A HN contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end-users, that will make them aware of this issue and persuade them that it is important to them. Vote up the best ones. [EDIT: The goal is to persuade them about its dangers, not sell them something based on it]
That elevator pitch is key. I have extensive knowledge about this issue but have a hard time coming up with it; I need to be prepared.
Change only will come through political pressure, and that requires public awareness. I had lunch recently with a journalist from a prominent publication, someone very well informed, and they told me that widespread surveillance wasn't real, a sort of urban myth. Organizations like the EFF have been unsuccessful and I think that's because they don't generate mass public awareness. It's up to us to create it, and we need a pitch.
You've spent years saving up to finally buy a home. You're having a baby in a few months, and you really need the space. You have the down payment ready, your credit is great, you've ticked all the boxes on the application, but you're turned down for the loan. Why?
Maybe you walk home through a bad neighborhood. Maybe you sometimes grab a beer at a bit of a divey bar near your office. Maybe you've visited an old friend who's been in some trouble recently. Whatever the case may be, your face has been in a photo with some questionable folks, whether it's a security camera or a stranger's Facebook photo. So the bank's computers noticed, and flagged you as a risk. People who hang around questionable people aren't very good at repaying their loans.
I've tried this one on lay people before. The problem I have is that they usually can't get past their firm belief that these things are technologically impossible, even after you explain to them that they are. "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world."
Also it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them.
> it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them.
A tangent: I enounter this too, all the time, with intelligent, well-educated people. It's as if people don't understand what "example" means, or can't project concepts from an example to a broader class.
That this kind of risk is zero-sum. If higher rates are charged to people who meet these criteria, those of us who don't will get better rates from competitive lenders.
> "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world."
Tell them that the mobile phone they have in their pocket also seems like science fiction - and it was 20-30 years ago. Now it is science fact. Facial recognition is getting the same way.
If anything, based on all the shoddy movies that 'zoom in, enhance' with photos, the public should be primed to accept facial recognition quite easily.
Ha, when watching those shows, I am always the nerd telling my wife how it's impossible to zoom in and enhance, because you can't create more information than existed when the photo was taken. I'm not sure that she gets it.
If you take a blurry photo of a license plate - it can be possible to enhance it (e.g. using sharpen) to reveal the license plate number - just because your naked eyes can't extract that information from a blurry photo doesn't mean the blurry photo doesn't already have enough information to encode the number precisely.
There is also superresolution methods that in practice make the "enhance"-feature possible. The information from the same objects in successive frames, eg. from a security camera feed, are composited into a single frame of higher resolution than the originals. This can even be done for a single image (see. Glasner et al. "Super-resolution from a single image." Computer Vision, 2009 ICCV 2009. IEEE.).
If machine learning is brought into play it gets even more interesting. See eg. waifu2x, the anime video upscaler based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. Basically it is a neural net, that has been shown A LOT of anime, and it can therefore creatively(?) fill in the created pixels when upscaling.
I have no idea how advanced this kind of ML boosted "enhance" technology can get in the future, and it might even get a little scary: imagine an observer with the experience of million lives spent looking blurry images in poor lighting. It might get surprisingly good at that...
I know it seems crazy, it seems crazy to me too, but this is what I encounter time and time again. No matter how carefully you explain it, it seems too unlikely to them. Once the explanation passes a certain threshhold of complexity (for which the bar is frighteningly low), they tune out and shut down.
Why not abuse them. If they let themselves be led to the slaughterhouse that easily and voluntarily maybe they have to feel the pain of being abused to learn?
I get more cynical by the day, the more I read/hear such accounts.
I am/was an idealist, but I catch myself every so often to think, that these people do not deserve anything else. Everything is clearly visible - that possible paths are not that hard to understand. The consequences can be dire if nothing is done - non the less. They keep giving away their and everyone else's privacy in the blink of a thumb-flick on "what ever the next big app is called".
Have I given up? No, I try non the less to inform people surrounding me. Do I believe in positive change? Sadly not anymore.
I tried to discuss the dual-use nature of their research with some machine learning/pattern recognition people (I was there to discuss maybe working with them as a student). They didn't seem to ever have thought about it at all, and were not open to start now. This was quite shocking to me. I'm not sure how to deal with the issue when even the people creating the technology are like that.
> Also it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them.
There is a superb essay written by a law professor that was posted to HN a while back entitled "I've got nothing to hide'' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy [1] which tackled the problem with the way privacy is commonly framed (and limited) in such discussions, going into detail about the nature and definition of privacy, mass surveillance, and the difficulty in getting the point across.
One of the issues covered it that often privacy discussions hinge on singular arguments and hypothetical examples that become ineffectual when they don't relate to or affect a person's own experience, or use analogies that don't hold up well. The lack of news stories covering the real world effects of privacy harm, 'dead bodies' as one person put it, also make it hard for people to care for the tangible consequences. Now more than ever there are articles being written on company breaches and database hacks yet the problems we face from mass surveillance are a different, broader and legalized kind, the effect of which still isn't clear to a lot of people even with what we know.
Inevitably though people tend to look after their own interests, and if it doesn't affect them and they have no way to change it there are those that simply don't care.
> "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem"
That's why it's called an "elevator pitch". If you get this sort of response, you get out of the elevator and pitch the person off the roof of the building.
On the other hand you are just as likely to get a loan you otherwise wouldn't have because you haven't been seen with questionable folks. In any case that kind of policy is already illegal. And it's not even technically feasible at the moment. Even if it was, it's very unlikely there is a strong correlation between being seen with some random person in a photo, and your likelihood of paying a loan.
There is plenty of questionable shit happening right now in the NSA and stuff. I don't see why we need to resort to fearmongering about absurd hypotheticals.
