illegally.
> In the group of 100 people, even if 99 people will ban something, 1 person will still use it.
This is the nirvana fallacy. We don't expect people not to drink and drive ever again, but we still ban it.
And like drinking and driving, not only can we ban something, but we can find how we can defend against it (such as education and making it easier to get taxis home). So, the question:
> Isn't it better to find how you can defend against something
can be easily answered with: "Why not both?"
> What sort of thinking is this?
Reasonable, logical thinking that has succeeded in the past.
Does this mean it's the correct solution here? I don't know. But this isn't illogical by any means.
>> In the group of 100 people, even if 99 people will ban something, 1 person will still use it.
The same thing goes for any crime. Most people will not mug you, but a few will. So what? Should we not make mugging illegal, because there will always be some muggers around? Or do we just forget about policing such behaviour and instead "find ways to defend against it"?
I mean I guess you could argue for the latter approach, but then you need to explain where the buck stops- do we have any laws banning harmful behaviour, or is it every man and woman for themselves? Or something in between?
I built a face recognition algorithm to sell to police, immigration and pretty much who ever wants it. It took 6 months and is state of the art. Which is to say, not as good as a human, but getting close.
If you’re worried about privacy then maybe you should take the tracking device out of your pocket.
The concept of using the power of the state to limit the power of the state seems flawed to me. Especially an oppressive state.
The issue is scale and inability to escape. So, while your group would know about “thief”, another group would not, allowing this “thief” to decide to reform with this group, or just as likely to yet burn another bridge. But at least this “thief” had an opportunity to reform.
You will see this in history when say a lawyer or whoever else from that time got recorded in history, moves to a new town to escape a bad rep., often unfairly cast due to personal dispute.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadSpeaking anecdotally from when I worked in a theater, somewhere around one in five people either can't watch 3D movies (motion sickness or similar) or simply don't benefit (no depth perception). Parties of four or more would almost always go to a 2D showing, because of the likelihood that somebody would veto 3D.
Edit: Typo and better explanation of the « trick »
There should be options for people with disabilities of course, and AFAIK 2D movies still exists and are not going to die anytime soon. But what are you debating for ? Do you want a global ban on 3D because it can not be enjoyed by everyone ?
I must also kindly reject your example. You can ski without legs. Ski slopes are actually a very good counter example: everybody who can pay a lift can go.
It’s a different question that I do not addressed, but I do not believe a ban will work. It’s better to regulate and put checks and balances in place. At least IMHO.
I (obviously) don't watch 3D movies too often. When the technology first came out, it was really bad and gave me not-quite-headaches, not-quite-nausea when wearing glasses. It's better now but I don't get nearly the effect that the movie makers are going for and some of the more blatant effects (like things jumping out of the screen) end up looking weird and off-putting -- like getting half an image and stuff.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotropia
So do I. Give your local movie theater a call and ask if they have 2d glasses. My local theater does and it's a godsent. (it's basically just 3d glasses except with the left lens twice)
in this age, physical location isn't that important
text recognition, lets the oppressor know who is thinking what, and who they're trying to communicate it with
or makes nearly all communication impossible
Everyone else seems to think that information is important. What's your address?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
The barrier of entry is just too low. If a few pictures of your face are floating online, many people can make a system that will somewhat accurately try to detect your face; the best the regulation can do is to specify that organizations will not use facial recognition even if they trivially could.
I agree with your point though.
Even if it is a lottery, if you lose your penalty is determined by the sliding scale of how reckless you were. That is a major factor in how fast drivers feel is reasonable.
With facial recognition, the farther along we go the frequency of its use will increase. However having the equivalent of a sliding scale of punishment could be useful.
Did the police department use facial recognition to try and identify who broke into a store? O.K.
Did the police department use facial recognition to preemptively surveil a high crime rate area and identify and keep track of everyone that goes to that area? Warning.
Did the police department use facial recognition to identify minorities and keep track of their activity across the city? The police department is banned from using facial recognition in the future and if caught again will face punishment on a case by case basis.
If "facial recognition" were banned, organizations would just start ignoring the face and proceed with other characteristics. The world of biometrics is huge, and the whole reason facial recognition is the biometric people pick on is because it is the easiest for laypeople to grasp.
This is article is nearly obsolete fear propaganda. We're getting wise to this crap, as the fear card is being played far too often, it's become the boy who cried wolf.
* All existing laws should protect children, and protect people from discrimination. It should prevent the disclosure of health records. (So no AR apps that let you see who has what disease)
* The main concern is tracking people's location and movements and taking photographs and tagging people on social media sites.
* Some potential benefits are reducing crime and a "call parents" app that lets you call the parents of a misbehaving child without actually identifying the child to the person who has the app.
Well, stealing candy from a baby, or robbing an old woman is not hard to do either; anyone could do it, with even less skill than "a decent CS undergraduate student". Yet, it is illegal to do so and there will definitely be consequences to any such attempt.
In other words- something doesn't need to be hard to do, in order for it to be illegal, neither are there fewer consequences for performing illegal acts that are easy, rather than hard.
Those very same governments are also the main problem with censorship, and of course, their agents (police, politicians, ...) have proven time and time again that they can't be trusted with a stick [1], and don't follow the law.
And this is ignoring the fact that governments frequently see themselves as exempted for the law. In many cases, they build this into the laws in the first place.
So what exactly are you proposing we do ? If governments use this, who really cares who else is abusing it ?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_nAYd6Gpt4
In western countries with civilized police and legal systems this is not tolerated.
In any case, I don't understand what you propose we do. Governments can fail to uphold their own laws. Should we do away with all laws? And then- what? A life of total lawlessness is better than one where laws are sometimes broken by government?
