All these reports have the feelings of small rumblings or rumors of purges and famines that leaked out of the Soviet Union in the 30’s. The dismissal of all of them due to China’s size and growth really strengthens the analogy too.
Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day, committing some kind of crime. I mean the definition for loitering is so broad that alone gets most people.
The ad-tech companies of the world think they are criticized now, but they have no idea the judgment history will render for some of the attitudes and practices that have been promoted regarding data and privacy. Some of this stuff is as naive as Charles Lindbergh helping the Luftwaffe because he believed airplanes would connect all the peoples of the world and promote global peace. What is it with “connecting people” and really terrible ideas?
All totalitarian governments, not being very innovative, have thrived off of inventions that have been developed elsewhere and have been bearable, and then mutated into unrecognizable monsters under them.
> Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day, committing some kind of crime.
I think that is the big issue we will see and have seen recently.
Surveillance tools are better than ever in history. Many times, laws were created as deterrents to some behavior, that maybe shouldn't be laws, because it wasn't easy to nab everyone doing it. Back then cops, judges and more weren't as locked into forced outcomes i.e. three strikes, mandatory minimums etc and there was more humanity in corrections at that level.
Now that we have surveillance at this level and going up, we need to remove the criminalization of certain things otherwise everyone will be locked up.
Moral laws or making illegal non-violent/no civil violations actions will not work in mass surveillance, only laws that are violent and infringe on civil rights of others should remain.
An example might be the criminalization of drugs or old laws on the books. If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the country at least would have a record.
With surveillance this high and going up, we MUST decriminalize and re-evaluate every law. The problem is our 'corrections' and law enforcement, is that both have turned predatory along with the advancements in technology that have been used to erode privacy.
The Dutch police issued 9.2 million traffic fines on a population of 17 million. Most of this is a fully automated system from connected speed traps, to an 'invoicing system'.
I feel that if these things are fining apparently widespread behavior at such a scale the laws should change.
Last week a judge ruled that the Student Loan administration can use mandatory personal RFID equipped train tickets to detect scholarship fraud.
A mechanism no-one but the strongest privacy advocates had imagined would be used in this way.
>I feel that if these things are fining apparently widespread behavior at such a scale the laws should change.
You don't even need the law itself. If you've got the infrastructure to fine everyone who exceeds the speed limit in a place that it's not a big stretch to use dynamic speed limits set to the 90th percentile speed with only a little bit of lag.
Or just force cars to only be able to drive the speed limit. I don't like this option, but I feel like it's better than turning citizens into rolling ATMs.
Eventually, law enforcement will become dependent upon the speeding revenue, but the people will wise up and slow down to avoid the fines. Then how are they going to replace the lost revenue? Especially if it is "needed" because of onerous contract termination agreements agreed to.
> If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the
> country at least would have a record.
That idea seems deeply troubling if you're a White American. Meanwhile, this is the daily reality of Black Americans, because the police have been systematically enforcing these laws against people of colour.
Now we face a world where that same disproportionate enforcement may be applied to Democrats, or the young (who disproportionally vote against Republicans).
> may be applied to Democrats, or the young (who disproportionally vote against Republicans).
That doesn't make any sense! To affect elections, you'd need a really huge number of prisoners. Moreover, you'd need to deny prisoners the right to vote. Wait ...
Consider a hypothetical police officer who is against "leftists" (the police officer's definition is all that matters, not ours).
Right now, said police officer can and does enforce laws disproportionally against Black Americans because to the police officer, they're all leftists.
But if we give the police officer access to all sorts of profiling information about humans, when making a traffic stop, the police officer can be extra-zealous about performing a search if the person is profiled as being a "leftist."
The point is, prosecuting people for their political views has existed for some time, but it didn't scale well. Now it will scale extremely well, up to the point of wearing glasses and tagging people with certain social profiles in real time.
Not only surveillance, but the accountability has gone up too. Not only is it easy to be exposed performing morally debatable but illegal stuff but they are also permanently recorded by unknowable number of entities(news sites/blogs), shared across innumerable platforms and get judged by mobs you never knew existed, leading to a possibly life altering effect.