The banks are doing things, perhaps not exactly what was described, but your facebook history, linkedin, other social media accounts are taken into account when applying for a loan. Even when you browse the bank's web page, where you hover the mouse, what pages you look at and variour other metrics. One example of a company providing such service is http://www.bigdatascoring.com/
In my opinion that is a very good thing. If they can make fewer loans to people who are high risk and lower interest loans to people who are not, everyone wins. The source of the data doesn't matter.
> On the other hand you are just as likely to get a loan you otherwise wouldn't have because you haven't been seen with questionable folks.
I would imagine the list of things that will count against you in those situations will always be much longer than the list of things that can count for you, i.e. just because A can count against you doesn't mean that ¬A will count for you; ¬A will just be 0 points and the assumed baseline.
They're actually trying to give you the lowest rate they can while staying profitable, you know, to be competitive with other lenders. There's no baseline, all our characteristics are inputs to a function that estimates risk of default. Then the lender chooses what rate to offer based on their portfolio design.
In one sense, it's a zero-sum game. If person A is a better debtor, A gets a better rate than B. However, a more sophisticated portfolio will try to find anti-correlated debtors. Rather than lending to 100 low-risk people all similar to each other, I'd rather diversify and include some very different people that may be higher risk on an individual basis; the aggregate risk can be much lower than individual. To that end, the more the lender can learn about me, the more chance I have to reveal how anti-correlated I am with others.
I generalized this as "You have something you really want (everyone has different goals). Right when you think you are about to achieve your goal, it is taken away (because of something stupid you did in the past; everyone has done something stupid at one point). This is why unchecked data collection is bad"
The problem is that there is no reason to believe that is more likely than the opposite case of
"You have something you really want (everyone has different goals). Right when you think you are about to fail to reach your goal, it is achieved (because of something clever you did in the past; everyone has done something clever at one point). This is why unchecked data collection is good"
Information in this case as in many is asymmetrical hence leading to the phrase "information is power".
Lack of information does not grant the same benefits/advantages as possession of information. Why do you think so much effort is expended to possess information?
You missed the point. In the original loan example, the lender may want to screw you, but they also know that the one that screws you least is the one you will do business with. And your good character, as determined by omnipresent surveillance, allows them to safely offer you a better deal. It's like the "good student" etc discounts that car insurance gives now.
This isn't a good example because the technology already exists to deliver this service to lenders - read up on Canadian Tire's JP Martin. He did the first experiments with rewards-credit-cards and data mining, and found he could pretty-well correlate certain behaviors with missed credit-card payments. Apparently there's a dive bar in Montreal that indicates you're a screw-up if you drink there.
But doesn't this cut both ways? If you don't hang around questionable people, you'd qualify for better rate for loans. Or if your credit score is not very high, but the fact you don't hang around questionable people brings your credit file up a notch and make you qualify.
"Questionable people" is hardly a concrete descriptor, nor is it something immediately obvious.
Let's say I meet a guy at a party. Facial scanners detect me with him. He seems like a nice guy, but he is currently on trial for a number of white collar offenses -- I know none of this. "The machine" does and will now assume I hang around questionable people.
The chances are just as good - not necessarily 50/50, but close to population baseline - that the person you met actually was a nice guy and "the machine" assumes you hang around with good people.
If your chances are actually higher than population average to hang around with bad people, the machine is probably correct for assigning you a higher risk.
Which all misses the point that as soon as he walked into the party, your own ocular implants would have performed the same recognition and you would have known to stay away from him.
> If you don't hang around questionable people ...
Who is questionable and who defines it? Gay people were "questionable" for most of history; they would lose their jobs if discovered (that was still true in the US military until very recently). What about Muslims, overtly discriminated against in many places? Poor people? Latinos (someone might suspect they are illegal immigrants)? etc.
It might not be a person making the call. Whatever the state of the art machine learning algorithm decides. Not to suggest that a learning algorithm won't be able to learn racism.
Yeah, in my mind, this completely negates the argument. If I don't engage in a given statistically risky behavior today, I'm paying more for insurance because some people do and the insurance company doesn't know who should be paying for that risky behavior so we all pay a little more.
To me, the more compelling angle to attack surveillance has to appeal to people's desire to keep some portion of their lives from being made public (rather than appealing to their wallet).
But the whole point of insurance is to collectively spread the risk, so that when things do go bad, you are not on your own. By definition, people in aggregate pay more for insurance than what the insurance pays them back (otherwise the company would go bankrupt!).
Insurance is paying for peace of mind. Most people are paying more premiums than insurance is paying them back.
This pitch reminded me of the cartoon in beginning of the documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply - a concise documentary related to the topic of how your data can be used by the company whose services you are using. The cartoon may be good to use too.
I reckon some subversive art projects. Set up a camera and an SDR in a fairly well trafficked public place (shopping mall, train station concourse, etc) and have the camera do face detection/recognition and the SDR grab MAC addresses from bluetooth and wifi radios. Collect a few weeks worth of data, then put a screen on it so it can put up a big sign
"Hi again! Haven't seen you since Tuesday, when you were with this person [photo of other face seen with them]! Have you been OK? You haven't missed a Wednesday before?"
HusbandWatcher - provide a photo of your cheating husband, and we will scan hotel, car and street surveillance to show you who he is with every moment he is out of your sight
Employee-motivator - using simple webcams we can monitor the facial emotions of your employees moment to moment. Are they reacting positively to your email about the new executive jet purchase? Are they showing signs of morale fatigue as they fall behind their schedule? We can send them morale boosting emails such as ... "Smile, you still have your job".
I have a great way to explain Facial Recognition and why it's important....
_________________________________
I wrote a program called uWho(https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho) for our hacker/maker convention, Makevention. Our goal was to determine how many people showed up to the convention, as it was a free-to-attend with a suggested donation event.
