The biggest promoter of face recognition tech right now is Apple. The created the trend and made the sensors cheap. They should be campaigning to them first.
Apple used 3D based face recognition that only works when your face is right in front of the iPhone. We are a ways away from distance 3D face recognition, and given the advances with deep learning and bigger data sets in 2D, it isn't even necessary.
Not only is Face ID only stored in the one secure Apple chip (and not uploaded to Apple), but I'm fairly certain that the face identification that you linked is also only stored on your device as well.
Maybe it's changed, but I think that if you get a new device, it basically has to reindex all the faces iirc. Or maybe it's only stored in your own personal iCloud.
I really want to agree, but it's hard to feel secure in certain countries, even I have a complain against an aggressor that have happily evaded the police for the last two years, he keeps on threatening me, my children are also suffering from this man, for the first time, I'm not going to be with EDRI, but I mean I understand that people who aren't under physical security threats would be with EDRI there, but I'm going to side with the victims and the state.
Technology can't make the police care. Just look at the decline in the murder clearance rate even as DNA and other forensic techniques became more sophisticated[1]. Facial recognition technology might help people like you, but it's much more likely to be used against petty drug offenders, protestors, and political enemies of the state.
Hargrove claims that the overall decline in homicide clearance is a failure of local leadership:
> It is the position of the Murder Accountability Project that declining homicide clearance rates are a failure of leadership by local police and by the politicians over them. When mayors and other elected officials make murder clearance a priority, as did the mayor of Philadelphia a few years ago, the clearance rate will improve significantly. If readers look at the “clearance rate” charts at our website, they will find hundreds of police departments that are doing a stellar job solving murders.
> [...] we strongly believe that failure to solve murders are a failure of will by local leaders to make homicide clearance a priority in their communities.
> That homicide clearance rates have plummeted despite the forensic revolution is one of the real mysteries in American law enforcement. The backlog of DNA testing has certainly slowed down the process in many cases. Lab testing may have forced a “pause” in murder investigations, which causes delays that can dramatically reduce the odds of a homicide being solved.
Could it be murder clearance rates have fallen despite more evidence because the bad cops can't just accuse and prosecute any unlucky poor person walking around in the area anymore?
I think we've lost that war. So I think what we should be advocating isn't an ideal world that will never come to be but rather a hard push for privacy aware designs.
What I mean is that biometrics are going to be used one way or another, what we should make sure that the data can't be leaked original data can never be access again etc.
A different example would be healthcare data. In Germany spend so long lobbying that data should not be used until the new health minister just sneaked in a law or two to just give that data to insurances.
What we should be doing is design systems in a way that that data is actually accessible by default but also not abusable. I.e. only a subset research necessary PII filtered data should be available. But that way we could potentially have audited systems where we can make sure that the data is shared in a safe fashion and the other side can't do malicious things with it.
Because if we don't, once the data becomes available some government contractor will write the law (and the crappy software) with the Health Ministry acting as a defacto lobbyist for the insurance industry.
Years ago my country was arguing over getting the state biometric databases to update the federal database within hours compared to typical weeks, the usual terror nonsense rolled out. No one was debating the morals at all, it was solely about interop and "who is paying for this?".
Biometrics has dug in deep and isn't ever going away, at least in the free world.
Everytime one of these threads shows up someone mentions gait recognition, which sounds incredibly dystopian. Do I have to be constantly conscious of how I walk now to maintain some form of privacy?
I would also guess those same lasers could be used to analyze a persons breath from afar and distinguish different gas compositions, tone and frequency of breathing from different people distinguishing them.
As far as I've read (I think on HN), Chinese surveillance systems can identify people very well even when wearing masks. I've personally been able to distinguish various acquaintances with their faces covered in various contexts (e.g. on the street). As long as I can do this as a human, there's no reason to believe that face recognition will have problems with this.
>We will just have to figure out other ways to stop the terrorists.. (or stop creating them in the first place)
Other ways? All this mass surveillance has hardly helped so far. All you get is nice footage after someone blew something up.
By the way these surveillance cameras and systems are stupidly expensive. For most installations they're so expensive you could pay for a police officer permanently stationed for years at each of those public spaces and subway stations you were going to surveil. That would actually help making them safer.
On top of that there's many other ways to use that money to save lives where it matters.
For instance you could use the money you were going to use on surveilling public places to make them physically safer instead: less accident-prone, install public access defibrillators, etc. Statistically you're going to save so many magnitudes more lives that way, it's not even funny.
People seem to assume that heart attacks is something that happens to other people, while terrorism of all things is a personal threat to them.