For instance, slavery was long on the way out of the US by the time of the Civil War. As we kept expanding west-ward, the new states had exactly zero economic incentive to turn people into livestock. The South could get away with political shenanigans only as long as it could maintain its voting bloc. Expansion made that impossible, and the only solution became a war.
If the war hadn't happened though, we would have seen a managed transition. Legislation tailored at reining in slavery would have slowly made the practice increasingly untenable and the economic aspect would have gotten managed out over time. In fact, it was already happening.
To generalize, oppression seeks out a local maximum, eventually society finds a higher peak, and the oppression only lasts as long as it takes for the rest of society to build a wide enough bridge so that people on the lower hill can just walk over to the bigger hill. Or, you know, a war.
Are you saying we shouldn't worry because that oppression will fail in another 50-100 years? Let's just make sure the end of that oppression is well managed ?
The author of the piece is calling for a ban on facial recognition tech. At what level should this ban be placed? Just the US? The Anglo world? Anglo-Europe? Worldwide? China seems to be leading the push here, and they don't seem to be all that interested in human rights arguments originating from the West.
I know that nobody here really wants to deal with China's focus on collectivism over individualism, but it really does deserve a discussion. China has been grappling with the task of governing its immense population for thousands of years. How do you draw the line between governance and oppression?
Even if we restrict our ban to the Anglo world or just the US, A ban on facial recognition tech can have the same kind of effect that banning psychedelics did back in the 70s. A ban means that we can't run social experiments. When we can't run social experiments, we can't actually know the effects.
To implement a ban, a war must be fought. Even if it doesn't result in physical violence, you're still telling a lot of people they can't have what they want. If facial recognition tech results in oppression, we need to understand how.
Your point seems to be that "all things end" but that's true of anything. It took hundreds of years and massive two world wars for Britain to be weak enough to give up its self image of being an empire and emancipate its other colonies.
Edit: Answered my own question, to some extent. Relative to even recent human history, gay marriage has gotten along pretty well. Not bloodlessly but nothing like the 1960's lynching of rights workers.
It's where you start thinking "this needs to be solved, right now," that leads to senseless, irrational violence. Hang back, spend some time understanding the problem, its economics, its politics. Take action to remove the worst excesses and slowly dig the problem out in detail. There's way more historical examples of well-meaning zealotry causing more problems than it solves than there are examples of zealotry preventing bigger problems from coming to pass.
The article is a masterpiece of misdirection because we are very aware that the written word in the form of explainer articles for the uninformed IS ACTUALLY THE PERFECT TOOL FOR OPPRESSION. Unless you're one of the emotionally manipulated, you realize we live in a new age where the ignorant and intellectually lazy are "farmed and harvested" for their ignorant votes, to control the laws and economies of entire nation states. This article is one such ignorance embedding article putting fear into people's heads so they can be controlled.
Isn't it better to find how you can defend against something (face recognition in this example) instead of convincing the people to "ban it"?
I mean, let's ban all wars, ban low income and ban evil. What sort of thinking is this?
On the flip side, you have the "good guy problem" that we normal "good" people will happily give up our rights in order to help catch bad guys.
But really... it's not a MAC address or an IP address. It's your face. What "defense" is there to facial recognition software? Even if you stay off of facebook, your friends and family will still post photos of you there and reference you and talk about you. "No man is an island" has never been more apparent.
An automated system that scans friends galleries to find my face in their galleries maybe would be helpful. Then I would see who uses my face in what context, so I can react; maybe send a polite request to remove me from the picture, set it as private, or simply remove the picture from the gallery?
Or maybe an approach based on spreading disinformation would be enough, so I could produce fake photos of my face with other randomly chosen faces from all over the internet, so that face-gathering systems will store fake relations between me and some random people?
There are lots of methods we can use to defend ourselves.
The "ban something" approach works only for parties that are willing to cooperate. But it's not the cooperative parties that we should be afraid of, it's the uncooperative ones.
You would love to have a system that scanned the world's photos and notified you automatically about people commenting on you. You don't necessarily want the government to have that same system.
Furthermore, how do you rectify disagreements over that trust? I may trust a multinational corporation (especially if I own stock in it and can vote on its directors), but you may trust your government, and our neighbor may not trust anyone.
Both of those questions need to be "solved" (if such a thing is even possible), but that's (obviously) a lot easier said than done.
So I would rather allow anyone to have access to face recognition software, than to allow using it only for illegal use. Because nobody can prevent it from being used illegally.
This is the nirvana fallacy. We don't expect people not to drink and drive ever again, but we still ban it.
And like drinking and driving, not only can we ban something, but we can find how we can defend against it (such as education and making it easier to get taxis home). So, the question:
> Isn't it better to find how you can defend against something
can be easily answered with: "Why not both?"
> What sort of thinking is this?
Reasonable, logical thinking that has succeeded in the past.
Does this mean it's the correct solution here? I don't know. But this isn't illogical by any means.
The same thing goes for any crime. Most people will not mug you, but a few will. So what? Should we not make mugging illegal, because there will always be some muggers around? Or do we just forget about policing such behaviour and instead "find ways to defend against it"?
I mean I guess you could argue for the latter approach, but then you need to explain where the buck stops- do we have any laws banning harmful behaviour, or is it every man and woman for themselves? Or something in between?
If you’re worried about privacy then maybe you should take the tracking device out of your pocket.
The concept of using the power of the state to limit the power of the state seems flawed to me. Especially an oppressive state.
"Oh, that guy? Don't trade with that guy; he's an asshole." ;)
Now we're just scaling it up with fast-communicating hardware.
You will see this in history when say a lawyer or whoever else from that time got recorded in history, moves to a new town to escape a bad rep., often unfairly cast due to personal dispute.
Second option, can a camera sensor be damaged by laser pointer?
I have no hope for legal restrictions, it will always be defeated by 'security' arguments.