With a permissive license (OpenCV) attached to a GPL3 (Qt), I was able to make a real-time face scanner. My version was nice, in that it saved a one-way hash of the person's face. It is a 2 liner to save the full face instead of the nice method I did.
I did this using software anyone can get. Now, imagine having this software, with mainframes combined with the ability to trawl through a user's facebook profile... Because a like allows that. And do you have a company's Facebook permission? Now they can see your whole profile, as well as your friends.
Now, tell me this: what would happen if a company downloaded every face in a user's profile, checked the names of tagged faces, and ran all of them through a face recognizer like what I already made?
> With a permissive license (OpenCV) attached to a GPL3 (Qt)
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about already.
> My version was nice, in that it saved a one-way hash of the person's face. It is a 2 liner to save the full face instead of the nice method I did.
If I was following, the only thing so far is that you were taking pictures of people and recognised faces and it was really useful, and you're trying to convince me that we should be worried about others taking pictures of us and recognising faces?
> Now, tell me this: what would happen if a company downloaded every face in a user's profile, checked the names of tagged faces, and ran all of them through a face recognizer like what I already made?
What would happen? The company can recognise who people are, like facebook can and I already allow and don't care about / like?
"Congratulations! You have been selected for our beta testing program.
Based on data we collected on you when you were browsing the internet, we found that you [insert controversial subject, political statement, political affiliation]. We matched this data to you using facial recognition.
If this is not correct, please write to us at [website], we are always looking to improve our algorithms.
[website prominently displayed]"
The controversial characteristics can be obtained by hot reading of some sort or by simply sending party affiliation leaflets in an area where a specific party makes sense. No data actually has to be gathered.
Website reveals the trick and what you, the user, can do about it.
Automatic social network shortest-path finding: point your phone at someone and find out if you're friends-of-friends, if you went to the same school, worked at the same company once, etc.
I hate to say this, but: I think this would be very cool. See someone interesting at the bar? Scan and check to find a convenient ice breaker. "Oh! We both went to the same summer camp as kids!"
Hopefully by then we'll have progressed past this patriarchal protect-the-defenseless-women mentality. Who's to say my daughter won't be the one using it on men at the bar?
I am not sure I follow this comment. No one said anything about forbidding anyone from anything It was simply a statement about how upsetting it would be as a parent.
Real-life targeted advertising: bus-stop ads that scan your face, look up your private browsing history, and try to sell you the complete works of Nickelback or something equally embarrassing.
It's now easier than ever for the political party in power to spy on the opposition. Imagine what Nixon would do if he had the NSA surveillance powers that are available to the current President.
Republican, Democrat, or independent. Do you want any party to have that much power while in office?
If history is any guide, you've got the surveillance directionality mixed up here.
Most fallen regimes that we have good records for - e.g. the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, and (kind of) the East Germans had various factions competing overtly or covertly for power. Each faction had an intelligence service constructing dossiers on/blackmailing the chiefs and other interesting people associated with other factions. The nominal chief executives were spied on by everyone except their own ultraloyal people.
I don't see any reason to expect different outcomes in America, so most likely the NSA would be closely watching Nixon and everyone else, while Nixon's people tried to do the same.
And of course this isn't a special property of Nixon - it would be very naive to believe there aren't various dossiers on Obama floating around the Virginia/Maryland suburbs.
This is a strange perspective on the history. Why are you emphasizing comparison to the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis, and dismissing the similarity to the East Germans? Why not look at what domestic intelligence has actually already done in the US, which seems quite reminiscent of the Stasi?
Did you know some businesses have the ability to instantly identify you by nothing more than physical features? Did you know the storage and exchange of that identifiable information can be used by businesses or governments to violate your rights and privacy? By the way, there is no regulation regarding the use of this information, nor can you do anything about it.
It might be too late for that, it's not a matter of elevator pitches anymore. People are already ok with being tracked constantly. I think it's a matter of going back to the fundamentals and re-instilling an appreciation for individual liberty and the value of privacy. That's not something that happens with an elevator pitch, that's something that takes essays, and blog pieces, and conversations, and lots of time.
People are already ok with being tracked constantly.
You and I must know very different people.
Being resigned to it, feeling they can't do anything about it, or accepting some level of (usually ad-related) tracking in return for some other service are all different to being OK with being tracked constantly.
It's also striking how often people don't realise the full implications of these technologies. They're OK up to a point because nothing bad ever seems to happen to them, until it does. Sometimes they're also OK with it up to a point because they think it's necessary for some greater good, which may or may not actually be true.
A carriage manufacturer contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end users that will make the aware of the danger of automobiles and persuade them that it is important.
I don't think it's possible to educate non-technical end-users (ie. most of the general public) about this. They're too dumb.
But on the bright side, surveillance technology will probably mean the end of democracy. With extensive surveillance, it should be easy enough to eliminate/sabotage people who speak up for the common man, such as labor union activists, universal suffrage activists or politicians before they become major problems.
Then we über-nerds can finally rule the world! The common people will make useful servants. And we get to impregnate their women, eventually, slowly but surely, turning all of the Earth's population into nerds! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!
Very well if you use one of the many popular email or messaging services which does not use end-to-end encryption to send it or one of the popular cloud service providers that does not encrypt to data on your computer first to store it.
As someone with prosopagnosia (neurological inability to recognize faces) I find this incredibly frustrating. My everyday life would be immensely easier with assistive tech that told me the names of everyone I see. And now that the technology exists to develop such a useful device, what do we get instead? Mass societal surveillance.
That would be the killer app for Google Glass. Not just for your situation, but for salesmen, customer service reps, security guards, politicians, or anyone who needs to recognize lots of people, recall names, and bring up an instant profile about the person standing in front of them.
(Granted, even this application has serious overtones of societal surveillance.)