Most vague laws have been created to be enforced on some specific population. Now that they could be automatically used against anyone the ruling population which was not supposed to be affected is starting to question those laws. It is OK when mostly blacks, youngsters and poor people get jailed for jaywalking; not so much when upper middle class people are.
That's what a cynical person like me can take from your argument.
I don't think that's a road we really want to go down. Laws exist to solve problems, not persecute minority groups.
I have heard white supremacists use this logic to say that DUI laws unfairly target white people, because in major cities maybe white people have cars and the minority populations use public transportation. You could also use the same logic to say insider trading unfairly effects white people.
> "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Not really true. Many laws still on the books in southern states were created _explicitly_ to persecute minority groups.
You couldn't use the same logic to say insider trading unfairly effects white people because there isn't evidence that enforcement of insider trading is uneven, whereas there is evidence that enforcement (and sentencing) for loitering, jaywalking, and drug laws are biased against minority groups
That's a good point. I should have been more clear. When i said "that's a road you don't want to go down", I don't mean to say no laws have been created that don't have racial bias. That's definitely a problem, especially in the South.
But I have a problem with arkh's assertion that...
>> Most vague laws have been created to be enforced on some specific population.
Were that the case, there's unlikely to be the resources to act on every crime. However, having some 'dirt' on everyone means that it'd be easy to take action on any particular 'problem' person.
>An example might be the criminalization of drugs or old laws on the books. If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the country at least would have a record.
> Do governments who use this kind of 'selective justice' really need the pretext of an actual law being broken?
At least one former UK Home Secretary has said that it's a good thing to have laws that aren't usually enforced, as it gives the authorities something to use when they do want to go after someone.
So (for at least one country) the answer is "yes".
Yes. Any government can fall if there's sufficient public outrage[1]. And government employees of basically any government can make use of this. I remember driving with an off duty US police officer once and him pointing out which issue of code every car on the road was in violation of so that he could legally conduct a stop if he wanted to.
Look up 'mortgage headshot'. It's a type of fraud that is very common, but that is only prosecuted when it's necessary to compel a person to work with law enforcement.
More like 0.01% decide to lock up 100% of their political opponents supporters.
The War on Drugs was started by Nixon to target hippies and blacks, those who supported his opponents. I can imagine a War on X being brewed up by either side to do the same if they have the means to automatically enforce it.
Having recently read a lot more literature about the big picture social issues in the US from the 30 through the 70s the late '60s and early '70s was a time of stupid groups reacting to other stupid groups with tragic consequences.
The militant leftists and their bombs, the hippies and their antiwar stuff, the racists, the FBI/government and it's BS, the black power groups and their violence, they all were reacting to each other while failing to understand in any meaningful way the grievances of the other groups in any meaningful way.
Cracking down on the millitant left was right. They were the second the most destructive domestic terrorist movement (the post civl war KKK is 1st by a mile). The government at the time used it as an excuse to cast way to wide of a net because of personal beliefs (in aggregate) and because they didn't understand the where the problem was coming from. It's unfortunate.
If people hadn't been such idiots in the late 1960s there wouldn't have been a millitant left to crack down on. If civil rights of the late 1960s or the Vietnam war had happened a decade apart from each other we probably wouldn't be mopping it up in 2017. It didn't so here we are trying to wind down the war on drugs and demilitarize the police (and we'll probably revert some gun control too since it's part of the same anti-minority, anti-hippy package of knee jerk decisions).
In the 2040s we'll probably be in the same situation trying to wind down the post 9/11 expansion of government surveillance.
No, the War on drugs was specifically racially and politically motivated to help Nixon and his party. I don't have it at the moment, but there are tapes of Nixon and one if his advisors talking about this openly.
The guy who ran the beta version of the DEA at the time specifically used "marijuana" instead of the more common "cannabis," because he hated Mexicans and wanted to make people associate pot with an unpopular minority.