And we have a lot of parasitic security companies that induce heavy costs on taxpayers without tangible results. The problem is that "feeling safe" has become a metric because people are bad at math and understanding risks.
I had an idea for a product: A semitransparent material that acts as a face covering when you are in public places like airports that allows you to be seen completely, but when imaged by a sensor like a camera products an unintelligible result.
At face value this is physically impossible. Light either goes through and can be picked up by human eyeballs and cameras, or it doesn't.
However if you used a material that is only transparent at certain angles, you could make use of the fact that cameras are generally placed somewhere near the ceiling.
A baseball cap kind of solves the same problem though.
I mean, I just flew Delta from JFK and to board I had to use a face scanner at the gate .... instead of just scanning my ticket. There didn't appear to be a way to opt out at the time, and with a few people behind me in line, I just _gave up whatever rights I had._ On my return trip, if I see the scanner I'm going to talk to the gate before I board to see how to opt out.
Then simply refuse to remove either. It's about creating a shelling point: face scanner work on the pre-covid premise that most people were NOT covering their faces, so it required no action on their behalf.
Fortunately, the situation changed: the shelling point prefers the existing status-quo, so it will be seen as an unreasonable expectation to ask you to remove your mask, unless it's a TSA agent checking your id... and it's not.
> Hilariously, they asked everyone at the gate to remove their masks to get scanned. AFAIK, everyone before me did, as did the few I saw behind me
Say out loud "But I don't want to catch Covid and die!"
Pretending you care more about public health works very well!
If they insist, say their disregard for the FDA guidelines just to play with they new tech toy is not acceptable, and say you will denounce this blatant endangering of everyone health.
The fear of monetary liabilities from Covid is a great way to make most business dance the way you want.
Recurrent games in game theory require the reliable identification of the players. The social order is just a tangle of these games played with variation.
If you remove reliable identification as a feature you will push the equilibrium to some other state. Are you sure you want to live in that state?
You are replying to the article to which I agree with you. But I was replying to the comment which suggests as significant reduction in one persons ability to identify another.
I recommend Cory Doctorow's recently-published novel "Attack Surface" (3rd installment in the "Little Brother" series). It's entertaining and possibly illuminating, and gets fairly detailed about surveillance tech's application and countermeasures, and ramifications.
Nice goal, but its a "wicked problem". For example, I don't think this will do anything for "face privacy" if you travel out of the EU. If someone snaps and uploads your face to a database like findclone.ru, how will this help finding and deleting that information from an out of scope database? Counter-intuitively, I think we need much better tools that enable us to actively search the entire Internet for our face, and only then can we begin to fix how to reset that data back to null.
There used to be a device you could wear on your head that would "disrupt" any CCTV, and the like, cameras, but I believe the newer cameras have fixed that "hole". I would like something like that now, some device I cold wear on a headband that would prevent my face from being properly recorded.
Privacy is dead. There are too many signals, too many recorders, too much CPU power.
(I want to be clear: I don't like it and I'm not advocating for it, I just don't see a way out/around it.)
In return for our privacy, most forms of crime could be made difficult or impossible, so it behooves us to make our laws carefully.
- - - -
You can't make ubiquitous surveillance illegal because you have to use it to make sure no one is violating the ban on using it. It's one of those logical "This sentence is a lie." loops, eh?
This is a choice. It doesn’t have to be this way. Laws regulating collection and use of data are possible and don’t have to be complicated. They do run up against the interests of those that use that data for their business, but again, that is explicitly a choice on our part as to whether we put their interests ahead of our own. You really can’t run get around these laws without being obvious and easily stopped.
I agree, at least in the long term. However, I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing. The reason we perceive it as bad right now is because it is unequal: you and I do not have access to the systems that make privacy an obsolete concept, and some other people (namely those in positions of power) have the ability to keep themselves out of that system. It seems likely that this will eventually no longer be true and society will adapt to a world where privacy no longer exists for anyone. I would wager that, looking backward, they will probably even wonder what all the fuss was about.
Of all the possible outcomes of the evolution of privacy, I have zero confidence that either the public will have equal access to surveillance, or that the powerful will be equally subject to it.
Yeah. Stephen Baxter wrote a novel about the invention of the time camera ("Light of Other Days") and in it, before long, folks are screwing in public because, hey, everybody who wants to can look anyway so who cares?
> The Light of Other Days is a 2000 science fiction novel written by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke,[1] which explores the development of wormhole technology to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the spacetime continuum.
The idea behind twelve organizations joining forces is to allow civil society to make its voice heard in a debate largely dominated by the tech industry.