EDIT: Anyone care to speculate on why Google Glass doesn't do this? Surely the processing capability is there.
Google Glass bans facial recognition apps[0]. I've tweeted them about getting an exception for assistive tech but I've never pursued it any further[1].
Google Glass specifically, yes. There will be other products with the same form factor that don't have the same restriction. And you can always just take your chances with sideloading an app even if Google themselves aren't willing to distribute it.
I briefly worked with a company that made a facial recognition app for Google Glass (http://www.nametag.ws). Google officially banned us but you could still sideload it. The two major issues were assembling the database of faces (we used mainly LinkedIn photos but you really need multiple photos per person in different light/angles to train it well) and hardware performance (we had to do processing server side but even the basic part running on Glass killed the battery and made it run very hot). The hardware is Glass is basically an underclocked original Moto Droid (the one that launched Android 2.0), and is extremely underpowered for doing local face recognition on a large corpus of faces. I imagine a Glass-like device created a few years from now could be much more viable for this sort of thing. As for the database of people, there are companies that will sell you that (FullContact, Spokeo, Pipl, AllThePeople.net, etc) although the photo quality can still be an issue.
Forget about Google Glass banning facial recognition...any CV-type activity is too process-intensive. It will burn thru the Glass battery and the entire unit becomes stove-hot in 20minutes. I know because this is exactly the problem I tackled for three months (I was doing Glass-based CV for hand gesture recognition)
Glass, the current version, is not meant for CV-intensive operations.
I am no expert on this but the article suggested that the database of named photos was the hardest part to obtain for an individual. Since you would (probably) most value a database of people you have met before, a self generated database would be a good start to gaining access to this technology.
Right, I could definitely train existing facial recognition software on a database of people I've met. The problem is delivery; when I need this information, I'm not sitting at a computer. I need some kind of device, with a camera and a way to feed me the person's name real time, that I can reasonably wear in public without looking like a walking server closet. That's hard to hack together (just ask the Glass team).
Alas the first application of much cutting-edge technology is in the service of authority. I hope you are at least a bit comforted by the fact that the technology is making its way slowly to you.
How do you deal with this in real life? Do you recognize your friends' voices, or have they learned that they just need to identify themselves when you meet?
I have relatively mild prosopagnosia; I can recognize people I know well. My understanding is that the brain's object recognition system takes over from the facial recognition system. It's less efficient but it works well enough. Anyone I know well enough to recognize from the back (by gait, voice, height, hair color, etc.) I can also recognize from the front by looking at their face. It's hardest when I'm first meeting a lot of new people, like at a new job.
Other people, with more severe prosopagnosia, can't even recognize their own family members' faces. They rely on gait and voice and other cues. It's really hard on them when, say, their spouse decides to get their hair dyed blue.
I no longer know what to do about this problem. I'm convinced surveillance is here to stay and that making it illegal will only serve to hide the microphones. I'm still extremely grateful for those who fight for privacy, is just that I don't see how we can win.
Not knowing how to treat the cause, I'm at least trying to treat the symptoms. We might not be able to stop them from seeing our secrets, but we might very well stop them from making us feel ashamed and from blackmailing us.
> surveillance is here to stay and that making it illegal will only serve to hide the microphones.
Certainly it's here to stay, but so is murder, theft, fraud, and many other things. We want to maximize the leverage and tools people have to fight it.
Unfortunately you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I don't think there's a real way to fight this in the age of networks and cameras in every pocket.
There are many good uses for the ability to instantly recognize and identify anybody from a crowd, as well as bad ones.
Probably the easiest way to frustrate these things would be the simplest; only go out in public with substantial facial features obscured or altered.
The degree to which tools with diverse uses, some of which may be bad, should be regulated is always a matter of serious controversy (cf. firearms). Whether it's legal or not, this tech will be used, so we need to get people to accept that and learn to recognize and frustrate its usage, instead of trying to deprive the populace of the tools that provide the function, which is ultimately futile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering ('The key argument supporting this proposal is that face-coverings prevent the clear identification of a person, which is both a security risk, and a social hindrance within a society which relies on facial recognition and expression in communication.')
I don't know how well obscuring facial features will really work. There might just be too much information. Partially obscured face, body dimensions, clothing, location, time... I think it might be a loosing battle.
Who wants to do that every day? Also, how long before we can out-calculate it? Right now we can already match things like gait patterns and multiple biometrics (eg height, relative length of limbs) well enough for many purposes using probabilistic systems (eg your metrics match 3 people but the other two are on different continents so I'm 99% certain it's you).
I don't think there's a real way to fight this in the age of networks and cameras in every pocket.
Sure there is.
For one thing, a similar level of technology to the capture and processing applications could also be used to automatically detect and obscure faces where storing them isn't necessary, probably with imperfect but highly reliable success. Consider how Google's Street View wound up hiding car licence plates for a lot of places after the privacy complaints, for example.
For another thing, the problem with a lot of modern privacy invasions is asymmetry: large, powerful organisations like big businesses or governments can do a lot more to you with lots of information than you can do to them in return.
This could be solved for businesses by imposing rules and meaningful penalties for violating them. Facebook isn't going to be processing anyone's face for dubious reasons if it's subject to compulsory scrutiny on account of processing a high volume of personal data and the penalties for repeated breaking of the rules escalate as significant percentages of annual revenue. For deliberate violations, you could remove the corporate shield from the responsible executives as well, as with other criminal conduct.
Governments is harder, because right now the governments of the West seem to be more hostile to their own people than to foreign surveillance. Ideally, our governments would actually be on our side, and the vast resources they seem to be devoting to invading their own people's privacy would instead be devoted to protecting it. Imagine how much safer we would all be from things like fraud, identity theft, commercial espionage, and worse, if instead of trying to exploit vulnerabilities and limit secure communications, organisations like the NSA and GCHQ helped to close vulnerabilities and promote safe and secure use of technology by everyone. Like everyone else, I don't know exactly what the real threat from terrorism is, but I'm pretty sure the potential savings to our economies alone from safer technology would run to many billions.
Yes, those are all valid concerns as well. I was just demonstrating what is technically possible, not asserting that current practice is sufficient.
If Google applied that same fuzzing to its own internal copy of the images, it would not have records of everyone's licence plates any more. I don't know whether they do this today, but we could empower the official regulators to investigate such things in reasonable ways, for example by mandating greater disclosure of working practices or some sort of inspection regime for organisations processing high volumes of personal data.
I'll let the NSA surveillance me because I don't have the power to stop it on my own.
I will not let a corporation/individual do the same if
I can spot the devises they use, or the hear they are surveilling me.
The small changes I made are: I don't shop at Home Depot as much as I used to. I walk out of any store that has too many cameras. I don't shop at stores that a require membership picture. I never had a big presence on the Internet, so I didn't need to delete to many real name/identifiable ip accounts.
I think their are small ways we can fight. The problem I see is most people think, "I'm not doing anything wrong, I really don't care."--with the exception of HN members.
I have actually looked into ways to defeat facial recognition, but everything I looked into might bring more attention to myself than doing nothing. I do understand the big hoodie though. To be honest, I've never liked my picture taken. As a Photographer, I don't take people's pictures like I used to; it just rude, and shows poor manners these days. (I did look into a hat with IR lights on the brim. It seems to work now, but looks like new cameras will be able to defeate the lights, and there's always the establishment that says no to hats?)
I think that it has to get worse before it gets better. In the UK there is so much apathy and general fear of the nebulous 'terrorists' that surveillance is broadly supported. I hope that our children's generation will be able to free themselves from the terrible world we are building them.
As much as I hope this is wrong, I think the logical consequence would be a transition from an imbalanced one-to-all surveillance society to an all-to-all surveillance society, i.e. everyone knows everyone else's secret. If we can't take the surveillance part back, all we can do is to equalize it. I don't know myself if this is dystopian or not. I'd just feel very uncomfortable, but maybe that's what a society really is.
Where's the line that separates generic image recognition from facial recognition?
Forget corporations for a moment and think about your own rights as a programmer. I want to tinker with image-similarity scores by downloading random images from the internet and comparing with a photo I just took in a public place. Oops, my photo just so happened to have a stranger's face that matches a photo in my database and that filename contains the person's name. Should that be illegal?
Consider the effects of a legal requirement to have an "opt-in" for facial recognition software. That was what the "consumer advocates" thought should be a minimum standard. Large corporations with trusted brands might be able to run such an effort, but any startup certainly could not.
Regulating what software I can write is a slippery slope. Compare facial recognition with encryption. If there's regulation for recognition software, then regulation for encryption will be coming right after. The worst-case scenario in my mind is if the federal government has a monopoly on any kind of software. Our best defense against a government/corporate monopoly on surveillance is not to ban it, but to democratize it.
What you can do in your own time is one thing, what you can do commercially is another.
Encryption is something you do by yourself or with another consenting party, facial recognition is something you do to someone else without their permission and possibly use for nefarious purposes.
There's nothing wrong with outlawing certain activities from the commercial sphere, or any sphere. It's not an assault on your freedom, its protection of my privacy? It's illegal to stalk and harass people in person or over the phone. It's illegal to serve people undercooked food or raw milk or whatever. It's illegal to breach HIPAA.
Are you next going to say its terrible that you can't access my medical records for your startup?
How about security cameras and genitalia recognition in the bathrooms at restaurants, is that cool too?
It's illegal to stalk and harass, it's not illegal to make phone calls. The issue is not facial recognition, it's the misuse. I'm all for gun control, not gun ban.
Cameras in the bathroom? Fine. Whatever. If that's the new normal, then I guess I'll get over it. Are you saying that will now be legalized? I'm pretty sure we don't need any new laws to prevent cameras in changing rooms. The "scary" scenarios that have been described in the other threads are already illegal for other reasons -- harassment, redlining (racial profiling), spam, etc.
You should be able to collect any data you want, and use it however you want?
Why not start a business face-recognizing people who show up at battered women's shelters and selling access online for $50?
Or how about completely legally standing a public street and making notes of the schedules of when people are and are not home, and selling access to that to probable burglars, should that also be legal?
The use of information can and should be regulated. Everything from insider trading to medical privacy.
People's opinions are remarkably malleable. Read some accounts of how soldiers change during and after fighting. Watch how the audience acts at a rock show. Check out the people on a nude beach vs the sidewalk just off the beach. Normal and acceptable is entirely situational. Walking in the street was normal. After the ad campaigns of the auto industry, we call it jaywalking.
I'm all for regulating (mis)use of information, but not the collection of information.
You're conflating regulating what software you can write with regulating what data you (or anyone else) can collect, use, and share.
It is perfectly possible to restrict, say, the systematic collection of facial images or the commercial or government use of facial images or the transfer of facial images to another party, without impeding casual, incidental use such as taking your own personal photos that sometimes happen to catch someone in the background.
Au contraire, much of machine learning (learned?) software is simply the data used to train it. I think we can all agree that generic image recognition is benign and should be permitted. How about a database of publicity photos from famous movie actors and actresses? Would it be OK to use that database to identify which celebrity I saw getting out of a limousine? And if that's permitted, then the regulators are tasked with determining how famous someone must be or how much the purpose of the image must have been for publicity. These kinds of questions are best suited for a case-by-case interpretation in the courts using current and slowly evolving privacy standards, not some broad new catch-all.
Asserting that good laws are "perfectly possible" is a little tragic given our long history of poorly designed laws. Not to mention mismanaged and corrupt regulatory agencies.
It's certainly true that we have problems both with our legislators not understanding technology and with their apparent willingness to help special interest groups more than their electorate at times.
However, those are orthogonal issues to the ethical principles and the technical aspects here. The same level of technology that can now be used to compromise privacy could also be used to help protect it, and we can surely do a reasonable job of distinguishing between the kind of inadvertent background imagery that comes from living in a world with other people and the kind of systematic, targeted collection and use of data that leads to some of the more serious privacy risks with the new technologies today.
So are we actually there yet? I was under the impression that, while face recognition has evolved to the point that face matching against a limited group of people (say, your Facebook friends) is feasible, we're still a long ways off from being able to put a face-scanner in a crowd in NYC and have it spot the 1 suspect among 10 million without a totally ridiculous rate of false positives.
This should be a top comment - this kind of tracking is not possible at scale and probably won't be for a long time. Identifying a person in a group of 100s/1000s has been a solved problem for decades. Consistently identifying a single person from a database of 100Ms/billions of people who are constantly gaining weight, growing facial hair, etc is impossible with today's technology; false positives will become an exponentially bigger problem as you increase the candidate space.
Perhaps one day increased camera resolutions will allow trackers to identify something humans can't, like retinal scans. This would allow cameras to basically "fingerprint" people, and will be super creepy.
I think that actually as you increase surveillance the problem gets simpler. If you're always in view of a camera then I can simply track your motion and I only need to recognise you once. Given that I've seen you in your car, I can already narrow things down significantly.
> Consistently identifying a single person from a database of 100Ms/billions of people
I don't need to, there aren't billions of people who are likely to be at the closest ATM to your house.
> false positives will become an exponentially bigger problem as you increase the candidate space.
To be honest, I think that this is the most likely thing to scare people, that you won't be allowed to fly because a computer made a mistake and everyone trusts it or can't override it. That the police get called when you go to pick up your son because you're the same height and rough build as a child molester who was released from prison yesterday
There are already devices that can rapidly scan irises of a crowd. It's also possible, as the sibling comment suggested, to correlate multiple datasets (wifi probes, unique phone CDMA/GSM/LTE IDs, location, behavior, physical limitations like maximum velocity, etc.).
I can verify they do not care about false positives. My high-flying career at Accenture ended abruptly in 2004 when I ended up on the no-fly list. Didn't get fixed until 2009, and fixed is sort of gray.
With sufficient data, you can narrow down the NYC crowd population quite a bit too. Whose smartphones are known to be nearby vs whose are known to be far away probably already gets you 90% of the way there.
I agree with the general idea put forth by the article. This is an important issue, and the future could bring a lot of bad things if we (as a society) are not careful.
Schneier makes it sound pretty scary. For a general audience, this is probably good. It takes a lot to make your average Joe start paying attention to something new.
But on a technical level, I can't help wondering, how realistic is the scenario he describes? Or, maybe the better question is, how immediate is the threat of universal face recognition? If we know what time horizon we're working with, maybe we can be better prepared.
I think Schneier makes some substantial logical leaps in the article that make it sound like automatic, ubiquitous facial recognition is a more urgent issue than it really is.
For example, he goes from this
> Today in the US there's a massive but invisible industry that records the movements of cars around the country. Cameras mounted on cars and tow trucks capture license places along with date/time/location information ...
to this
> This could easily happen with face recognition.
with no supporting evidence for how this feat of engineering will be accomplished. Recognizing letters and numbers on a license plate is one thing. Recognizing faces at random angles with random occlusions, hats, eyeglasses, makeup, etc., is quite another thing.
I found a couple of papers from CMU and UCF a couple of years ago where they look at the problem of recognizing people in photos at "web scale" [1]. The recall/precision rates of the algorithms they tested are pretty decent, but they're still pretty far from the dystopian future described in the article.
I'm not sure what "good as a person" means in the context of large scale facial recognition.
I know software is now scoring as people on various standard AI tests. But most people couldn't recognize a million other people correctly. The situation is kind of odd. It's like how engineering a car to drive automatically in a variety of controlled situations which might represent 90% of the normal driving. They are still nowhere near ready to drive on real roads.
The supposed advantages are perverse; Face recognition with a 1% false positive rate can translate one fugitive to 10 or 100 false arrests of random people.
A store clerk knowing your name when you walk in the store is mostly creepy and wouldn't help sales - the store that had their clerks saying goodbye by name to credit card holds a few years back have stopped.
So, benefits? Changes? The article is kind of light on the whole subject.
> store clerk knowing your name when you walk in the store is mostly creepy and wouldn't help sales
Saying your name might be creepy (but maybe people will become accustomed to it). Knowing your identity I think would certainly help sales, the same way it does when you shop online.
Knowing your identity I think would certainly help sales, the same way it does when you shop online.
How?
I suppose you could have store change it's stock based on who it knows has visited it. But that sounds cumbersome and speculative. The store might find itself removing the things people like to buy from that store and stocking things people prefer to buy from other stores and so wind-up selling less.
Kind of like when things I've searched for on amazon reappear as Facebook ads. It don't click through and buy 'cause I've already decided on whether or not to get them.
I'm surprised to find questions like this on HN. These are fundemental concepts that drive SV; while I don't expect the world to understand I expect it here.
There was a great discussion I wont be able to find about this recently on HN after an article about a zebra/leopard patterned couch. Thwarting an image id algorithim is not difficult and the researcher came on and spoke about the problems in the space similar to this xkcd[0] comic. It is a super complex problem to solve. How far away are we? It is like the turing test, everytime someone gets close the term is redefined. It is certainly coming, maybe reasonable models in ~5 years publicly acknowledged. What can someone really do to prevent it? Short of making an account every few months with a lot of your data but different pictures, what american doesnt have a photo that has been published on the internet? Even if you dont have facebook, someone you know does. The tech will take a while to dev and refine, and longer to deploy at scale, but I can't think of a scalable solution to this.