"What is it with “connecting people” and really terrible ideas?"
Hehe, nice framing. I'd say the answer is "power." Collectivising, aggregating and connecting people yields power, new abilities that exist as a product of increased network size.
Yuval Noah Harari (grand narrative historian) identifies this network effect as the defining characteristic of human progress. Increased size of a functional group.
The bottlenecks are travel and (more importantly) communication. To him, the difference between modern palaeolithic sapiens and archaic humans (including archaic sapiens chronospecies) is "fictions:" abstract concepts like kingship, nationhood, religion, law, money and such that allow cooperation between strange individuals. Airplanes yielded similar power.
Increasing cooperative group size and the quality of that cooperation yields power, a lot of it.
Air travel improved group size and quality. You can send a letter, visit or bomb places 1,000 km away within an hour. European ships allowed the subjagation of foreign places, transcontinental trade and centralised global administration.
You yourself are admitting that terrible evil can be done by governments without any of the advanced technology that some fret over.
It's not about the technology.
It's about the will of the government.
Think about all the horrendous evils rendered upon the citizenry of early nations and empires in the distant past. No advanced technology there. Just a twisted view of right and wrong.
What this tells us is that regardless of what technology is available, a good government will do good, and an evil government will do evil. That really goes for any entity. You name it.
Ok you’re definitely right with the technology thing not being an issue to “govs killing lots of people”.
Let me say that currently, because the technologies are new, not well understood, and not regulated by any kind of international treaty or norms (even national regulations sometimes) they can and will be abused in ways that are hard for other countries to protest against in a credible manner.
In China during The Great Famine under Mao, 50 million people died. I know numbers and history can seem so distant, but that’s more than the number of people who died in WWI and near the low end of estimates for WWII (especially the early estimates).
It was insanity on a level no society has ever perpetuated. A good example of this was that 40% of all structures were torn down during this period. Incredible. It’s all probably worse than we know too due to a lack of records and archives that individuals have access too.
The National Book Award winner this year was about Russian totalitarianism called “The Future is History”. If this is true, the future is a much worse place for the Chinese people.
Sure it’s about the will of the gorvening body. Then you’ll have to agree a good bunch of current western societies have governments willing to do evil or let evil be done for a reason or another.
Nothing is black and white, but the current trends about how people are equaly treated and human life is valued is still in the darker greys in my opinion.
I worry that technology can leave no room for anything except dystopias. For example, it seems privacy is going to become a thing of the past, and there's little we can do about it short of smashing the looms.
Why are you so eager to ignore the effects of technology? You'll notice in history that the biggest wars/massacres were committed with revolutionary technologies.
Privacy is about individual freedom, and in all societies there is a tradeoff between this and social cohesion. True liberalism aspires to achieve a stable society with minimal encroachment on personal freedom.
I get why human rights orgs would want to speak against this technology, from a Western philosophy and law perspective.
China does not have the same philosophical or legal lineage. They will have to find out on their own whether the cons outweigh the pros.
Theoretically, if the system is not corrupted by misinformation (false or incomplete information), it has the potential to keep the streets free of wanted criminals --which is a noble goal. The question is whether keeping criminals off the streets will trample on innocent people's rights and if so whether the general Chinese public would accept that deal.
That said, I can see this technology also taking off in some public areas in the West --ports of entry, for example.
I also think human rights orgs also are concerned that China might show enough effective use of the tech that states outside Asia will want to at least trial it out.
"Wanted criminals" in China's case might be someone who posted criticism of ruling party, mentioned Tiananmen Square protests, support Tibet independence, belongs to certain religious group etc. Of course, western countries are not much better, but it just highlights the fact that we, as society, should fight mass-surveillance as it will be used for thought control. The power is simply too great and alluring to be trusted to any entity.
>It also tells officers whether the possible perps are on the run from the law, the address of the hotel where they are staying and information related to their internet usage.
Strange thing to include for something designed to find wanted criminals. A great addition however if you wanted to do something like prevent people who have seen/made certain posts from entering public spaces/events. You can kill the protest before it even begins.
This kind of tech has already come to Western ports of entry. Why else would Snap, Inc. have millions of dollars worth of contracts with Customs and Border Protection (alongside dozens of other contracts with DHS, DoD, etc).
I personally do not believe the tech is as `high-tech` they say as it is. Its not easy to get someone's bio information just from a small camera. Edit: Think some of this might be BS fluff stuff.
More importantly, I do not think it would help to catch people that much other than further police's assumptions as to who is a criminal (if all they have is name, gender, address, ethnicity). Even putting that concern to the side, think about how many people a foot solder can "scan" on a crowded train station.
And now have that work without depth data, increase the population size from one person to 1+ billion, apply to moving video, aim for high precision and high recall, keep it battery friendly as you distribute to all police, somehow get the classifier of 1B unique people onto all these embedded devices, keep it up to date as people age, etc....
The article mentions that the glasses are connected to a smartphone like device. That can handle the battery and computing, all you need on the glasses portion is the camera. You don't load all the data onto the device, you just ping back to a central database (that way you also get to track every location that someone shows up at). To keep things up to date you simply pull the latest images of the person from a commercial partner who will identify and photograph them much more frequently than the government.
>Banks are beginning to use facial recognition instead of cards at cash machines while the travel and leisure industry also sees opportunities — China Southern Airlines this year began doing away with boarding passes in favour of the scheme.
If your facial recognition data in the system is out of date you will eventually find it difficult to withdraw cash or travel. People will update it themselves.
Wouldn't they do something like take all wanteds from each local precinct, up to 10000 from each village, top 10000 from local township, top 10000 from local county, top 10000 from local prefecture, etc...?
I mean you're not trying to ID every person in front of you. You want to be able to pick out known bad elements within your coverage zone.
I don’t disagree that doing image classification at scale with the parameters you’re describing is non-trivial.
But I was attempting to rebut GP’s point that a small camera is incapable of performing facial recognition. That’s plain incorrect. Speed/scale are orthogonal issues.
First, faceid is a depth camera not a photo camera. It’s also quite high resolution.
Second of course you CAN do recognition on something that’s low resolution. But if the question is how many labels can you correctly identify with high precision and recall... well... that’s a harder problem.
By that I mean, I understand they don't have a political say. They don't get to "vote on the issues" like others might [the party makes those decisions]. At the same time, I would tend to think if you put the question to your Chinese on the street over there they will favor this technology (and its use) with a few conscientious objectors who will be few and far between.
Because overt conscientious objectors will have their social credit scores lowered. Do you not see the oppression? Does this not parallel the Soviet Union?
Just like you, I believe we will achieve this some day. The problem is that if the system is corrupt - and it very much looks like it is, anywhere in the world, not just in China - these tools allow that corrupt system to live on, without correction.
Technology has long passed the advance of society and individual human minds, and that is a major problem, for which I have no solution for - nobody does.
Please let society catch up, let basic income become reality (essentially let us not worry about lowest level of the Maslow Pyramid), and only after that have this level of control. There is an incredible difference between a thief who steals food because of hunger, and someone who steals from banks for the thrill and fun, but this level of tech will only be useful on the first, who'd instead deserve help.
TFA: "The app brings up the (scanned person's) vital
information, including name, ethnicity, gender and address (..), the address of the hotel where they are staying and information related to their internet usage."
Wow. So just by looking at you, they can see how often you visit Hacker News - or what else.
Rob Lake's comment is pretty spot on (I'm taking the liberty to repost w/o his authorization):
""The app brings up the suspect’s vital information, including name, ethnicity, gender and address." Presumably version 2 of the app will also pop up the person's social credit score."
That being said, this will definitely come to the west sooner or later. I mean, doesn't London already have cameras at every street corner for instance ?
This is exactly what comes up when the police run a plate.
The only difference is facial recognition vs numbers and letters.
Querying for more invasive information such as medical history, sexual orientation, online accounts, "undesirable people" they are acquainted with) is a simple as a DB connection string and a select statement.
License plates are much more unique than faces and they do not change over time and you can't put a hat and sunglasses on them. What they lose in quantity they make up in quality. They are a much bigger intrusion but for a large majority of the population instead of literally everyone. The difference isn't very meaningful from a surveillance POV since you can build shadow profiles.
Two can play at the "I don't care about your problems because they don't affect me" game.
Some people live in rural areas with little to no government infrastructure that can be used for dragnet surveillance. They don't have to care about the government tracking faces with the subway security cameras.
That's a dumb game to play. Dragnet surveillance is bad in all forms.
After watching various films where organisations are able to pull up feeds from cameras absolutely anywhere in the world, I'm wondering how long it will be before there's a mandatory internet connection and back door on all 'security' cameras sold.
Face recognition exists, is becoming trivial and this has implications.
I saw a demo of sorts about 6 years ago, and heard rumors of various research projects @ FB. Banner tracking in malls that link banner "views" to "conversions" using a camera armed cash registers. Hi-res cameras on streets that collect data like wildlife tracking collars. A stadium cam that can id all the people at a match. A smart building that knows who's inside it & where. Casino cams that dispatch cocktails waitresses to VIPs wherever they are. Casinos've been using face recognition since early days, for persona non grata identification. Coffee shop loyalty stamps. School attendance. Prison monitoring, with relationship graphs and ML conspiracy detection. Traffic Analytics....
There are a ton of applications, commercial, security, intelligence or general nosiness. IMO, the best way of thinking about face recognition is: Google Analytics will now work for physical reality.
All this stuff just exists. FB (and many others) have an enormous, proprietary set of tagged photos. You could probably create your own set just scraping social media and google image search. Some applications don't even need it. Face recognition works. Cameras are high-res & cheap. The software is fast. Customers want it. It will happen.
We (our generation) has not shown the political will (or competence) required to create new rights and limitations on power sufficient to moderate this kind of technology, thus far. The only thing preventing wide-scale & unlimited use is creepiness feelings and that is temporary.
Putting the technology onto AR robocop glasses is just an illustrative way of demonstrating implications. If this is well implemented, every police force will want it in some form. Fugitives are needles-in-haystacks and I suspect this will turn up a ton of them. It's probably a genuinely useful police tool, unlike the dragnet digital snooping they do.
A bit of a strong idea, but what if we just outright say that face recognition is unethical?
I have a hard time finding any use that is positive for society. Advertising and surveillance. Given that, what if we try to convince as many people as possible to not research this tech, nor work for any company working on this.
You wouldn't work for a weapons manufacturer, maybe the same metrics need to be applied to adtech and all this other tracking stuff
You can't make people forget technologies you don't like selectively. The more we advance in adjacent technologies (like in autonomous driving) the easier it will become to advance in face recognition, to the point where just a tiny group of people can develop it.
Fighting technology with artificial bans have never worked, and privacy or ethics based arguments won't work now either. The only hope is better technology of controlling the government: better ways to vote, better ways to monitor financial dealings of politicians.
If, people lose their privacy, but government loses it's privacy too, ordinary people will be the ones who benefit the most.
Well... the ban on using nuclear weapons has worked so far. The ban (to the extent it exists) on using unwarranted digital data dragnets in civilian policing has at least limited its use some.
Not that I disagree with the larger points, it's an uphill fight.
First, arms industries and even mercenaries don't seem to have much difficulty operating. So, whatever boycotts individuals might practice don't really do much. Even tobacco companies find employees, and no one likes them.
Second, we (in practice, eg eu cookie laws) rarely define these effectively. Is face recognition the problem? Let's ID people based on some other markers. You'd probably need very broad, principled, constituion-esque language. It is illegal to de-anonymise, store data or somesuch. My guess is that this will be almost impossible politically with bootleggers and Baptist's left right and centre.
There are just very few examples of what we would need, in modern legislation.
I guess we have different levels of confidence in consumer action-like initiatives.
One sleazy startup is a rounding error to yc. Online snooping is worth at least 100 bn to Google and FB, most of the revenue of two giant and otherwise desirable startups. Also, it's important to all the businesses that buy these ads, the creators that publish on YouTube (for example, but they honestly get very little from this), etc.
Well yes, but why should we not ostracize those people like we presumably would do to others who committed, participated in, or collaborated with atrocities?
Serious question/statement looking for an answer here—I don’t understand why every time an article along the line of this gets attention it makes me wonder if anyone out there is working on two things:
1. Educating the general population how the latest technologies can/are being used to affect their privacy
2. Working hard to be an independent, trustworthy part that scrutinises the government
I honestly don’t understand the general attitude of most of the comments on articles like this, particular when you are not living in a country where censorship is “okay”.
In an ideal society (in my opinion) the government would act in the best interest of the society and the government is scrutinised by a well-informed population. This is certainly not what is happening in most, if not all, countries; but seeing some of the comments on HN repeatedly that don’t go beyond “scary as” or “this is not okay” is quite disappointing and makes me wonder where else I should look for reasonable opinions sometimes.
Have we not learn anything from storeis about govermental mass surveillance programs in recent years? How about perhaps we should all sit down, think, and set standards for how to protect everyone while setting encforcabke standards for what is an isn’t okay?
I think/believe there's lack of "external stimulus" for doing that. Unless you have a channel where a big part of the audience is both intelligent and independently thinking, your message get's no traction.
Simple defences of this or that extreme get a lot of attention because anyone can understand that. Maybe it's time the average "above average brained citizen" grow up and start uniting. But then we all know what can happen to such groups, either being eradicated or hijacked by political interests.
Has anyone played with Baidou`s Face Ai Products , I cant read Mandrin and The site is impossible to navigate with google transelate.@ http://ai.baidu.com/tech/face
Would really appreciate a pointer to a independent performance eval of the same .
Apparently "立即注册" means "Sign up now"! So you will have to go through that and lovingly translate each field. If you right-click in Chrome and click Inspect on a textbox you will see they have English names for their control namess (like name="userName") ... lol.
>the newest use of facial recognition technology that has drawn concerns among human rights groups
why are they getting up in arms about this? networked cameras with facial recognition have been around for years. what's so different about mounting it on a police officer's head?
> what's so different about mounting it on a police officer's head?
I'm not even mad at the implementation in general, the article implies that the officer first identifies a suspicious person and then engages the technology to make an identification. However, it's probably due to the fact that China is a country where your religion can get you arrested or kidnapped by the state.. so, it's still unsettling.
The use of such invasive practices is unsettling even in countries where such things aren't regular (now)... Politics change, and what is acceptable changes. Any technology or legal tool available to the government will eventually be used in the worst way imaginable.
Remarkably close form factor to Glass, but definitely not something Google would be participating in. Glass Enterprise Edition is much sleeker, this has a much more boxed-off front. Looks like they may be using the same projector-style display as Glass, but it's covered so that an onlooker can't see if it's displaying anything or not.
Fairly thick tether cable, seems thicker than you'd need for just power, unlikely it operates standalone. Could be like a USB-C cable, maybe, to run all the power, display, and camera data to another unit on her person?
Notice that the smart glasses tech is improving fast. Intel recently showcased a very convincing (according to a reporter) prototype called "Vaunt". One advantage is that it looks basically like a normal pair of glasses.
I did see Vaunt! For someone who already wears prescription lenses, that looks fantastic. (And the camera was never a key perk of my Glass unit to me.) The biggest thing right now for me, is what software I can run on it, and how much control I have over that software.
I've been fiddling with a Vufine, which I can connect to pretty much any HDMI feed. Very cool, though it's a fair bit larger and bulkier than the state of the art.
Since this thread is about an article mentioning Black Mirror, I am reminded of the episode "crocodile". It depicts a tech that allows insurance companies and law enforcement to tap into people's memory and extract images of what has been seen.
Reading visual information from the mind is still far off, but if someday smart glasses become widespread, and assuming that they backlog their video input to the cloud or something, then for all intents and purposes, it'd be basically the same.
A very significant fraction of the population already wear glasses, so it's not too far fetched to imagine that soon, everything we see will be logged somewhere.
Why is this not evoking a stronger response from the public? Or globally? Mass surveillance has always been a troubling possibility with computer vision.
I remember a client who approached us a few years ago to develop software to surveil his employees in departmental store (containing no particularly special commodity). To track his employees 24-7. We refused to take up the project. I can't believe we are on the way to implement to the same idea at this large a scale!
No matter what the short term benefits are, I believe the long term effects are going to be very very unpleasant. Orwell's world doesn't seem too far off.
> The system is part of China’s efforts to build a digital surveillance system able to use a variety of biometric data — from photos and iris scans to fingerprints — to keep close tabs on the movements of the entire population.
Currently in some country people pay to live in cities or neighborhood with better security theatre. I can imagine 50 years from now when you'll be recorded and traced everywhere people will pay for the privilege of living in closed neighborhood with no sensor inside.
While the tech is interesting, I'd like to know the security of the backend system and the data access system. Poor security allowing it to be manipulated by others could make it a powerful tool for all sorts of criminals or foreign governments. Like Stalin said, its not who votes that matters, its who counts the votes. Likewise the recognition might be perfect but the data is fake.
Good, technology like this is good. Worrying about potential misuse of this technology is misplaced worry. Our concern is better placed on forming governments that will use this technology for the common good (whatever that is determined to be) than on the availability of the technology itself.
It's not about the technology.
It's about the will of the government.
Think about all the horrendous evils rendered upon the citizenry of early nations and empires in the distant past. No advanced technology there. Just a twisted view of right and wrong.
What this tells us is that regardless of what technology is available, a good government will do good, and an evil government will do evil. That really goes for any entity. You name it.
Government is never good or bad. If government has a will, it can only be to preserve itself. That is why it is so important to hold it accountable, to align its objective with the will of the society. Weirdly, Chinese government is driven by the fear that it can be overthrown if the economy stops growing, thus it delegates so much focus to economic investment. With technology like this, they might, in one day, think they are no longer have such concern anymore.
Yes. You have always had to supply a photo for a Chinese visa. A fingerprint requirement was added recently (mid 2017 I believe) at all the Shenzhen/HK border points (ferry, 3x land crossings) but it sounds like it hasn't yet reached all the other airports/border crossings yet.
I visited China on tourist visa in December (2017) and didn't have to give up any biometrics other than photos/videos from the cameras placed everywhere.
I think we romanticize "being on the lamb". For the 99.999% of the time, if someone is a "wanted man", it's much better for society if he is apprehended. I don't see this as a threat.
If, however, every innocent person were tracked, and crimes were generated based on observations ( like souped up red-light cameras for every imaginable crime ), and charges were created automatically ( and algorithmically ), that would suck. Or, it would make us realize most laws suck and we'd remove them.
I can't help but disagree with your 99.999% assessment.
I feel like at best it might be 50%. At which point, it's horrible for society to be rolling the dice on every person in prison, if they should be there or not.
I would refer you to the Innocence Project [0] for a useful exposition of wrongful convictions, and error rates therein.
You're making a false comparision between none and many when it seems like a few would be a much nicer place to live after accounting for civil offenses and the points made by parent.
This technology puts a human face to technological surveillance, there has to be some minimum psychological cost for everyone there which may outweigh the claimed benefits.
Do we even know what an "outstanding warrant" consists of in China? Granted, I may be naieve about what it represents in the US, but I hope it's something that comes from a reasonably transparent and fair process. In a totalitarian state, it could mean something else.
The question becomes: Who is being rounded up, and why? This seems more important than the specific technology used.
I happen to live in a neighborhood where the very presence of a police officer would attract notice.
From the article: "The app brings up the (scanned person's) vital information, including name, ethnicity, gender and address (..), the address of the hotel where they are staying and information related to their internet usage."
It gets worse: many are essentially wanted for being the wrong skin color. A lot of laws disproportionately impact people of color. AKA systemic racism.
Downvoting it doesn't make it not true. See this article for example:
The owner will, if they would like the car to be legal to drive with updated license plates. It is a minor but important distinction. I can't speak directly that no states in the US operate differently. but as far as I know, you don't become a wanted person for parking tickets.
You realize this is China, the same government that literally ground their citizens to a paste with tanks?
Idk why everyone is talking about this in such impartial terms, this is a totalitarian state that has no concept of civil liberties. The idea that this is going to be used just for mere criminals is a pipe dream.
Unless you classify criminals as those who disagree with the CPC. This is going to be used to repress the population, without a doubt.
"The same government that..." -- Hmm, I think government is comprised of people, and the people that did that have likely aged out.
This government is like the son or daughter of that government. And this government has realized many free market principles (and certainly many other lessons). It's not the same, nor totally different.
Either way, I have to talk about it impartially, as if I were contemplating its use in the states.
Huang Shike was arrested in 2016 in Xinjiang province, three months after he formed a discussion group about Muslim worship on the messaging app WeChat, according to the official website China Judgments Online
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-jails-muslim-huang-shike-...
>And this government has realized many free market principles
If there is one thing to be learned from the former communist states + whatever China currently is, it's how little "free market principles" have to do with things like human rights, civil liberties or democracy.
China is a totalitarian state with lip service to the free market. No one believes China has any of the freedoms it espouses. It's about as "free market" as a ponzi scheme with zero transparency into its markets, debt, companies, etc. Generation means nothing because they select for true believers.
The same people crushing people with tanks got promotions and are now running the government.
Like...you're so far off from reality idk what to say :(
Would you please not use HN for nationalistic/political battle? You've posted a bunch of such comments to this thread, it's not what this site is for, and it destroys the intellectual curiosity that it is for.
I've hardly said anything about China. You've however said it is completely equivalent to running people over with tanks. I think you are slightly off the deep end, and you view my moderateness as the opposite of your view, when I merely am a less extreme version. Haha. You.
I said nothing of the sort, I was merely saying the same country that engaged in those actions is also the same implementing this technology, and it would be naive to think about it as just technology.
Tech has users and it's important to consider who is using it. And those same people in positions of power now are the ones who actively murdered their own citizens in 1989. Idk why everyone is ignoring the elephant in the room, this is more than glasses and you cannot and should not separate the two.
Given that some filters may throw the facial recognition off the scent, probably some kind of makeup or a combination of fake scars, different hairstyle, eye bags should be enough.
I saw Facebook misidentifying siblings of different gender with a year difference in age. The bone structure of their faces is similar, all the rest is different.
In the future, people of the internet are unable to write about new technology without resorting to increasingly tiresome, lazy and spurious references to a popular British Twilight Zone remake.
Yes, in many cases the uses of tech in China are disturbing (like the supposedly planned social credit system).
But this case? It's the job of the police to find people. Facial recognition helps it (although, I suspect, it won't be as flawless as advertised). How is it functionally different from the recognition tech in airports? Because the cops look scarier?
Even the police/government can contain bad actors, some might even like the cover.
The problem is when access to private data goes beyond the need, probabilistically people will abuse it, especially people with an authoritarian slant that are tripping on the power.
Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day, committing some kind of crime. I mean the definition for loitering is so broad that alone gets most people.
The ad-tech companies of the world think they are criticized now, but they have no idea the judgment history will render for some of the attitudes and practices that have been promoted regarding data and privacy. Some of this stuff is as naive as Charles Lindbergh helping the Luftwaffe because he believed airplanes would connect all the peoples of the world and promote global peace. What is it with “connecting people” and really terrible ideas?
All totalitarian governments, not being very innovative, have thrived off of inventions that have been developed elsewhere and have been bearable, and then mutated into unrecognizable monsters under them.