Every place with bulk surveillance is a proving ground. The end game will always be to record as much of our lives, as makes people in power comfortable.
As long as we can use this data to provide an alibi in court in case it’s needed, then I don’t mind it.
Literally doesn’t change a thing for me as I already carry a smartphone everywhere with SIM card in my name.
They aren't addressing the root problem, which is "internet cameras everywhere", and the answer is to figure out how to work with that reality, not to turn the clock back to 1975.
The solution will involve doing a forward-looking envisioning of a mass-camera society where rights are respected. Not something I'll be able to invent on the fly in a HN comment, sorry. :)
I get that limiting the things people can do with video footage isn't really an integral solution, as it requires mankind to unilaterally decide to not even develop a particular technology (which so far hasn't really ever worked as far as I can tell). But if we're trying to get to the root problem then surely we should also consider just removing the cameras? Because trying to figure out a way to live under constant surveillance isn't exactly addressing the root problem either.
Not because it wouldn't solve the problem, but because at some point cameras will be so ubiquitous that there's no point in banning the State from putting up cameras, because every tom, dick, and harry has a camera on their phone and on their glasses, every store has a camera system, some jackets and hats have cameras, etc, etc, etc.
Sure. The State doesn't have cameras. It will develop a automated warrant-generator to pull all cloud footage from cameras that were in a specific area at a specific time. They will have agreements with the major cloud camera vendors. All legal, above board, reasonable, protective of rights and process, and exactly identical to if the State had camera towers.
Same for biometric ID. Fine. You don't want the State having in-house biometrics? Great. It can set up agreements with Facebook and Google: "Identify this person" - a few flatfeet go run down those leads.
Net effect is to have the same result, but now with less accountability (private firm), more expense (private contracts getting profit), and less safety (private firms with the data).
That's why we need to assume the existence of these technologies and the followons, then design the world we want to see given the followons.
Whoever said we're only banning the state from filming public areas? And before you try to convince me that's weird, please note that there are already laws that prevent people from filming anything other than their own private property (with some minor leeway).
And it's not like a law against cameras would be impossible to enforce. At the very least in the widespread constant surveillance scenario the government is entirely aware of the existence and location of the cameras.
69 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadMaybe it's changed, but I think that if you get a new device, it basically has to reindex all the faces iirc. Or maybe it's only stored in your own personal iCloud.
[1] http://www.murderdata.org/p/blog-page.html?m=1
Hargrove claims that the overall decline in homicide clearance is a failure of local leadership:
> It is the position of the Murder Accountability Project that declining homicide clearance rates are a failure of leadership by local police and by the politicians over them. When mayors and other elected officials make murder clearance a priority, as did the mayor of Philadelphia a few years ago, the clearance rate will improve significantly. If readers look at the “clearance rate” charts at our website, they will find hundreds of police departments that are doing a stellar job solving murders.
> [...] we strongly believe that failure to solve murders are a failure of will by local leaders to make homicide clearance a priority in their communities.
> That homicide clearance rates have plummeted despite the forensic revolution is one of the real mysteries in American law enforcement. The backlog of DNA testing has certainly slowed down the process in many cases. Lab testing may have forced a “pause” in murder investigations, which causes delays that can dramatically reduce the odds of a homicide being solved.
What I mean is that biometrics are going to be used one way or another, what we should make sure that the data can't be leaked original data can never be access again etc.
A different example would be healthcare data. In Germany spend so long lobbying that data should not be used until the new health minister just sneaked in a law or two to just give that data to insurances.
What we should be doing is design systems in a way that that data is actually accessible by default but also not abusable. I.e. only a subset research necessary PII filtered data should be available. But that way we could potentially have audited systems where we can make sure that the data is shared in a safe fashion and the other side can't do malicious things with it.
Because if we don't, once the data becomes available some government contractor will write the law (and the crappy software) with the Health Ministry acting as a defacto lobbyist for the insurance industry.
Years ago my country was arguing over getting the state biometric databases to update the federal database within hours compared to typical weeks, the usual terror nonsense rolled out. No one was debating the morals at all, it was solely about interop and "who is paying for this?".
Biometrics has dug in deep and isn't ever going away, at least in the free world.
"The pentagon has a laser that identifies people by their heartbeat"
https://www.engadget.com/2019-06-27-the-pentagon-has-a-laser...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-molecular-weight_po...
Looking at the title, I hope one day we can run a campaign for a ban on ALL(*gasp) mass surveillance, not just biometric :/
We will just have to figure out other ways to stop the terrorists.. (or stop creating them in the first place)
Other ways? All this mass surveillance has hardly helped so far. All you get is nice footage after someone blew something up.
