The issue with governments implementing mass warrantless surveillance is not training or standards, NIST or otherwise.
It should be straight-out illegal. Governments do not have "free speech" rights.
As for private citizens doing it: I think there are already sufficient laws about recording people without their consent. You can hire someone to stand on a corner and watch for a specific person to walk by, but a law prohibiting you from recording everyone who walks by is most likely going to withstand a court review. It's a question of scale.
I feel like this has the same basic shape as the problem of industrial pollution. Instead of the classic "diffusion of responsibility", there's more a "diffusion of injury". Theoretically, class-action lawsuits are supposed to handle this, but those are basically toothless when a government organ can hide its process for "security" reasons and then have the case dismissed for lack of standing (cf. Jewel v. NSA).
From my understanding, don't many places like big retail stores or malls already use facial recognition with their security systems? Whether it be to deal with flagging banned individuals who come on premises, or for things like tracking where people go in a mall. These kinds of things privately I think are already used a lot.
There's probably a legal distinction, but personally I really don't want, say, my grocery store tracking how long I spent in which aisles to add to my advertising profile.
(Yes, I use rewards cards, but I have the option to not enter my phone number and pay cash if I want to exclude a particular purchase from that dataset.)
FYI with a lot of rewards cards you can just get the card and then do nothing but just use the card. Don't install an app and don't add a phone number. I've also been successful using fake phone numbers, even 555 ones.
Not really, it's antisocial behavior either way. This is just splitting hairs anywhere but a courtroom.
Anyway, a mall is a public space in the context of recording without consent. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy. The law needs to be updated to reflect the vastly more invasive technology we have now compared to when these statutes were written to reflect actual social mores.
I think it would be a fantastic idea for the government to surveil road infrastructure. We spend a crap ton of our GDP just on healthcare addressing the negative impact of traffic violence. Not to mention everyone knows someone that has been killed or affected by this. Outright saying the government shouldn’t monitor this is in bad taste.
You can argue that the solution is to stop doubling down on our bad investment, bad that is much less feasible than installing a bunch of traffic cameras.
For those who haven't encountered the term before: "traffic violence" is another way of describing "car accidents" that emphasize that injury due to automobiles is not inevitable and should be worked to be eliminated.
I do find it hard to believe rockson doesn't know anyone who has been involved in a car accident if they live in the US.
Hey, I want to thank you, erikaww, and underbiding for pointing me at a great research topic: a big rock I can turn over and see what's slithering around under there:
How about workplace accidents? They are also not inevitable and should be reduced. Are they "workplace violence"? Clearly not, that already means something else.
That is why it is accurate to call "traffic violence" a propaganda device.
You’ve never been in accident or almost hit by a car? You don’t know anyone that has died that way? Really?
Infinitesimal? It’s one of the leading causes of death among youth on the order of suicide, homicide and drug overdoses. Calling it infinitesimally small is horribly offensive.
It’s a big reason why our life expectancy is lower than peer countries. Again to reiterate, we spend a ton of our GDP just in healthcare to address traffic violence. Modern fire departments mostly address car accidents rather than fires.
You clearly don’t know what you are talking about and you are going to hit a sore spot in many Americans
"Accident" implies a lack of blame. The vast majority of vehicle "accidents" are not.
If you're speeding to pass someone and hit an oncoming car, that's not an accident.
If you're impatient and try to squeeze by a bicycle and hit them, that's not an accident.
If you're texting on your phone and rear-end the car in front of you, that's not an accident, it was a conscious decision.
If your transmission seizes or your wheel fails off so you fly off the road into something (and you haven't been ignoring maintenance on your rust bucket for so long that you should expect this), that's probably an accident. But that's an infinitesimal fraction of vehicle incidents.
Stopping the deliberate debasement and pollution of our language. That's what I'm gaining. Or trying to.
Call it what it is ("traffic accidents"), and we can stop arguing. Other countries have fewer accidents? OK, that's worth talking about. I didn't "miss the nuance" because I'm not responding to that right here.
Or "bad road engineering" if that's what you want to talk about.
Language is living. Get off your high horse. People are allowed to invent and use new words and terms. Language evolves with use, not by people like you holding on to dear life for every little thing.
Inventing inflated words to make something old sound like a fresh crisis is indeed debasement and pollution. I guess you don't know or care what that is.
So don't tell me what to say. You can keep doing it and I can keep calling it out, and there isn't a thing you can do about it.
Actually, this is incorrect. Pen registers are generally considered fine because they are applied in a specific, limited manner, with minimal injury to the privacy of the populace. There are specific legal tests applied to surveillance technologies and the info they gather that exactly weigh the harm to the privacy of the public.