Nah, turns out that modern AI techniques are better than the brain at certain things. In this instance, the brain has huge amounts of volume dedicated to recognizing faces. AI don't have that same preference for faces; we can make AI recognize using any feature, including seemingly unlikely ones such as gait. A driverless car with no windows would probably do it, but then again the car itself will probably be bugged a la Samsung TVs.
There was a comic recently that had a main character who had little emitters constantly blasting his face with IR radiation, so it would just turn up as an overexposed blob on surveillance cameras. Of course all they need is an IR filter to combat this, but the idea is fun.
This article is a bit alarmist. I agree that government entities using this technology as a tool of oppression is definitely bad & going to happen somewhere but I'm not worried about the shop clerk knowing my political affiliation because there is zero profit motive there. You're talking about a truly massive database of customer info joined with facial info obtained...how? Is the DMV gonna start giving away my license to Home Depot? Is facebook going to torpedo their business by selling this info? I doubt it! Second, why would they want it? to creep me out when I walk into their store?
> Is the DMV gonna start giving away my license to Home Depot?
IIRC this already happens and businesses can buy DMV databases.
> Is facebook going to torpedo their business by selling this info?
Many businesses collect and sell this information. Where do all these online businesses, who charge users nothing, get their revenue? [EDIT: More simply said, that info arguably is the basis of the Internet economy]
> why would they want it?
To discriminate. They may offer different products or prices. They may discriminate because you are gay or transgender, because of your ethnic background, or because of your religious (e.g., Muslims) or political affiliation (e.g., communist, right-wing extremist, etc.). This can happen in more serious situations too, such as when dealing with government, law enforcement, or in employment situations.
Certainly such discrimination has been widespread for centuries and is today. Why would it be any different when they have new tools?
Seems like a massive amount of effort just to be a dick. They get all the info they could ever want from customer loyalty cards, this is a redundant and frankly useless waste of money.
I think it's unwise to underestimate your fellow humans' propensity to "be a dick", as you put it, even if they don't gain anything more than the satisfaction of treating others poorly.
Facial recognition + a database allows POWERFUL and fine grained discrimination!
Imagine being able to know ${Things} about people -- via analytics / The Internet -- whenever any prospective customer comes into your store.
You could refuse to do business with gay people, divorcees, adulterers, married people, transgender people, politicians, members of the opposing political party or religion, or even police officers with X number of complaints. You could exclude people from the wrong side of town, or who didn't go to the right schools, or whose parents were (or who themselves are) illegal immigrants.
Many of these things are Probably Legal (some are likely not), but most of them strike me as unjust treatment of others. The technology allows frightening things, and there are MANY people who would do so right now if given the ability. (Religious and political boundaries are one such place where people are quite willing to do so.)
I only touched on business owners. Now imagine that roving bands of jerks (or criminals) got their hands on the same technology or data, and could tell who was a stranger in town, or was more vulnerable than others, or fit their desired target criteria. It's pretty scary, and I'm sure that within ten years we'll hear stories of such abuse happening.
> I think it's unwise to underestimate your fellow humans' propensity to "be a dick"...
That tendency exists quite strongly in humans, yes. Unfortunate, but true. On the other hand, businesses also have the tendency to want to make money. If I've got a business, and I make it hard for group X to buy stuff from me, they're probably going to try to find someone else who wants more strongly to make money and/or less strongly to be a jerk. And that business will get their money, and I won't.
And there may be businesses that are okay with that. But it ought to be somewhat of a self-defeating behavior.
Note well: I am not claiming that this behavior is moral or legal.
The criminal aspects mentioned in your last paragraph is quite frightening, and more so because it is also quite probable...
> That tendency exists quite strongly in humans, yes. Unfortunate, but true. On the other hand, businesses also have the tendency to want to make money. If I've got a business, and I make it hard for group X to buy stuff from me, they're probably going to try to find someone else who wants more strongly to make money and/or less strongly to be a jerk. And that business will get their money, and I won't.
Which is true, although there are a few rubs:
1. It's not so easy to start a business, and if the group you exclude are small there's very little [edit - forgot to finish this sentence, sorry] incentive to open a new business just to cater for a small proportion of people. Depends on the business, obviously.
2. You're ignoring any influence other customers have. If 90% of your customers threaten to boycott you because you (bake cakes for gay weddings || print leaflets for republicans) it'd be good business sense to not serve that small percentage of your client base.
With 2, consider a "realistic" situation. In the future, all sex offenders will have their photos published on some public crime database. Cue outrage that sex offenders are being served in the local bar (or choose the establishment of your choice), they are then banned. Are people going to open up bars with the motto "sex offenders welcome here!"? To make people more wary of this, what happens when it thinks you're a sex offender because of a false positive?
I'm always really concerned when people argue that the free market will remove discrimination, and perhaps they're right in the long term but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that there was a fair amount of time when people in the US were discriminated against because of the colour of their skin (not to get into a discussion about now as it's not too relevant).
"And there may be businesses that are okay with that. But it ought to be somewhat of a self-defeating behavior."
This type of libertarian self-solution rarely works. Things do not self-defeat because the affected groups are small and grow slowly. Consider the restricted fly list -- part of it was was government lead but part of it was implementation lead -- companies decided their own filters. Some were horrible -- you selected "Muslim Meal" option and the next thing you know you cant get a boarding pass. Problem is, you dont always have options. If you got restricted form American Airlines, as I did, suddenly you found yourself with half the flight options. If you got flagged again by United, now you were in real trouble...are you going to fly from NY to Charlotte via Detroit?
Your comment is ill informed. As an example search radioshack and look what happened to the user data during the bankruptcy proceedings. Now ask yourself what happens if Facebook ends up in the position Myspace is in? For another example do some research into wifi tracking in shops.
It is a scary vision. However, the scary part seems to come not so much from the increasing data availability, but rather from the increased likelihood of discriminatory uses of such data. Enforcing non-discriminatory uses of data sounds like a hard problem to tackle, especially if we realize how diverse is the space of possible missuses (e.g., in law enforcements, business, and politics) and that this problem affects both humans and computer systems. As hard as this problem sounds, the article provides a great motivation for research that defines computationally what "discriminatory" means, as well as for the research aiming to design systems (both human and computer) that are privacy-protecting and non-discriminatory.
My default interpretive framework when I read something like this is, of course, nearly hysterical paranoia and sociopolitical despair. And, speaking as objectively as possible, I think those are not invalid responses. However, for the moment, I'm instead trying to imagine sociology/psychology of the first generation to grow up native to this environment, and I admit that it's fascinating to think about. What will the teenagers be like who grow up expecting to be identified and known everywhere they go, by friend and foe alike? How will it affect manners, speech, courtship rituals, expectations for entertainment/education/employment? Etc. So strange.
When surveillance systems are put in place and collected information stored for later use, irrespective of whether it's a personal, business, or government system, the people who get themselves in control of them will use the surveillance and/or information to steal from, preach to, discredit, and/or wear down the target/s, all of which ultimately equate to benefiting in some way at the target's expense. There's no such thing as unused surveillance capacity or unused collected information.
Watching Minority Report the other day, this reminds me of the automated retina scans in the movie. Really creeped me out when Tom Cruise was walking through a mall, gets picked up by the scanners and they start shooting targeted advertising at him.
Tangent:
I always chuckle at how prescient Minority Report was on some aspects, yet they didn't envision network storage or wireless communication -- do you remember at how they would transfer small glass disks all the time...how burdensome. LOL.
Walk into a store, and the salesclerks will know your name.
- they already do once you scan your store card
The store’s cameras and computers will have figured out your identity,
- store card
and looked you up in both their store database and a commercial marketing database they’ve subscribed to.
- store card again.
They’ll know your name,
- store card
salary,
- if you entered it and if you didn't lie when you filled out your store card form
interests,
- if you entered them and your didn't lie when you filled out your store card form
what sort of sales pitches you’re most vulnerable to,
- if the "deep data" / AI is actually correct
and how profitable a customer you are.
- store card
Maybe they’ll have read a profile based on your tweets and know what sort of mood you’re in.
- MAYBE. assuming the AI is anywhere near correct.
Maybe they’ll know your political affiliation or sexual identity,
- MAYBE, probably wrong.
both predictable by your social media activity.
- PROVE THIS.
And they’re going to engage with you accordingly, perhaps by making sure you’re well taken care of or possibly by trying to make you so uncomfortable that you’ll leave.
Considering that Target can tell whether you're pregnant or not before you do based on your purchases, I'd assume that online habits encode your preferences a lot more strongly that one would like to think.
You've over stated things, Target makes the pregnancy prediction based on pregnancy related purchases, someone making those purchases is going to be aware they are pregnant. In the article, a father is outraged that his teenaged daughter received an ad for baby clothes and complained to a store manager, he didn't know his daughter was pregnant.
But the point is really not whether your sexuality or political affiliation, or whatever characteristic is _really_ predictable. What is important is that people will _think_ they can predict it and then act accordingly- and treat you unfairly based on the knowledge they think they have.
The technology is certainly advanced enough and complex enough that a good salesperson can sell it to people who can't ever hope to understand it. In other words: it's consumer-ready as Google might say.
If for no other reason, video is a much more ubiquitous format. And due to our social norm if an agency was to ask for video record for "some reasons" it would be far easier both technically and politically than asking Walmart to extract all customer data from date X to Y.
Besides, your face is (for all practical purposes) all the data needed to identify exactly who you are, you name is just a few bit (albeit extremely discriminating one) of info and can have collisions.
Being able to efficiently do thing that was possible but inefficient is a huge deal. Especially since the government was designed with inefficiency in mind as a check of power. Removing them means increasing their power, and absolute power corrupt absolutely.
This is true, but I think it's an important distinction that store cards are typically opt-in (I haven't come across a store that requires such a card to shop there, except maybe Costco). A facial recognition system would, presumably, be automatic.
RMS has been advocating against using store cards for years. I guess in-store facial recognition could thwart the privacy efforts of people like him? (To some degree?)
Unless he's using cash, make no mistake, his purchases are being tracked in some capacity.
Why do you need a store card when a credit/debit card track has more than enough information to identify?
- Card number (useful on its own as an identifier)
- Name (not perfect, decent secondary info)
Granted, these don't generally make for a super-continuous history on someone, but they're pretty decent for the average person for a year or two.
Also, if you make any returns at one of these stores that you've previously used a CC, your real state-issued ID will be correlated with your purchases (via your CC).
Also, if you do any online shopping with a retailer and use the same cards in the store: instant correlation.
Checks? Necessarily correlated with DL and account numbers, even better than CCs.
Outside of cash: there're just too many ways to establish purchase histories for most individuals.
That elevator pitch is key. I have extensive knowledge about this issue but have a hard time coming up with it; I need to be prepared.
Change only will come through political pressure, and that requires public awareness. I had lunch recently with a journalist from a prominent publication, someone very well informed, and they told me that widespread surveillance wasn't real, a sort of urban myth. Organizations like the EFF have been unsuccessful and I think that's because they don't generate mass public awareness. It's up to us to create it, and we need a pitch.
EDIT: [deleted]