By the way these surveillance cameras and systems are stupidly expensive. For most installations they're so expensive you could pay for a police officer permanently stationed for years at each of those public spaces and subway stations you were going to surveil. That would actually help making them safer.
On top of that there's many other ways to use that money to save lives where it matters.
For instance you could use the money you were going to use on surveilling public places to make them physically safer instead: less accident-prone, install public access defibrillators, etc. Statistically you're going to save so many magnitudes more lives that way, it's not even funny.
People seem to assume that heart attacks is something that happens to other people, while terrorism of all things is a personal threat to them.
However if you used a material that is only transparent at certain angles, you could make use of the fact that cameras are generally placed somewhere near the ceiling.
A baseball cap kind of solves the same problem though.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90274113/heres-a-look-at-delta-a...
Simple solution: just wear sunglasses on top.
Then simply refuse to remove either. It's about creating a shelling point: face scanner work on the pre-covid premise that most people were NOT covering their faces, so it required no action on their behalf.
Fortunately, the situation changed: the shelling point prefers the existing status-quo, so it will be seen as an unreasonable expectation to ask you to remove your mask, unless it's a TSA agent checking your id... and it's not.
Say out loud "But I don't want to catch Covid and die!"
Pretending you care more about public health works very well!
If they insist, say their disregard for the FDA guidelines just to play with they new tech toy is not acceptable, and say you will denounce this blatant endangering of everyone health.
The fear of monetary liabilities from Covid is a great way to make most business dance the way you want.
If you remove reliable identification as a feature you will push the equilibrium to some other state. Are you sure you want to live in that state?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_in_game_theory
This was never intended to stop terrorists:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24777115
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance#Purposes
Not bombing their countries would probably go a long way toward this. The US spends far too much money dropping explosives on brown people.
(I want to be clear: I don't like it and I'm not advocating for it, I just don't see a way out/around it.)
In return for our privacy, most forms of crime could be made difficult or impossible, so it behooves us to make our laws carefully.
- - - -
You can't make ubiquitous surveillance illegal because you have to use it to make sure no one is violating the ban on using it. It's one of those logical "This sentence is a lie." loops, eh?
This is a choice. It doesn’t have to be this way. Laws regulating collection and use of data are possible and don’t have to be complicated. They do run up against the interests of those that use that data for their business, but again, that is explicitly a choice on our part as to whether we put their interests ahead of our own. You really can’t run get around these laws without being obvious and easily stopped.
You’re asking governments to put restrictions on their power. You can see how the incentives are not exactly aligned.
How can we be sure no one is using the tech without using the tech?
(And, once someone somewhere is using the tech, why not solve all crime? Why have the illusion of privacy, and permit e.g. kidnapping, rape, murder?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
> The Light of Other Days is a 2000 science fiction novel written by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsis by Arthur C. Clarke,[1] which explores the development of wormhole technology to the point where information can be passed instantaneously between points in the spacetime continuum.
At this point we discover just how subjective most crime really is.
Yeah, to be honest, I don't think it's enough.
This same data can also put you near a crime and lead to false accusations.
They aren't addressing the root problem, which is "internet cameras everywhere", and the answer is to figure out how to work with that reality, not to turn the clock back to 1975.
The solution will involve doing a forward-looking envisioning of a mass-camera society where rights are respected. Not something I'll be able to invent on the fly in a HN comment, sorry. :)
Not because it wouldn't solve the problem, but because at some point cameras will be so ubiquitous that there's no point in banning the State from putting up cameras, because every tom, dick, and harry has a camera on their phone and on their glasses, every store has a camera system, some jackets and hats have cameras, etc, etc, etc.
Sure. The State doesn't have cameras. It will develop a automated warrant-generator to pull all cloud footage from cameras that were in a specific area at a specific time. They will have agreements with the major cloud camera vendors. All legal, above board, reasonable, protective of rights and process, and exactly identical to if the State had camera towers.
Same for biometric ID. Fine. You don't want the State having in-house biometrics? Great. It can set up agreements with Facebook and Google: "Identify this person" - a few flatfeet go run down those leads.
Net effect is to have the same result, but now with less accountability (private firm), more expense (private contracts getting profit), and less safety (private firms with the data).
That's why we need to assume the existence of these technologies and the followons, then design the world we want to see given the followons.
And it's not like a law against cameras would be impossible to enforce. At the very least in the widespread constant surveillance scenario the government is entirely aware of the existence and location of the cameras.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell