It is not the technology that is dangerous but the scale and manner of its deployment. Patented, opaque, closed source, championed by mega-corporations closely allied with powerful governments, entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage... these are the real concerning factors.
After all, a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by, but with a human there are obvious limits and a person to confront, charge or circumvent. With ubiquitous, tiny robots all over the place, society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power. That's not good.
>society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power...
Don't kid yourself, even the 'watchers' will be 'watched'. The people bringing all these systems together will not be your local yocal Barney Fifes. They will be professional and highly intelligent technical teams whose members have likely studied little other than security and intelligence gathering for their entire professional lives. These are not the type of teams that carelessly leave obvious security holes like that laying around.
Taken as a whole, the technologies coming out today will enable surveillance regimes the likes of which even the UK and China never previously would have dared to dream up.
Yeah, because the CEOs, Politicians, etc... are definitely the people walking around in public spaces or delivering packages or buying stuff from stores.
Yeah, except it's not like that. It is much closer to the random collection of anybodies found at any company, just with a tech bent. The idea of these uber specialist is myth. I work in security, at high levels. It's just normal people.
I think you misunderstood who the watchers are supposed to be. Santosh83 is probably referring to the high risk of the establishment of a police state.
"Taken as a whole, the technologies coming out today will enable surveillance regimes the likes of which even the UK and China never previously would have dared to dream up. "
thay's really important. Hitler, Stalin, the Stasi and many others would have been very pleased to have the systems we are building right now. Once a full country surveillance system gets in the hand of a ruthless dictator it will be very hard to get rid of that dictator.
Why do you think this? Who are these elites that never leave security holes in things? The snowden leaks show they don't work for the NSA. They don't work in consumer electronics... the deeply flawed copy protection schemes in most video game consoles show that. They don't work for the FSB. What gives you the impression that these people even exist?
People seem to not understand the asymmetry in difficulty between offence and defense. For something to be broken, there just needs to be one fuckup, or a few tiny fuckups that can be linked together. Smart people are not infallible. Everything is exploited eventually. The only foolproof thing to do is not to build the infrastructure in the first place.
But yes, I agree with your last point. There's no privacy anymore.
And who watches these specialized, intelligent watchers? Another, "higher caste" of more specialized, more intelligent watchers?
The more likely scenario is that this line of work would likely attract creepy antisocial perverts who like to watch, and love to exert authority -- essentially the people we would like to keep as far as possible from this kind of technology.
ring's entire technical team is based in the ukraine because the labor is cheaper and the data moderators that tag the videos for facial recognition and video processing make $3.00 - Ring isn't a sophisticated technology or even a secure product. For example, there is no two factor authentication and it's not encrypted end to end. Surveillance capitalism is a rush to the bottom to make money, not protect society, leaving gaping holes and cutting corners on quality (and fair pay) for profits.
"After all, a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by"
Yes, but the essential difference is that the good old security guard isn't photographing everyone passing by and putting those pictures into a database.
Which is only a problem because its... entirely beyond the analysis or oversight of the vast majority of citizens, completely connected realtime to various other systems, automated, eternally slurping up data for indefinite storage..
It wouldn’t be as concerning if it was only being stored in a local sqlite db.
I mean, he or she is collecting images with their eyes and storing them in their brain. We're fine with that because it's only local storage--the police can't just plug a network cord into your security guard and suck out all the images and timestamps every hour.
I think facial recognition door systems are a fine idea if they can be implemented like a doorman: local storage only, carefully trained on local data. With current technology that would be impossible or extremely expensive, though.
The difference between individual human watchers doing surveillance, face recognition, etc. and at-scale watchers doing the same thing is key.
The difference is no less than the old corner stores every few blocks vs Amazon's automated warehouses & shipping.
An ordinary drive with a bit of speeding here and there everyday goes from perhaps a ticket or two every decade, to 6 tickets every trip.
A meaningless wrong turn, I'm lost, let's look around and try to figure out where I am, turns from a non-event to a Suspicious Activity Report...
Just because the laws are word-for-word unchanged, the scaling of enforcement technology transforms the identical laws into a completely different society and experience (just as other scaling technology transforms our experience in a positive way).
This phenomena, as unintended consequences ("just trying to make the neighborhood safer...", but scaled 10^7), is perhaps as dangerous as Bostrom's AI warnings.
> An ordinary drive with a bit of speeding here and there everyday goes from perhaps a ticket or two every decade, to 6 tickets every trip.
Can it be that the best way of avoiding that is avoiding speeding? It's interesting that you are lumping together objectively dangerous, even if prevalent in the US, public behaviour (deliberate speeding) with honest mistakes (making a wrong turn).
Yes, an obvious almost tautological suggestion, which often does not apply, and can actually increase the danger of situations even while technically reducing your chances of a ticket.
I regularly drive on highways with relatively dense traffic all going 10-20mph above the speed limit; in these conditions, it is objectively MORE dangerous to attempt to go the speed limit. I've seen the whole pack drive right by a state cop at 80+, and he'll do nothing because just to turn on his lightshow will likely cause a major wreck.
Outside of residential/school/congested areas with non-vehicular traffic & obstacles, it is NOT any numerical speed that causes issues, but the differential in speeds. Going too much faster -or too much slower- than surrounding traffic is what will cause accident situations (obviously, up to the limits of conditions, car preparation, driver skill & attention, etc.)
The Autobahns are regulated as an excellent example of this. In rural areas very high speeds are permitted, and lane discipline is rigorously enforced. You'll get busted way harder for driving slow in the left lane than for driving 300kph. And, in the more congested zones, the speed limits come down. And the safety records exceed those of the 65MPH US highways.
Speed does not kill, but rather driver ignorance does. A safe fast driver is better than an unsafe slow driver any day. And most US drivers are never taught even the basics of how to actually drive. I know otherwise very intelligent people who balked at taking their teens to driver safety & skills classes taught by SCCA and others (which objectively reduce accident rates) because they thought that teaching these skills (car control, balance, braking & turning at the limits, etc.) would give them wrong ideas...
> with relatively dense traffic all going 10-20mph above the speed limit; in these conditions, it is objectively MORE dangerous to attempt to go the speed limit
The fix is simple: just make everyone observe speed limit with a bunch of speed cameras. In the meantime, fill the state coffers with fines. If people think the speed limit is too low, put pressure on politicians, make them run studies proving that it's safe to go 10-20mph more on that stretch and rise the speed limit if it is.
> it is NOT any numerical speed that causes issues
It absolutely is and you're just rationalizing. Kinetic energy rises quadratically with speed, and so does the risk of death and stopping distance.
> A safe fast driver is better than an unsafe slow driver any day.
That's a strowman. The point isn't that just you must go slower, it's that everyone must go slower and observe the actual speed limit. Speed limits aren't imposed just because, they are supposed to take into account tons of data that an average motorist can't possibly have in their mind. If people disregard and ignore them as "too low" instead of observing and fixing when needed, it just slowly corrodes civil society.
That's not really the point the parent is making. The problem isn't using an unattended system performing the function of a security guard -- because nobody's arguing that security guards are a tantamount to a surveillance state. It's that a single company operating all of these autonomous security guards gives them, and anyone with power to compel them, a level of viability which simply didn't exist before.
News messages such as these are increasingly scary and alarming. They paint a picture of a very nearby dystopian society that, until now, was the stuff of fiction.
The news is successful in scaring us, but what can we do against this type of thing? What can I as an individual do? I can install ad-blockers, etc on my PC, but how can I prevent the technology described in the article from impacting my life or that of my children? I don't want them to grow up in a 1984 or Brave New World scenario. What can I do today to stop from, at the very least, my country from going down a path where this is considered normal?
* Push your politicians to support GDPR-style legislation
* Donate to your politicians so they actually listen
* Run for office
* Try some weird tech solution like dazzle clothing (this won't work most likely)
* Take inspiration from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and emigrate to a place with governance that more closely reflects your own values. A place covered by the GDPR would be a good start. _Presumably_ if your country loses enough talented people it will work to retain them. But, that's a pretty long-term approach and I have doubts about it's true efficacy (My homeland is hardly building great bike infrastructure since I left, and that was one of the biggest motivations)
* (Also pretty extreme and of dubious efficacy long-term) live off-grid somewhere remote and not walk by people's houses.
Probably a lost cause, though. I find it infuriating that my voice is being listened to by Alexa, etc. when I'm in other people's homes, but they don't seem to care. Maybe civilization will collapse and render this a moot point.
I don't know? I think idea number 2 from your list would likely be extremely effective if you had a large enough amount of money so that you could give large amounts to a large number of politicians.
But, yeah, not many people out there with that kind of resource. For the majority of us, resisting these sorts of technologies and tracking is a lost cause.
Thanks for the suggestions. They follow some of my own thoughts.
> Push your politicians to support GDPR-style legislation
Luckily I live in the EU, only 'luckily' might be an overstatement with regards to privacy if you look at the article 13 issue. Apart from that, at least to what I perceive, privacy carries at least some meaning here still.
> Donate to your politicians so they actually listen
I do not have enough money to make politicians listen I think.
> Run for office
This seems like one of the only conceivable routes to take that could have some real impact. I don't want to run for some political office, but at some point I might have to.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think Nietzsche thought that we shouldn't give power that those who want it. Right now there are a lot of people in power who want that political power and use that to advance themselves in life, rather than helping society. Not only in politics however; Amazon's developers who work on these intrusive technologies are just as guilty. I would not work on this type of technology because I can't justify this to myself as a person, but apparently many people leave the person they are at the door when they go to work, developers and politicians alike.
> ...emigrate...
I could consider this at some stage, but that would be to protect myself and my family against imaginable changes to political situations with regards to privacy, not as much as a way to force government to change their views.
> ... live off-grid
This sounds like a great way to draw attention to yourself. Besides, I don't want to live in the woods, I want to live in society without my privacy being violated constantly by advertisers, other companies and government. Because everybody has a right to their thoughts staying their own.
"This sounds like a great way to draw attention to yourself. Besides, I don't want to live in the woods, I want to live in society without my privacy being violated constantly by advertisers, other companies and government. Because everybody has a right to their thoughts staying their own. "
Yeah, it just means you won't have to walk by the doorbells. I wasn't really serious about it. And between cheap drones, IR cameras, etc. if somebody wants to find you, they will.
At this point I think your only real hope is finding a place that aligns with your values, moving there, and working to keep it good. Effecting real change is 99% luck and places heading towards dystopia have a lot of wealthy forces arrayed against you.
In my state Kerala in India, police seems to have started using face recognition. There was a huge protest recently in a famous temple called Sabarimala. Police had installed 12 cameras in the temple compound. If I understood correctly, the system compares live video feed against a database and alerts the police if anyone in the database was caught in the camera.
Quoted from the below link:
>"The cameras are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI). They can recognise people, who are among a crowd, by identifying faces. To ensure safety, the photographs of wanted people will be uploaded on the system. Whenever a person who is in the wanted list appears before the camera it will detect the person and send popup notifications to the three control rooms at Sabarimala," said IG Manoj Abraham, Cyberdome nodal officer.
While I dont know the specifics, police used this system to arrest 200 known protestors by preparing a database of 1500 people and had the system go through over 800 hours of footage.
If that is not enough, now they are planning to use drones with facial recognition as well.
NYPD was using this during Occupy. Everyone complained that Occupy lacked organization.
But what was happening on the ground was that the NYPD was identifying who potential leaders were by using face recognition technology and (we believed) cell phone tracking to identify people who consistently showed up to different meetings.
They would then use the same face identification technology to pick these people out of crowds, and arrest them before or when major events occurred, so they would be in holding during the event.
Eventually the individuals would either be charged for resisting arrest, or let go since they were arrested without reason. Which dovetails into the other NYPD/LAPD tactic during mass protests of , in their words: "arrest people now, end the protest now, pay the civil liberties fines 10 years later."
I have never heard of this, do you have references to this?
If this is true, and even if you (or someone) made it up but it is a practical possibility, then it has truly horrific consequences for social organization and the peaceful transition of power (democracy).
If you take away more and more ways to (relatively) peacefully protest something (for example by arresting the leaders as you say). Then the frustration will just continue, and grow and grow until the only way is violence, say what Marx had in mind.
> New York City Police Department documents obtained by The Verge show that police camera teams were deployed to hundreds of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street protests from 2011–2013 and 2016. Originally acquired through a Freedom of Information Law request by New York attorney David Thompson of Stecklow & Thompson, the records are job reports from the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU) that document over 400 instances in which the unit’s video team attended, and sometimes filmed, demonstrations. More important than the records the NYPD turned over, however, are those that it claims it cannot find: namely, any documents demonstrating that legal reviews and authorizations of these surveillance operations took place.
The MUCH bigger story is FBI standing ready to kill protestors with snipers "if deemed necessary". All of these disruption tactics articles are just "soft" news to gently irritate the public and convince it that the truth is known, is regularly leaked and the press will keep the public informed.
The real truth (the planned murder of activists MLK-style) is mostly NOT known, virtually no news outlets write about it, and FBI refused to declassify it. The truth is this: If somebody is a real threat to established order they get killed, plain and simple.
This should be the discussion, not "disruption" tactics of the police and how allowable/legal they are.
> Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a "systematic effort" by the agency "to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations" linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).
> Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."
Variations of this tactic (disrupt the leader before they create a useful coalition) used to be called COINTELPRO[1]. The methods used changed as technology changed, but the core tactic is still used in many places. GCHQ even has an entire department dedicated to this type of disruption: JTRIG[2].
> then it has truly horrific consequences for social organization and the peaceful transition of power (democracy).
Snowden tried to tell everybody that. I recommend reading the actual documents in [2]; they paint a very clear picture about the tactics being used.
Similar response to the one I made to other commenters in the thread.
The MUCH bigger story is FBI standing ready to kill Occupy protestors with snipers "if deemed necessary". All of these disruption tactics articles are just "soft" news to gently irritate the public and convince it that the truth is known, is regularly leaked and the press will keep the public informed.
The real truth (the planned murder of activists MLK-style) is mostly NOT known, virtually no news outlets write about it, and FBI refused to declassify it. The truth is this: If somebody is a real threat to established order they get killed, plain and simple.
This should be the discussion, not "disruption" tactics of the police and how allowable/legal they are.
I mean, you see a camera pointed at a crowd, then they stop on one person, and cops push through to arrest a specific person, its pretty easy to figure out what's going on. They used a lot of techniques, honestly, that until that point I thought were in the realm of Hollywood speculation, not actual reality. This was not the most concerning thing that happened, by a long shot.
I think you're right, for the exact reason that you stipulated in your other post. I also think that our society is embracing technology in a way that makes this an increasingly difficult problem going forward. I don't want to put Kaczynski on a pedestal, as I significantly disagree with both his actions, and the conclusions he came to, but I think he and others were right to identify this as _the_ issue for western society going forward, when combined with wealth inequality.
See my response above to the comment you are replying to. It is MUCH MUCH MUCH worse than that. The government had tasks force with snipers ready to eliminate the leaders "if deemed necessary". FBI refused to disclose who those snipers were, but since no arrests were made it is quite obvious the snipers are not some local criminal gang. This has been going on since the early 20th century and has to do with money. Not race, and not human rights. Money, and only money. Class warfare of the purest kind.
Both MLK and Kennedy are probably the most notable examples of people who were quickly killed when they tried to change the system and enfranchise the poor. You probably think of MLK as a racial rights leader, but that's only 10% of the story. The other 90% are his efforts to end the oligarchy that rules America and as soon as he started talking about poor vs. rich instead of black vs. white, he was promptly killed.
I am not even sure why we are even having these discussions, as not much can be done about it. The world is basically an international fascist regime, and the presence of separate countries is largely meaningless. We are all ruled by a handful of multi-national corporations that obey no laws, and are accountable to nobody. See the recent news about J&J knowingly selling for decades baby powder contaminated with asbestos.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18684384
If something so horrible (knowingly killing babies) can happen so habitually and be concealed for decades, then who the hell cares about freedom of speech or your civil rights?!? Seriously, wake the fk up!
> Well it’s very simple what happened. Everybody in America was convinced they literally lived in a police state, that if you go out to the streets and demand change, even if you non-violently sit in a park, RoboCops will come and beat you up. And for a moment, when we did this thing in Zucotti Park, that didn’t happen! Everybody was like: ‘What? You mean this actually is a free country? We can actually protest?’ And so they came. And then, in about two months, the cops said ‘no this is not a free society’ and they beat them up again.
> It’s not that Occupy dissolved, but you can only create a movement for direct democracy if you can get everybody out in some kind of public place. They have to be safe enough to go there. So if going to an Occupy march means risking getting beaten up with stick, or being thrown into prison, then people with children, old people, they’re just not going come. And then only the hardcore activists come. It’s that simple.
And then the society that lets that happen picks out the worst examples of misbehavior by hardcore activists, calls itself noble in comparison, and goes back to sleep.
Beat them up? That all? Seriously, is everybody asleep?!
The FBI was standing ready so assassinate all the leaders of Occupy "if deemed necessary". See my comments to other posters in this thread and the links I provided. Once the news leaked that snipers were in place even the hardcore Occupy members decided to fold their tent (literally). Most people can probably deal with a few beatings, some will even sue for brutality and win decent awards, and maybe get some police scum fired. But suing is not an option if you get killed, and most people (rightly) draw the line there and decided a protest is not worth it.
The society that lets that happen is a gang of drooling imbeciles, zombified by decades of SSRI and anti-anxity therapy, psyops by media and government, and kept in constant fear by being on the brink of financial ruin 24x7. How can you expect people to care about political protests if most of them worry to death about the next day, every day??
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18682331https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...
Summary of the second link above, if you don't read it - SEVENTY EIGHT percent of working Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck! You can only imagine the financial situation of "non-working" Americans.
So, do you think in that state anybody would care the slightest bit about a political protest??
The 99% are nothing but slaves and the 1% own us. Any other discussion is empty talk...or a psyop.
The FBI refused to release documents or identify the group that had snipers tracking Occupy leaders in Houston but if you read the redacted documents it becomes quite clear it was a government agency. The redacted documents contain lines that basically said the sniper "group" would take out any Occupy leaders "if deemed necessary". That latter language is used to describe government agency activities, not some renegade alt-right group who decided to take out Occupy by force. If the FIB has knowledge of ANY criminal group ready to take out people on-demand "if deemed necessary" there would be quite a few arrests, even if no murders took place. The fact that FBI arrested nobody in that plot speaks volumes about who the snipers were. Either the FBI itself, the Houston SWAT team, or some 3-letter agency that officially does not exist.
Those same forces that were ready to take out Occupy leaders are the same forces that killed MLK. Most people, even African Americans, do not know that MLK's biggest threat to the established order was not his campaign for racial equality. It was his campaign for economic equality. As soon as he made the issue class instead of race, he was killed.
MLK planned something called "Poor People's Campaign" and envisioned a million-people-strong demonstration in DC with the goal of non-violently interfering with government business and "occupying" the capital until the demands of the poor people are heard. Does it sound eerily similar to the Occupy group? Where do you think the Occupy leaders got the idea from? It was a re-incarnation of the MLK campaign from the start. And just like back in MLK's days, the government stood ready to murder the inconvenient leaders. Thankfully, it did not get to that point but it is quite obvious that individual rights and the law in general in the Western capitalist "democracies" are long gone.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/why-...
"...Yet in December, 1999, after hearing the testimony of over 70 witnesses, including the owner of a restaurant close to the murder scene who admitted his complicity in the plot to kill King, an interracial jury in Shelby, Tennessee unanimously concluded that King’s murder was the result of a conspiracy of unnamed “GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES.”
It is way overdue that we ALL wake up and realize the truth - we ALL live in an international fascist dictatorship that knows no boundaries and obeys no laws. The laws are just for us, to keep us from disturbing the status quo. And no matter how hard organizations like ACLU et. al fight for the rights of the common person, it is a lost cause from the start as these secret entities do NOT follow laws. They cannot be reformed. President Kennedy said the same thing about the CIA (that it cannot be reformed) and he was killed a month later. I think it is rather obvious where this whole process is going.
Unfortunately, history repeats itself, even for the people who learn from it.
This is exactly how FR is designed to operate (author of an FR system here). The FR system's gallery is loaded with persons of interest, and then video acquired from various sourced is analyzed. When a person of interest is identified, that "identification" is in the form of "here is person N with a probability of X% accuracy". That "notification" is then presented to a human, who then makes the human decision "yes, that is our person or no, that is not our person" and then whatever organic response that person's presence triggers occurs.
FR is like having a human lookout who is really good with faces.
Beyond that, it is all humans using this capability for good or bad purposes.
Yeah but at least it's the police who control the data. Who knows what Amazon can do with that info. We're handing over the keys of the power to a private company.
"Amazon PeopleTech’s mission is to re-invent ways for our employees to connect with one another. You will work closely with our team of engineers in designing a strategy for new projects like our new Facial Recognition technology for Amazon’s Time and Attendance systems"
"Amazon’s Disturbing Plan..."? Come on. I agree this is scary and "disturbing", but doorbell cameras have been around for awhile. It's not like Amazon is the first to do this. Phrasing like that always makes me immediately distrust the article's intent, even if at face value what they are saying is something I agree about. Just because they are openly saying it in a patent, doesn't mean the other companies weren't already doing it in some other sketchy way.
With all that said, what did you think would happen when people openly started allowing listening/video devices on the inside/outside of their homes? Of course people (law or others) are eventually going to want a way to utilize that data if it's useful to them. The same way that I'm sure Facebook/Twitter/etc. work with law enforcement with their data.
I did. The first part is just commenting about the title at more of a face value, I followed up the second part about the actual contents of the article.
...and it is an extremely late patent. Patents for this type of innovation first appeared 25+ years ago when IP video was first happening.
In fact, the lateness of this filing smells like it is purely for the creation of outrage articles such as what we are discussing.
it's ring, not amazon. no other consumer hardware iOt company is providing facial recognition id search to police via products camera. Their employees are given shirts that say 'fuck crime' but the only victim in amazon package theft crime is amazon, customers are refunded.
Has anyone trolled Amazon yet with video loops of bad things happening? i.e. webm's from 4chan and such. I'm sure it would violate their ToS. Would it break any laws?
I could imagine selling a service that multiplexes video cameras and only sends Amazon devices live video when there is really motion and not just when they say there is motion. Meaning, put the security control back on the home owner.
Likewise, homeowners can also add photos of “suspicious” people into the system and then the doorbell’s facial recognition program will scan anyone passing their home.
This has to be the worst part of it, if you've ever been part of a suburban neighborhood that uses NextDoor as a community tool you'll know that Ring doorbell videos of "others" crank the pearl-clutching paranoia of bored homeowners up to 11. The comment sections will go from "Did you get a license plate?" to "Hurry, add his face to the database before he comes back to rob and murder us all!"
I kept arguing with others on the Nextdoor app to keep a lid on their paranoia so much that I ended up leaving. The story that led me to leaving that community?
A van drove down a cul de sac and turned around. A homeowner thought that was suspicious and so jumped in their car and followed. They followed for a long time, then suddenly the van dips into another neighborhood, goes down a street, turns at the last moment, and goes down another street. This was even more suspicious! Except, what would you expect a driver to do when someone is following you through the entire city like a crazy person?
I was across town trying to get back to the highway, when I get confused in this residential neighborhood and end up on a dead end street. (Why so many dead ends?) As I get ready to turn back onto Pine, I notice this guy run out and hop in his car and start tailgating me. No way am I going home now, with this weirdo following me and probably wanting to steal my stuff. So I hit the gas, and duck down some side street hoping it’s not another dead end, but he stays on me. Luckily, I got a picture of him from the side mirror. If anyone sees this car CALL THE POLICE!
When I first moved to Chicago years ago the amount of one way streets and intersecting one way streets on the northwest side made for a lot of turning around, stopping, passing the same block multiple times, pulling over to the side of a road to stare at my spotty-coverage GPS and figure out how to get back to the main two way thoroughfare. Especially while apartment hunting.
I jokingly wonder how many people I freaked out on nextdoor
I get why this could be problematic under the wrong context.
But if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option.
This is not because I'm paranoic and I think right away that anyone showing up to my door will murder or rob me, but because said person already exhibited suspicious activity around my private property.
Why would I take for granted that this person was simply lost or innocently looking around? If that's the case, then my camera would never see them again. But if they show up a second time, I want to know that.
So under this system if I walk up to your door mistakenly before realizing I'm at the wrong place, the police will be alerted any time I walk past a house.
While that is a valid concern about the abuse of such technology, I couldn't see that ever happening if just because it would generate far too many false positives to render the technology useful (not to mention that most police forces in the world are under funded so they're not going to be the slightest bit interested in people walking past a house).
This kind of alerting is a bit like any of the automated alarms we have in IT (be it Nagios, CloudWatch, or whatever). They're necessary to tell us when things have gone wrong if they go off too frequently then they'll just get ignored.
In fact there was a parable about this as well, called "The boy who cried wolf".
I can see how members of some communities might feel like the technology opens them up to more scrutiny than they probably deserve from an overzealous do-gooder (or busybody, depending on your perspective).
Even if statistically the likelihood is low, I wouldn't say the fears of what this technology enables and could result in for someone simply being in the wrong neighborhood 'while black' are overly complicated or historically irrelevant/unfounded for certain areas of the US.
Like I said, I agree it’s a valid concern. My point was that for this kind of tech to be useful, it wouldn’t want to be that zealous with alerting otherwise the system would get flooded with false positives. That means door to door sales people, preachers, the postman, milk man, kids at Halloween, carol singers, etc.
Given this is an automatic sensor, people would just quickly just ignore it without even checking the footage - this even before any racial or social prejudices had chance to kick in.
We see this all the time with software monitoring solutions in IT what sysadmins ignore if they are too sensitive so my comment here isn’t without precedence either.
But essentially we are both arguing that an overly sensitive alarm is a bad thing - just from different perspectives. You make the point about discrimination and I make the point about the alerting being worthless in a sea of ignored alarms. Ultimately we’re both skeptical
But essentially we are both arguing that an overly sensitive alarm is a bad thing
You might be. I'm not. I never once said it's a bad thing, or described it as overly sensitive, to be fair. Just that I could see how certain communities might look at the technology and what it enables and have good reason to be incredulous about how certain neighborhood actors will use it.
That's about a nuanced as I can possibly get on the topic without trying to argue in favor or against these devices in full, or taking any absolute position.
Ring their doorbell. When they answer, tell them "Hi, this isn't the house I was looking for, but you've got that surveillance system in place, so I don't want to be registered as 'suspicious'. OK, sorry not sorry for wasting your time, goodbye."
Nobody? Where I live (suburbs, New England, USA), it's pretty common to be visited in person by local political candidates and/or volunteers during campaign season. I doubt this is in any way unique to my neighborhood.
Did you think I was suggesting doing this to every house with the system? Not my intention at all. I was replying to hypothetical "walked up to the wrong house" scenario.
I think it gets more problematic when the data is shared and human judgement is eliminated. What happens if someone is lost in a neighborhood and accidentally displays "suspicious" behavior in multiple locations? They are then logged in a database as a suspicious person and potentially pointed out to law enforcement as a suspect without any chance to explain themselves. I don't think this technology would be quite as bad if the data was kept local to a house, but as is there could be so many terrible consequences.
>What happens if someone is lost in a neighborhood and accidentally displays "suspicious" behavior in multiple locations? They are then logged in a database as a suspicious person and potentially pointed out to law enforcement as a suspect without any chance to explain themselves.
Where is the issue here? That we provide suspicious activity reports, or that our police SEEMINGLY can't reliably deal with those reports?
If you have no fear that the police will cause you harm when they get a report of suspicious activity involving you then your life has been very privileged.
The problem is giving police so much information that they can pick and choose what to act upon to justify their goals that have nothing to do with what have been reporter.
Involving the police is an issue, but that's really not the first thing that comes to my mind.
The first thing that comes to my mind is that people who use these systems would be causing innocent others to be included in Big Data databases without their knowledge or consent. I think that it's not only immoral to do so, it is straight-up antisocial and harmful to community and society.
We have more than enough of that sort of thing already.
It is paranoid to think that the people outside your house want to rob or kill you. It is not paranoid to see that the “wrong context” is just a matter of time.
There is no more paranoia in having a camera security feature than locking your door. if people are checking out your house repeatedly then you might have a problem so a precaution is fine.
considering that it is easy to surf news sites and find video captured by home surveillance systems showing people taking packages, trying to get in, or having broke in, it is not unreasonable to install such a device.
the issue is that the data would be available to the police without the homeowners permission. people coming to the door have no expectation of privacy on property they do not own and if need be a simple sign on the property can declare as such.
There is a huge difference between locking your door and setting up a CCTV system at your house. Locking doors (in normal residential areas) is mostly a signal of intent. You signal to everyone you don't want them entering your house, unless you've given them permission/key. It also sets things up so that no one can enter your house and then claim they didn't know you didn't want them there. Thirdly, it sets thing up so that people who want to enter your house without a key will have to act in an obviously suspicious way. If someone breaks a window or starts breaking your door with an axe, any neighbour or passer by will know something weird is going on. None of this applies to CCTV systems.
>considering that it is easy to surf news sites and find video
This is confirmation bias in action. You need statistics on your residential area to make decisions around home security.
Well, a lock does a great job at not letting people into my apartment. Why not put the camera inside the door?
It is trivial to find videos of people committing crimes, but that does not imply anything about its likelihood. Meanwhile the state has an excellent record of abuse of power for ends that are unrelated to the reasons given for the power. See: the use of “terrorism” to justify militarizing domestic law enforcement, or parallel reconstruction.
The issue is that this idea that centralization of information will somehow avoid the pattern of abuse of centralized power in the hands of people with perverse incentives.
This video stream should be considered private property IMHO which requires a warrant like anything else.
I work in information security and basically every IS system does exactly that. Tracks potentially suspicious behavior but doesn't act on it unless it becomes a pattern or something bad happens. As soon as something bad happens, the system has a history of all the suspicious behavior that actor had done before the actual crime.
It doesn't matter if it's an IP address scanning your network then hitting one system, then logging in and scooping up all your data versus a human staring at your house for a few days then walking up while you're not home and stealing your TV. You should know if someone is scoping out your perimeter in preparation for a breach, and post-breach you should know the history of the attack.
I know nothing about Next Door but from reading the comments it seems like the problem is having this information in untrained hands.
I know nothing about Next Door but from reading the comments it seems like the problem is having this information in untrained hands.
I'd go with 'undisciplined' hands versus 'untrained' hands, while admitting I'm unsure of the best way to articulate the difference in a manner that is empathetic towards the desires of residents who just want to feel like they're safe on their block but also addresses a certain pragmatic reality of what happens when 'good intentions' results in a patrol car pulling up next to you in your own neighborhood.
The reasonable expectation of your neighbors would be to assume they're normal people like you, not necessarily that they be trained in surveillance, criminal profiling or tracking persons of interest but instead disciplined in their vigilance as thoughtful and watchful community members who act when there is something demonstrably out of the norm that could affect the neighborhood.
Again, not sure how I can best articulate that thought, or even what steps a community has to take to avoid everyone "narcing" on everyone else for boring, mundane behavior (say, like for instance, retreading your steps through the neighborhood after you lost your phone or some other item the night before) while still remaining active enough to do the right thing when you see someone you know isn't your neighbor picking up packages off someone's doorstep.
"if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option."
This sort of thing is one of the reasons why I fear these systems. A world where this is common is a world where it's no longer safe to take a stroll through your own neighborhood.
A society of persistent, constant hi-tech surveillance already exists. It's called Singapore.
I also wouldn't want to live in that world. There are many problems with it, but not being safe for "a stroll through your own neighborhood" is not a problem for that world.
That sounds fair, although personally, I count being under surveillance as being hassled. This is because when I believe that I'm under surveillance, it makes me more cautious in terms of what I say and do, and puts me under stress.
Yes, that is a known negative of that type of society. Returning back to the subject, people on a whole are physically safe in that society as long as you follow their draconian rules. That is a benefit of a total surveillance society.
You've got all the rights in the world to walk by my house on the sidewalk and doing so an unlimited number of times will raise no suspicion from me.
The minute you cross onto my property you're going to show up on multiple cameras that are pointed right at the boundary line. You rights to do whatever you want stop when you cross that line.
I dont think you could convince me that this makes you any less safe.
It seems impossible to point cameras face high at a property line, but not capture images from beyond the property line. If you have a sidewalk in front of your yard, the difference between being on your property or not is like a foot. You're going to capture every single person who walks by.
That's obviously fine for you, the property owner, camera operator, and a very reasonable person. But, imagine every house working that way as you walk around your neighborhood. Is everyone as reasonable as you?
"I dont think you could convince me that this makes you any less safe."
I'm not trying to, because when it comes to my own security, what you think is or is not safe isn't relevant. Just as what I think isn't relevant to yours.
I travel out of the country for multiple weeks at a time for work, and want to ensure that all my worldly possessions are secure.
Im working for full 100% coverage of the entirety of my house, inside and out. The goal being able to control my smart house via gestures anywhere I am on the property via some machine learning and computer vision.
Also WYZE cams are 20 bucks a pop, and easily reflashed to do you own bidding. So it's not like this is some super expensive undertaking.
All the surveillance in the world won't keep your stuff from being stolen. At best, it might allow the thief to be apprehended later -- but you probably still won't be getting your stuff back.
By the way, I have had my home pretty thoroughly automated for about 20 years now. I do recommend that (as long as you aren't using third party services -- that's a security risk all by itself). It's a lot of fun, not incredibly expensive, and pretty useful.
- put pervasive face recog databases on the big majority of the US population in hands of huge multinational companies (because America) so an opulent Joe The Programmer can feel a little extra safety over his stuff, because Those Scary Plebs can steal their Juicero juicer
- work on societal problems, reduce the inequality to reduce the risk of robbing and accept whatever risk is left because the societal cost of pervasive corp surveillance is just too high
The fact that sizable number of people feel that the former in any way preferable is pretty damning.
I think this is a false dilemma. It could be that social problems have no solution, and yet also the poor and downtrodden benefit when the rule of law is upheld.
> I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option.
Most people would use that option if they had the opportunity; tracking potential troublemakers has obvious benefits. The problem is you are not being given the option "to track [a] person". You're being given the option to record video and apply an automated tool to identify "likely faces" and as way to compare those images against a local database using a definition of similarity that is poorly specified[1], extremely complex, and opaque/unexplained. Jumping right thinking of this as "tracking a person" ignores the many layers of metaphor shear between the desired goal and what the actual implementation does.
Metaphor shear is what you experience when you realize that interface doesn't match what is actually happening. The metaphor was lost somewhere in the hundreds of layers of abstraction connecting input to output. The map is not the territory. Efficient and powerful tools are very useful, but they also let you efficiently shoot yourself in the foot in powerful new ways.
Since metaphor shear is about the error between an expected ideal and actual measured reality, it compounds across layers of abstraction similar to how experimental error loses precision with each calculation. Any particular layer of abstraction is probably fine in isolation, but the interface metaphor loses significant digits as more and more layers are added.
If intellectual labor is going to be surrendered to a device, we need to be very clear and specific in what we are surrendering and what the device is expected to do.
(Video essayist Kyle Kallgren does a much better job of explaining[2] the problem of metaphor shear, using examples from sci-fi [Black Mirror, HHGttG, R.U.R.])
[1] poor in the context of trying to track someone. I'm sure the face matching algorithm is very well specified with respect to matching images of faces. The poorly specified part is when "matching images of faces" becomes "tracking someone" (what does "tracking" mean? How are probabilities about matching faces mapped to identifying "that person"?)
If this system kept the info locally at your place, and had sane defaults for erasing the data ( 30 days?) - with options, I'd be more comfortable with that.
If you or some grandma install a cloud system that auto sends my info to multiple third parties I would think that is worse than creepy.
I could see grubhub delivery people end up at wrong adresses, a system detecting unusual arrival at 9pm, send alert, the system pulls other data about this person, combines it. This is shared with multiple groups of people. Now humans look through it and see her going to the sex toy store earlier in the day and the abortion clinic and the (insert non-popular religious place here) - and whatever.
All it takes is one person in multiple groups to get heated about this person's lifetsyle or 'suspicious activity' to put out a pull over and find some reason to get more info, write a ticket, fine, get them to rack up other issues.
In an extreme situation you end up one of the cog wheels that started a Sandra Bland situation because a suspicions wrong address was given via GPS to a delivery driver.
Even without wrongful deaths, having people look into your life like that and make jokes about you or whatever is pretty lame.
At least when this happens with Msoft's one drive, one could say that someone agreed to the terms of lack of privacy with the corp. Not that I would buy that as 100% true in 100% of most cases, but at least then it could be argued.
I had the same thought. There was a situation where business owners (and police!) were using a group messaging app to share photos of "suspicious" people in an upscale retail area. It of course became mostly a way to track black shoppers.
You wonder what a suburb inmate's idea of a threat is. This is exurban America, not Brazil, where people have a good change of experiencing an express kidnapping or crossfire. Yet still the suburbanites act like that, it's disquieting.
I'm quite surprised here to not have seen anyone point out the way these patent games typically work inside of a big company.
Often a company is motivated to increase their IP portfolio. In turn they motivate their engineers by offering lucrative bonuses for each patent filed. At my last company we played this game and it was roughly $3k per patent. In general, out of the huge number of patents that get filed in a big company, very few---if any---have any hope of ever seeing the light of day as an actual invention.
While I agree that the technology itself is somewhat alarming and I personally disagree with the idea of anyone building it, let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world?
"let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world?"
Perhaps enough outrage now would prevent it from being deployed, or would get them to engage in at least a tiny amount of mitigation of the worst aspects of it.
>let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world?
By that time someone will make "the train had sailed" comment. I.e. claim that nothing can be done, because consumers had spoken and the technology is already being deployed en mass.
it's already deployed. Ring has the best facial recognition team is Eastern Europe. it's shitty software but amazon's working on integrating rekognition with ring's own tech. over 80 police departments currently use the product to track 'suspicious people' as flagged by users or their AI.
Have you heard of those handy online tracking companies, the ones that build profiles of you based on as much data they can scrape, steal or buy, mainly for advertising, but occasionally for more dubious purposes? Well, now thanks to Amazon Ring® powered by Rekognition™, you can have that same privacy invasion experience in real life! Not carrying your mobile device? Not to worry! Advanced facial recognition technology means that never again will you need to worry about going anywhere without being surreptitiously tracked! Every location, every purchase, and with optional amazon echo, every conversation. Amazon - total surveillance, today.
My point is, I don't like it, and this is actually where we're heading with this crap. The same tracking we currently have online, but in the real world.
This article is needlessly histrionic. Companies will patent anything they can just so they can have the patent and not somebody else. Jumping from that to "Amazon's plan to bring about a nightmarish dystopia" is a bit much.
Could this bring about a police state? Yes absolutely. But the technology is possible to build, so someone will build it, or at least patent it. There's no preventing the technology from existing.
We don't prevent a police state from happening by freaking out about the technology that enables it. We prevent it by voting for responsible leaders. So let's just assume that the technology for government oppression is going to exist and make sure we structure our government in such a way that it doesn't oppress us.
Ring automatically enrolls you into a community program and you don't have an option. In fact you cannot even use Ring without signing up with your address and signing up for the community feature. They suck up your data by force. You know its amazon, they don't have any qualms and reservations about how they use it.
1. No question this raises concerns about the system pinging authorities as someone who has been flagged in the system is detected.
2. This will sell like hotcakes with people who are on NextDoor. Everyday there is an alert about a burglary, stolen packages and people snooping around their properties. These people are very likely to approve sending any images/video of interest to police. (Right now it's very mechanical, scroll through video, capture and send --people will put out requests for footage very often).
I think the only thing we can do is call for strict regulation on its use. It's gonna get deployed and it's gonna get used.
I don't welcome "general facial recognition", but I do welcome this specific and single use case. As someone with an active stalker for the past two decades, I really appreciate the value provided by a device that watches specifically for the person that's sent me death threats.
In my neighborhood, we are impacted by constant property crime - burglaries, car break-ins, mail theft, porch pirates, you name it. After being a victim myself, I can say that it does indeed cause an increase in anxiety, especially the sense of helplessness that comes with it. The police department here is woefully understaffed and has been ordered to not focus on property crime because their staffing only leaves room to focus on violent crime. The under-staffing is in part due to the anti-cop sentiment of the far-left activists. This leaves law-abiding residents to largely fend for themselves.
I have always felt it would be very useful to be able to identify people in videos who may have committed a crime locally or elsewhere in the city, to learn of their movements, where they might live, what other crimes they committed, etc. This would help police prioritize some non-violent crime effectively, get a high return on the time they spend investigating property crimes (actually catching criminals), which would then in turn serve as a deterrent that is outright missing right now. I would gladly contribute my video to that cause, as would almost everyone in my neighborhood.
A word on the commenters here going on about 'pearl-clutching': that's just the latest in pejoratives that are nothing but empty stereotypes. Most people on NextDoor in my city are reasonable, but are regularly unfairly characterized by the far-left progressive cabal in this manner. Caring about the safety of yourself, your loved ones, and your property is not a bad thing. We work and live in part for those very things. If you disagree, then try outlawing door locks. It is unbelievable to me that the rights of criminals are more important to commenters here than the rights of those who want to protect their own. And worse yet, the conspiracy-theory notion that we are about to be taken over by a tyrannical government because of doorbell recordings. If this was a topic they disagreed with, those same commenters would readily call this a "slippery slope fallacy".
A further aside: The ACLU has been wrong a lot on this topic - for example when they called AWS's Rekognition service a "facial recognition service" instead of what it is, a generic object recognition service. They also did not seem to understand how false positives/negatives are managed and why it is fine to use an imperfect object recognition service as a first-pass filter. And they are wrong again here - people are allowed to film on public property and share it with whomever they want. They're allowed to perform whatever analysis they want and share it with whomever they want, period.
Completely agree. I’ve seen several legitimate instances of theft and porch piracy on my local Nextdoor and the government police seem to do little about it. Something like this would support private policing which is desperately needed in many areas of the US
Ok, now you just have to combine the cameras with a social-credit-as-a-service ecosystem to keep your suspicious people list up to date and one or two of these guys [1] mounted on every front porch for automatic suspicious people deterrence - and we can get a nice Black Mirror style scenario where you will be physically incapable of entering certain parts of the city if you pissed off the wrong algorithm.
There's a solution: make it inadmissable in court. That roves a huge incentive. And get rid of the fisa and other administrative kangaroo courts held to different standards of evidence, preponderance thereof, and due process.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadAfter all, a good old security guard also does 'face recognition' of everyone passing by, but with a human there are obvious limits and a person to confront, charge or circumvent. With ubiquitous, tiny robots all over the place, society will get sharply stratified into the 'watched' and the 'watchers' and the latter will get access to nearly limitless data and power. That's not good.
Don't kid yourself, even the 'watchers' will be 'watched'. The people bringing all these systems together will not be your local yocal Barney Fifes. They will be professional and highly intelligent technical teams whose members have likely studied little other than security and intelligence gathering for their entire professional lives. These are not the type of teams that carelessly leave obvious security holes like that laying around.
Taken as a whole, the technologies coming out today will enable surveillance regimes the likes of which even the UK and China never previously would have dared to dream up.
thay's really important. Hitler, Stalin, the Stasi and many others would have been very pleased to have the systems we are building right now. Once a full country surveillance system gets in the hand of a ruthless dictator it will be very hard to get rid of that dictator.
People seem to not understand the asymmetry in difficulty between offence and defense. For something to be broken, there just needs to be one fuckup, or a few tiny fuckups that can be linked together. Smart people are not infallible. Everything is exploited eventually. The only foolproof thing to do is not to build the infrastructure in the first place.
But yes, I agree with your last point. There's no privacy anymore.
The more likely scenario is that this line of work would likely attract creepy antisocial perverts who like to watch, and love to exert authority -- essentially the people we would like to keep as far as possible from this kind of technology.
Yes, but the essential difference is that the good old security guard isn't photographing everyone passing by and putting those pictures into a database.
It wouldn’t be as concerning if it was only being stored in a local sqlite db.
I think facial recognition door systems are a fine idea if they can be implemented like a doorman: local storage only, carefully trained on local data. With current technology that would be impossible or extremely expensive, though.
I agree, with the addition that all actual processing is done locally, that would be fine. But that's not what this patent is talking about.
The difference between individual human watchers doing surveillance, face recognition, etc. and at-scale watchers doing the same thing is key.
The difference is no less than the old corner stores every few blocks vs Amazon's automated warehouses & shipping.
An ordinary drive with a bit of speeding here and there everyday goes from perhaps a ticket or two every decade, to 6 tickets every trip.
A meaningless wrong turn, I'm lost, let's look around and try to figure out where I am, turns from a non-event to a Suspicious Activity Report...
Just because the laws are word-for-word unchanged, the scaling of enforcement technology transforms the identical laws into a completely different society and experience (just as other scaling technology transforms our experience in a positive way).
This phenomena, as unintended consequences ("just trying to make the neighborhood safer...", but scaled 10^7), is perhaps as dangerous as Bostrom's AI warnings.
Can it be that the best way of avoiding that is avoiding speeding? It's interesting that you are lumping together objectively dangerous, even if prevalent in the US, public behaviour (deliberate speeding) with honest mistakes (making a wrong turn).
I regularly drive on highways with relatively dense traffic all going 10-20mph above the speed limit; in these conditions, it is objectively MORE dangerous to attempt to go the speed limit. I've seen the whole pack drive right by a state cop at 80+, and he'll do nothing because just to turn on his lightshow will likely cause a major wreck.
Outside of residential/school/congested areas with non-vehicular traffic & obstacles, it is NOT any numerical speed that causes issues, but the differential in speeds. Going too much faster -or too much slower- than surrounding traffic is what will cause accident situations (obviously, up to the limits of conditions, car preparation, driver skill & attention, etc.)
The Autobahns are regulated as an excellent example of this. In rural areas very high speeds are permitted, and lane discipline is rigorously enforced. You'll get busted way harder for driving slow in the left lane than for driving 300kph. And, in the more congested zones, the speed limits come down. And the safety records exceed those of the 65MPH US highways.
Speed does not kill, but rather driver ignorance does. A safe fast driver is better than an unsafe slow driver any day. And most US drivers are never taught even the basics of how to actually drive. I know otherwise very intelligent people who balked at taking their teens to driver safety & skills classes taught by SCCA and others (which objectively reduce accident rates) because they thought that teaching these skills (car control, balance, braking & turning at the limits, etc.) would give them wrong ideas...
The fix is simple: just make everyone observe speed limit with a bunch of speed cameras. In the meantime, fill the state coffers with fines. If people think the speed limit is too low, put pressure on politicians, make them run studies proving that it's safe to go 10-20mph more on that stretch and rise the speed limit if it is.
> it is NOT any numerical speed that causes issues
It absolutely is and you're just rationalizing. Kinetic energy rises quadratically with speed, and so does the risk of death and stopping distance.
> A safe fast driver is better than an unsafe slow driver any day.
That's a strowman. The point isn't that just you must go slower, it's that everyone must go slower and observe the actual speed limit. Speed limits aren't imposed just because, they are supposed to take into account tons of data that an average motorist can't possibly have in their mind. If people disregard and ignore them as "too low" instead of observing and fixing when needed, it just slowly corrodes civil society.
Not many people can afford their own good human security guard. Not everyone lives in areas where the police department is properly funded either.
The news is successful in scaring us, but what can we do against this type of thing? What can I as an individual do? I can install ad-blockers, etc on my PC, but how can I prevent the technology described in the article from impacting my life or that of my children? I don't want them to grow up in a 1984 or Brave New World scenario. What can I do today to stop from, at the very least, my country from going down a path where this is considered normal?
* Push your politicians to support GDPR-style legislation
* Donate to your politicians so they actually listen
* Run for office
* Try some weird tech solution like dazzle clothing (this won't work most likely)
* Take inspiration from Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and emigrate to a place with governance that more closely reflects your own values. A place covered by the GDPR would be a good start. _Presumably_ if your country loses enough talented people it will work to retain them. But, that's a pretty long-term approach and I have doubts about it's true efficacy (My homeland is hardly building great bike infrastructure since I left, and that was one of the biggest motivations)
* (Also pretty extreme and of dubious efficacy long-term) live off-grid somewhere remote and not walk by people's houses.
Probably a lost cause, though. I find it infuriating that my voice is being listened to by Alexa, etc. when I'm in other people's homes, but they don't seem to care. Maybe civilization will collapse and render this a moot point.
I don't know? I think idea number 2 from your list would likely be extremely effective if you had a large enough amount of money so that you could give large amounts to a large number of politicians.
But, yeah, not many people out there with that kind of resource. For the majority of us, resisting these sorts of technologies and tracking is a lost cause.
> Push your politicians to support GDPR-style legislation
Luckily I live in the EU, only 'luckily' might be an overstatement with regards to privacy if you look at the article 13 issue. Apart from that, at least to what I perceive, privacy carries at least some meaning here still.
> Donate to your politicians so they actually listen
I do not have enough money to make politicians listen I think.
> Run for office
This seems like one of the only conceivable routes to take that could have some real impact. I don't want to run for some political office, but at some point I might have to.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think Nietzsche thought that we shouldn't give power that those who want it. Right now there are a lot of people in power who want that political power and use that to advance themselves in life, rather than helping society. Not only in politics however; Amazon's developers who work on these intrusive technologies are just as guilty. I would not work on this type of technology because I can't justify this to myself as a person, but apparently many people leave the person they are at the door when they go to work, developers and politicians alike.
> ...emigrate...
I could consider this at some stage, but that would be to protect myself and my family against imaginable changes to political situations with regards to privacy, not as much as a way to force government to change their views.
> ... live off-grid
This sounds like a great way to draw attention to yourself. Besides, I don't want to live in the woods, I want to live in society without my privacy being violated constantly by advertisers, other companies and government. Because everybody has a right to their thoughts staying their own.
Yeah, it just means you won't have to walk by the doorbells. I wasn't really serious about it. And between cheap drones, IR cameras, etc. if somebody wants to find you, they will.
At this point I think your only real hope is finding a place that aligns with your values, moving there, and working to keep it good. Effecting real change is 99% luck and places heading towards dystopia have a lot of wealthy forces arrayed against you.
Quoted from the below link:
>"The cameras are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI). They can recognise people, who are among a crowd, by identifying faces. To ensure safety, the photographs of wanted people will be uploaded on the system. Whenever a person who is in the wanted list appears before the camera it will detect the person and send popup notifications to the three control rooms at Sabarimala," said IG Manoj Abraham, Cyberdome nodal officer.
http://www.newindianexpress.com/states/kerala/2018/oct/14/no...
While I dont know the specifics, police used this system to arrest 200 known protestors by preparing a database of 1500 people and had the system go through over 800 hours of footage.
If that is not enough, now they are planning to use drones with facial recognition as well.
http://www.newindianexpress.com/specials/2018/sep/17/kerala-...
I thought the plans to use face recognition in airports was scary, but they are taking it to an entirely different level altogether.
But what was happening on the ground was that the NYPD was identifying who potential leaders were by using face recognition technology and (we believed) cell phone tracking to identify people who consistently showed up to different meetings.
They would then use the same face identification technology to pick these people out of crowds, and arrest them before or when major events occurred, so they would be in holding during the event.
Eventually the individuals would either be charged for resisting arrest, or let go since they were arrested without reason. Which dovetails into the other NYPD/LAPD tactic during mass protests of , in their words: "arrest people now, end the protest now, pay the civil liberties fines 10 years later."
If this is true, and even if you (or someone) made it up but it is a practical possibility, then it has truly horrific consequences for social organization and the peaceful transition of power (democracy).
I've written about that before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15110645
This is bad.
If you take away more and more ways to (relatively) peacefully protest something (for example by arresting the leaders as you say). Then the frustration will just continue, and grow and grow until the only way is violence, say what Marx had in mind.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/22/15016984/nypd-video-surve...
> Similarly, FBI documents confirmed "a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector" designed to produce intelligence on behalf of "the corporate security community." A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show "federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/j...
> then it has truly horrific consequences for social organization and the peaceful transition of power (democracy).
Snowden tried to tell everybody that. I recommend reading the actual documents in [2]; they paint a very clear picture about the tactics being used.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO#Intended_effects
[2] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
I think you're right, for the exact reason that you stipulated in your other post. I also think that our society is embracing technology in a way that makes this an increasingly difficult problem going forward. I don't want to put Kaczynski on a pedestal, as I significantly disagree with both his actions, and the conclusions he came to, but I think he and others were right to identify this as _the_ issue for western society going forward, when combined with wealth inequality.
If something so horrible (knowingly killing babies) can happen so habitually and be concealed for decades, then who the hell cares about freedom of speech or your civil rights?!? Seriously, wake the fk up!
> It’s not that Occupy dissolved, but you can only create a movement for direct democracy if you can get everybody out in some kind of public place. They have to be safe enough to go there. So if going to an Occupy march means risking getting beaten up with stick, or being thrown into prison, then people with children, old people, they’re just not going come. And then only the hardcore activists come. It’s that simple.
https://www.eurozine.com/anarchism-work-and-bureaucracy/
And then the society that lets that happen picks out the worst examples of misbehavior by hardcore activists, calls itself noble in comparison, and goes back to sleep.
The FBI was standing ready so assassinate all the leaders of Occupy "if deemed necessary". See my comments to other posters in this thread and the links I provided. Once the news leaked that snipers were in place even the hardcore Occupy members decided to fold their tent (literally). Most people can probably deal with a few beatings, some will even sue for brutality and win decent awards, and maybe get some police scum fired. But suing is not an option if you get killed, and most people (rightly) draw the line there and decided a protest is not worth it. The society that lets that happen is a gang of drooling imbeciles, zombified by decades of SSRI and anti-anxity therapy, psyops by media and government, and kept in constant fear by being on the brink of financial ruin 24x7. How can you expect people to care about political protests if most of them worry to death about the next day, every day?? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18682331 https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...
Summary of the second link above, if you don't read it - SEVENTY EIGHT percent of working Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck! You can only imagine the financial situation of "non-working" Americans. So, do you think in that state anybody would care the slightest bit about a political protest?? The 99% are nothing but slaves and the 1% own us. Any other discussion is empty talk...or a psyop.
The FBI refused to release documents or identify the group that had snipers tracking Occupy leaders in Houston but if you read the redacted documents it becomes quite clear it was a government agency. The redacted documents contain lines that basically said the sniper "group" would take out any Occupy leaders "if deemed necessary". That latter language is used to describe government agency activities, not some renegade alt-right group who decided to take out Occupy by force. If the FIB has knowledge of ANY criminal group ready to take out people on-demand "if deemed necessary" there would be quite a few arrests, even if no murders took place. The fact that FBI arrested nobody in that plot speaks volumes about who the snipers were. Either the FBI itself, the Houston SWAT team, or some 3-letter agency that officially does not exist.
Those same forces that were ready to take out Occupy leaders are the same forces that killed MLK. Most people, even African Americans, do not know that MLK's biggest threat to the established order was not his campaign for racial equality. It was his campaign for economic equality. As soon as he made the issue class instead of race, he was killed. MLK planned something called "Poor People's Campaign" and envisioned a million-people-strong demonstration in DC with the goal of non-violently interfering with government business and "occupying" the capital until the demands of the poor people are heard. Does it sound eerily similar to the Occupy group? Where do you think the Occupy leaders got the idea from? It was a re-incarnation of the MLK campaign from the start. And just like back in MLK's days, the government stood ready to murder the inconvenient leaders. Thankfully, it did not get to that point but it is quite obvious that individual rights and the law in general in the Western capitalist "democracies" are long gone.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/obery-m-hendricks-jr-phd/why-... "...Yet in December, 1999, after hearing the testimony of over 70 witnesses, including the owner of a restaurant close to the murder scene who admitted his complicity in the plot to kill King, an interracial jury in Shelby, Tennessee unanimously concluded that King’s murder was the result of a conspiracy of unnamed “GOVERNMENTAL AGENCIES.”
It is way overdue that we ALL wake up and realize the truth - we ALL live in an international fascist dictatorship that knows no boundaries and obeys no laws. The laws are just for us, to keep us from disturbing the status quo. And no matter how hard organizations like ACLU et. al fight for the rights of the common person, it is a lost cause from the start as these secret entities do NOT follow laws. They cannot be reformed. President Kennedy said the same thing about the CIA (that it cannot be reformed) and he was killed a month later. I think it is rather obvious where this whole process is going.
Unfortunately, history repeats itself, even for the people who learn from it.
FR is like having a human lookout who is really good with faces.
Beyond that, it is all humans using this capability for good or bad purposes.
Nevertheless, is as scary as you think...
"Amazon PeopleTech’s mission is to re-invent ways for our employees to connect with one another. You will work closely with our team of engineers in designing a strategy for new projects like our new Facial Recognition technology for Amazon’s Time and Attendance systems"
I love connecting with people!
With all that said, what did you think would happen when people openly started allowing listening/video devices on the inside/outside of their homes? Of course people (law or others) are eventually going to want a way to utilize that data if it's useful to them. The same way that I'm sure Facebook/Twitter/etc. work with law enforcement with their data.
Amazon filed this patent now, instead of earlier, purely for the creation of "outrage articles"? Can you walk me through the logic here?
I could imagine selling a service that multiplexes video cameras and only sends Amazon devices live video when there is really motion and not just when they say there is motion. Meaning, put the security control back on the home owner.
This has to be the worst part of it, if you've ever been part of a suburban neighborhood that uses NextDoor as a community tool you'll know that Ring doorbell videos of "others" crank the pearl-clutching paranoia of bored homeowners up to 11. The comment sections will go from "Did you get a license plate?" to "Hurry, add his face to the database before he comes back to rob and murder us all!"
I was across town trying to get back to the highway, when I get confused in this residential neighborhood and end up on a dead end street. (Why so many dead ends?) As I get ready to turn back onto Pine, I notice this guy run out and hop in his car and start tailgating me. No way am I going home now, with this weirdo following me and probably wanting to steal my stuff. So I hit the gas, and duck down some side street hoping it’s not another dead end, but he stays on me. Luckily, I got a picture of him from the side mirror. If anyone sees this car CALL THE POLICE!
[ Thanked by 15 people ]
I jokingly wonder how many people I freaked out on nextdoor
But if I have video footage of someone approaching my door, not knocking and just looking aroud to then leave; and I'm given the option to track if that person shows up again in future video footage, you bet I would use that option.
This is not because I'm paranoic and I think right away that anyone showing up to my door will murder or rob me, but because said person already exhibited suspicious activity around my private property.
Why would I take for granted that this person was simply lost or innocently looking around? If that's the case, then my camera would never see them again. But if they show up a second time, I want to know that.
This kind of alerting is a bit like any of the automated alarms we have in IT (be it Nagios, CloudWatch, or whatever). They're necessary to tell us when things have gone wrong if they go off too frequently then they'll just get ignored.
In fact there was a parable about this as well, called "The boy who cried wolf".
Even if statistically the likelihood is low, I wouldn't say the fears of what this technology enables and could result in for someone simply being in the wrong neighborhood 'while black' are overly complicated or historically irrelevant/unfounded for certain areas of the US.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/us/airbnb-black-women-pol...
Given this is an automatic sensor, people would just quickly just ignore it without even checking the footage - this even before any racial or social prejudices had chance to kick in.
We see this all the time with software monitoring solutions in IT what sysadmins ignore if they are too sensitive so my comment here isn’t without precedence either.
But essentially we are both arguing that an overly sensitive alarm is a bad thing - just from different perspectives. You make the point about discrimination and I make the point about the alerting being worthless in a sea of ignored alarms. Ultimately we’re both skeptical
You might be. I'm not. I never once said it's a bad thing, or described it as overly sensitive, to be fair. Just that I could see how certain communities might look at the technology and what it enables and have good reason to be incredulous about how certain neighborhood actors will use it.
That's about a nuanced as I can possibly get on the topic without trying to argue in favor or against these devices in full, or taking any absolute position.
Ring: Please provide a valid email address to continue.
Me: Turns to leave
Ring: Sorry we missed you! Please state your reason for visit and someone will reach out to you. Please provide a valid email address to continue.
Ring: Warning! This entry attempt have been recorded. An unauthorized entry attempt will be reported to the cloud and local law enforcment.
Where is the issue here? That we provide suspicious activity reports, or that our police SEEMINGLY can't reliably deal with those reports?
Feeding false positives to law enforcement causes them not to work what is important or to redirect resources to filtering reports.
The first thing that comes to my mind is that people who use these systems would be causing innocent others to be included in Big Data databases without their knowledge or consent. I think that it's not only immoral to do so, it is straight-up antisocial and harmful to community and society.
We have more than enough of that sort of thing already.
considering that it is easy to surf news sites and find video captured by home surveillance systems showing people taking packages, trying to get in, or having broke in, it is not unreasonable to install such a device.
the issue is that the data would be available to the police without the homeowners permission. people coming to the door have no expectation of privacy on property they do not own and if need be a simple sign on the property can declare as such.
>considering that it is easy to surf news sites and find video
This is confirmation bias in action. You need statistics on your residential area to make decisions around home security.
It is trivial to find videos of people committing crimes, but that does not imply anything about its likelihood. Meanwhile the state has an excellent record of abuse of power for ends that are unrelated to the reasons given for the power. See: the use of “terrorism” to justify militarizing domestic law enforcement, or parallel reconstruction.
The issue is that this idea that centralization of information will somehow avoid the pattern of abuse of centralized power in the hands of people with perverse incentives.
This video stream should be considered private property IMHO which requires a warrant like anything else.
It doesn't matter if it's an IP address scanning your network then hitting one system, then logging in and scooping up all your data versus a human staring at your house for a few days then walking up while you're not home and stealing your TV. You should know if someone is scoping out your perimeter in preparation for a breach, and post-breach you should know the history of the attack.
I know nothing about Next Door but from reading the comments it seems like the problem is having this information in untrained hands.
I'd go with 'undisciplined' hands versus 'untrained' hands, while admitting I'm unsure of the best way to articulate the difference in a manner that is empathetic towards the desires of residents who just want to feel like they're safe on their block but also addresses a certain pragmatic reality of what happens when 'good intentions' results in a patrol car pulling up next to you in your own neighborhood.
The reasonable expectation of your neighbors would be to assume they're normal people like you, not necessarily that they be trained in surveillance, criminal profiling or tracking persons of interest but instead disciplined in their vigilance as thoughtful and watchful community members who act when there is something demonstrably out of the norm that could affect the neighborhood.
Again, not sure how I can best articulate that thought, or even what steps a community has to take to avoid everyone "narcing" on everyone else for boring, mundane behavior (say, like for instance, retreading your steps through the neighborhood after you lost your phone or some other item the night before) while still remaining active enough to do the right thing when you see someone you know isn't your neighbor picking up packages off someone's doorstep.
This sort of thing is one of the reasons why I fear these systems. A world where this is common is a world where it's no longer safe to take a stroll through your own neighborhood.
I also wouldn't want to live in that world. There are many problems with it, but not being safe for "a stroll through your own neighborhood" is not a problem for that world.
I think that depends on what you consider "safe". Or perhaps I misunderstood what you were saying...
The minute you cross onto my property you're going to show up on multiple cameras that are pointed right at the boundary line. You rights to do whatever you want stop when you cross that line.
I dont think you could convince me that this makes you any less safe.
That's obviously fine for you, the property owner, camera operator, and a very reasonable person. But, imagine every house working that way as you walk around your neighborhood. Is everyone as reasonable as you?
I'm not trying to, because when it comes to my own security, what you think is or is not safe isn't relevant. Just as what I think isn't relevant to yours.
Im working for full 100% coverage of the entirety of my house, inside and out. The goal being able to control my smart house via gestures anywhere I am on the property via some machine learning and computer vision.
Also WYZE cams are 20 bucks a pop, and easily reflashed to do you own bidding. So it's not like this is some super expensive undertaking.
By the way, I have had my home pretty thoroughly automated for about 20 years now. I do recommend that (as long as you aren't using third party services -- that's a security risk all by itself). It's a lot of fun, not incredibly expensive, and pretty useful.
Maybe not but if the thieves are recognized automatically the police have a much better chance at recovery.
- put pervasive face recog databases on the big majority of the US population in hands of huge multinational companies (because America) so an opulent Joe The Programmer can feel a little extra safety over his stuff, because Those Scary Plebs can steal their Juicero juicer
- work on societal problems, reduce the inequality to reduce the risk of robbing and accept whatever risk is left because the societal cost of pervasive corp surveillance is just too high
The fact that sizable number of people feel that the former in any way preferable is pretty damning.
Most people would use that option if they had the opportunity; tracking potential troublemakers has obvious benefits. The problem is you are not being given the option "to track [a] person". You're being given the option to record video and apply an automated tool to identify "likely faces" and as way to compare those images against a local database using a definition of similarity that is poorly specified[1], extremely complex, and opaque/unexplained. Jumping right thinking of this as "tracking a person" ignores the many layers of metaphor shear between the desired goal and what the actual implementation does.
Metaphor shear is what you experience when you realize that interface doesn't match what is actually happening. The metaphor was lost somewhere in the hundreds of layers of abstraction connecting input to output. The map is not the territory. Efficient and powerful tools are very useful, but they also let you efficiently shoot yourself in the foot in powerful new ways.
Since metaphor shear is about the error between an expected ideal and actual measured reality, it compounds across layers of abstraction similar to how experimental error loses precision with each calculation. Any particular layer of abstraction is probably fine in isolation, but the interface metaphor loses significant digits as more and more layers are added.
If intellectual labor is going to be surrendered to a device, we need to be very clear and specific in what we are surrendering and what the device is expected to do.
(Video essayist Kyle Kallgren does a much better job of explaining[2] the problem of metaphor shear, using examples from sci-fi [Black Mirror, HHGttG, R.U.R.])
[1] poor in the context of trying to track someone. I'm sure the face matching algorithm is very well specified with respect to matching images of faces. The poorly specified part is when "matching images of faces" becomes "tracking someone" (what does "tracking" mean? How are probabilities about matching faces mapped to identifying "that person"?)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr9_DcO6G3A
If you or some grandma install a cloud system that auto sends my info to multiple third parties I would think that is worse than creepy.
I could see grubhub delivery people end up at wrong adresses, a system detecting unusual arrival at 9pm, send alert, the system pulls other data about this person, combines it. This is shared with multiple groups of people. Now humans look through it and see her going to the sex toy store earlier in the day and the abortion clinic and the (insert non-popular religious place here) - and whatever.
All it takes is one person in multiple groups to get heated about this person's lifetsyle or 'suspicious activity' to put out a pull over and find some reason to get more info, write a ticket, fine, get them to rack up other issues.
In an extreme situation you end up one of the cog wheels that started a Sandra Bland situation because a suspicions wrong address was given via GPS to a delivery driver.
Even without wrongful deaths, having people look into your life like that and make jokes about you or whatever is pretty lame.
At least when this happens with Msoft's one drive, one could say that someone agreed to the terms of lack of privacy with the corp. Not that I would buy that as 100% true in 100% of most cases, but at least then it could be argued.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/the-secre...
Often a company is motivated to increase their IP portfolio. In turn they motivate their engineers by offering lucrative bonuses for each patent filed. At my last company we played this game and it was roughly $3k per patent. In general, out of the huge number of patents that get filed in a big company, very few---if any---have any hope of ever seeing the light of day as an actual invention.
While I agree that the technology itself is somewhat alarming and I personally disagree with the idea of anyone building it, let's maybe save the outrage until they announce that they are actually going to build this thing and deploy it in the real world?
Perhaps enough outrage now would prevent it from being deployed, or would get them to engage in at least a tiny amount of mitigation of the worst aspects of it.
By that time someone will make "the train had sailed" comment. I.e. claim that nothing can be done, because consumers had spoken and the technology is already being deployed en mass.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evkgpw/smart-door...
My point is, I don't like it, and this is actually where we're heading with this crap. The same tracking we currently have online, but in the real world.
Could this bring about a police state? Yes absolutely. But the technology is possible to build, so someone will build it, or at least patent it. There's no preventing the technology from existing.
We don't prevent a police state from happening by freaking out about the technology that enables it. We prevent it by voting for responsible leaders. So let's just assume that the technology for government oppression is going to exist and make sure we structure our government in such a way that it doesn't oppress us.
1. No question this raises concerns about the system pinging authorities as someone who has been flagged in the system is detected.
2. This will sell like hotcakes with people who are on NextDoor. Everyday there is an alert about a burglary, stolen packages and people snooping around their properties. These people are very likely to approve sending any images/video of interest to police. (Right now it's very mechanical, scroll through video, capture and send --people will put out requests for footage very often).
I think the only thing we can do is call for strict regulation on its use. It's gonna get deployed and it's gonna get used.
I have always felt it would be very useful to be able to identify people in videos who may have committed a crime locally or elsewhere in the city, to learn of their movements, where they might live, what other crimes they committed, etc. This would help police prioritize some non-violent crime effectively, get a high return on the time they spend investigating property crimes (actually catching criminals), which would then in turn serve as a deterrent that is outright missing right now. I would gladly contribute my video to that cause, as would almost everyone in my neighborhood.
A word on the commenters here going on about 'pearl-clutching': that's just the latest in pejoratives that are nothing but empty stereotypes. Most people on NextDoor in my city are reasonable, but are regularly unfairly characterized by the far-left progressive cabal in this manner. Caring about the safety of yourself, your loved ones, and your property is not a bad thing. We work and live in part for those very things. If you disagree, then try outlawing door locks. It is unbelievable to me that the rights of criminals are more important to commenters here than the rights of those who want to protect their own. And worse yet, the conspiracy-theory notion that we are about to be taken over by a tyrannical government because of doorbell recordings. If this was a topic they disagreed with, those same commenters would readily call this a "slippery slope fallacy".
A further aside: The ACLU has been wrong a lot on this topic - for example when they called AWS's Rekognition service a "facial recognition service" instead of what it is, a generic object recognition service. They also did not seem to understand how false positives/negatives are managed and why it is fine to use an imperfect object recognition service as a first-pass filter. And they are wrong again here - people are allowed to film on public property and share it with whomever they want. They're allowed to perform whatever analysis they want and share it with whomever they want, period.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9ys1e...