Carpenter v. United States I think is one of the landmark cases that has started to signal the impending curtailment of unabridged third-party doctrine. Kyllo v. U.S. laid some groundwork as well, I believe unless I've mixed it up with another case in which the court recognized it must balance the ever expanding capabilities granted to law enforcement by new technology against the right of the populace to maintain their expectations of privacy. In part, those tests have to take into account the impact of the particular means being employed. In the Kyllo case, a thermal imager being used to see through the walls of a structure without a warrant constituted an infringement of the 4th Amendment because accepting that law enforcement could do this would be to let law enforcement intrude through artifice where historically they would not have been allowed to tread without warrants. Applied to the entirety of the population, this would represent a wholesale nullification of the 4th Anendment by mere accident of now having a sensor exist that could make that previously private, public. Based on said analysis, your assertion talls short. It is in fact the goal of the Court to specifically not infer that just because something is authorized for use in a singular instance, does not mean it's character does not change when applied a billion times.
Courts are not computers. They are not stupid. They business of weighing nuance is sorta their thing, in spite of how annoying they can be at utterly torturing language when they want to do something a plain reading won't let them do.
I'm ok with this if it's also banned for everyone else. Otherwise this will just be laundered through private enterprise, the only party less trustworthy than the government.
Democratic governments have privileges bestowed on them by their constituences. I don't remember where the US Constitution gives any branch of government "free speech" rights. It definitely has some protections for speech of officials in Congress and in courts.
Authoritarian governments, of course, have all the rights they manage to grab. Look what Russian officials say. I suppose that North Korean officials can say anything their bosses tell them to say, any public opinion notwithstanding.
>The government is protected for speech related to its duties, in clearly spelled out ways.
..which is a different claim than "governments have no free speech rights." They do, just limited in ways that individual free speech rights are not. But even individual free speech rights aren't absolute.
This is a blanket statement needing substantiation, but then, so was mine and I don't feel like doing research. Maybe some legal scholar will weigh in.
I predict a case about this will reach the Supreme Court in the next few years.
I just want to piggy back here. There's often counter arguments about how laws say that when you're in public you have no expectation or right to privacy.
First off, this is not true, you definitely have some rights to privacy in public (an trivial example is using a public restroom). The law also is based on what is reasonable, and I don't think nearly everyone would think it is reasonable to expect some privacy if you walked down an alley to get away from others or went to a more secluded area. These are often explicitly why people do such things.
Second, recognize that many of these laws were written long before the average person had a camera and microphone in their pockets (not to mention high quality). The environment changed and it makes sense that our laws should change to. So even if you reject the first point these arguments about "what the law says" are still not enough to dispel concerns because we can in fact change the laws. More so, we _should_ constantly be updating laws due to our changing environments and how we learn about things as they happen.
And yeah, there's also a significant difference between a private person and a government doing these tasks. The government has a lot more power, and this does mean they require higher scrutiny and accountability even if you have complete faith in them (yes, this also means corporate entities, since the concern is power dynamics). Scale certainly has changed in the last 100, 50, 20, and even 10 years. It happened fast and no matter what side you are on, you can't ignore that things have changed and are about to change even more.
The fact that people so many have to be explicitly told they have no expectation of privacy by people online kind of proves that opposite, that the average person does expect some natural right to privacy and has to be instructed otherwise.
Exactly. If it's news to people then they clearly had some expectation. But I think it's easy to fool yourself into thinking this isn't true post hoc knowing and especially if you're someone who visits HN and is more keen on the details.
I think it's also worth noting that most people don't want this to happen even when they do know. Of course some people don't care but even they do when they learn how it's being used
> Although it's a good thing that a good deal of Americans have plenty of guns to defend themselves (unlike us, who reside outside of the US)
Getting a gun is trivial about anywhere, btw, and in EU or latam ammunition enough for self defense is little trouble either. The fgc-9 and 'but what about ammo' are excellent education for curious Europeans.
In practice I assure you people don't notice one concealing a gun (especially in gun naive places) and for anyone who isn't a moron, it isn't pulled out unless they're trading a casket for a court docket.
I'm not religious anymore, but wasn't it Paul who made the argument that we should respect temporal authority and their temporal laws, because it was God Himself who allowed them to become an authority in the first place?
>fgc-9
Isn't it a bit too big to carry concealed for self-defense purposes?
That aside, don't 3d printed guns jam much more frequently than "real" guns?
So, for example, if you're in a life and death situation, and you live in a country that doesn't allow the concealed carrying of guns, and your opponent is a mafia member - who is, for all practical purposes, untouchable by the corrupt class of bureaucrats who are there to purportedly enforce and carry out the law (like the beauty of a country i find myself in) - and has a "real" gun pointed at you, and all you have is little better than a glorified plastic bb gun (because these days, unless you have a father or grandfather who had bought a gun 20 years ago to give to you today, buying a real gun is not as trivial as you make it sound, at least where I am), who wins nine times out of ten?
Like, sure, I've read articles about how there are resistant forces in some south east asian country (I forgot which one exactly and im too lazy to look it up right now, nor is it important to what im about to say) that are fighting a dictatorial military regime, and the resistant forces do use 3d printed guns; but the only reason they're doing so is because, one, before the conflict happened the citizenry didn't have a legal "right" to buy guns and so at the beginning of the conflict they had no real amount of "real" guns to use, and, two, they kill the oppressive military officers and take their "real" guns because they're just better.
But keep in mind, they're fighting an actual war, and don't have to conceal their guns (3d guns are too big to conceal in everyday settings), and two, even if someones 3d gun jams, there will be someone else with them to shoot at the opposite side trying to kill you (i.e not something likely to happen in a country that is not the US, where people aren't allowed to carry around guns for self-defense purposes)
Fgc-9 jams more frequently than a Glock. The barrel and ballistics were found to be near that of a Glock at least at lower round counts. Functionally it is a 9mm pistol which is what most law enforcement carry in my country. It is large but not unreliable at least in sub-1000 round counts.
Given the alternative is a glorified bb gun as you put it, or dealing with the same mafioso, it's not clear to me the calculus is so clearly dismissed as you put it. Certainly wasn't to the German Kurd 'Jstark' who invented it and indeed concealed it on German soil.
I suppose i was a bit overly harsh with calling 3d guns what I did
> Certainly wasn't to the German Kurd 'Jstark' who invented it and indeed concealed it on German soil.
Okay, I don't know much about him aside from just now doing a quick search on him, but he didn't conceal carry the fgc9 when out in public did he (correct me if im wrong)? And that's what im trying to say, the gun he made - while it is better having something than nothing - you cant conceal carry as you could a glock or any other pistol; or are there small, relatively decently reliable 3d guns that you can that im unaware of?
The onus falls on the one making the first claim to explain how the government could possibly have no free speech rights in the first place.
But fine:
The government - all three branches of it (judicial, legislative, executive) - is not some nebulous entity made up of some nebulous actors. The government is made up of people, more precisely, citizens of the United States, a.k.a Americans, not just by feeling - but by law as well.
Americans, as you may - or may not - be aware, have free speech rights as defined in the Constitution of the United States - the First Amendment, if I'm not mistaken.
Americans, when fulfilling certain qualifications, can one day, become part of the government, whether that's going to be a more visibly important position (like, say, the POTUS, a Supreme Court Judge, or a Senator, or a Governor of a state, or a Director of some agency, or other positions that I did not mention), or a, relatively speaking, menial employee, working for some government agency.
The President has free speech rights, the judges (in all courts) have free speech rights, the Senators and all other law-making individuals at the federal, state, or any other level, Governors have free speech rights, "menial" employees, and all others, have free speech rights.
Their free speech comes from the fact that they're, one, American citizens, and, two, on US soil, thanks, in part not just to the First Amendment of the Constitution, but also to the long-practiced precedent of freedom of expression expressed on that particular part of the world.
The government, being made up of American citizens (in all three branches), as explained, has, ipso facto, free speech rights.
Now, please tell me - as it is your turn to do so - if you are a gentleman, how these Americans on US soil, who happen to govern (make the laws, judge the laws, execute the laws) these United States on any possible level (federal, state, county, municipal, etc.) could possibly NOT have free speech rights PURELY because they happen to govern? What is it that you imagine the government to be in the first place? Thank you.
You’ve misread my first post. I’ll step through it more slowly:
Obviously the government has free speech rights. You laughed at the ridiculous notion that the government could possibly have speech restrictions imposed on it. I would laugh too. It’s a funny notion.
But instead of saying a second thing that I agree with, you immediately veered off into kook talk.
Now I am being aggressively challenged to explain how it could be possible for the government to be restricted in its speech by a person who has not demonstrated any capacity for reading comprehension. This, I will not do. Have a nice day.
I was appalled to see TSA facial recognition scanners at airports recently, where instead of checking your ID and boarding pass they scan your face. Almost everyone simply accepted the new process instead of opting out. I’m not sure how the eventual forced violation of biometrics can be stopped when most people don’t care.
I wasn't "appalled" but definitely felt uneasy about it. I am aware I could opt out and read all the discussions about it here on HN. I didn't do anything about it, despite being a very privacy conscious person (using firefox, use max adblocking/anti tracking etc). Why? I don't want to be an asshole, hold the queue and cause trouble for a TSA agent who is just doing the job and likely have no idea what "opt out" means, and with, let's admit it, no practical benefit for myself. (If anything, help myself miss a flight.) The feds and local law enforcement probably already have my face data anyway.
I had a perfectly pleasant experience opting out. The agent simply smiled at me, asked a question to verify that I was the person on the ID I had handed him, and off I went.
It was much easier and less gropey than opting out of the mm wave scans.
I too find the domestic TSA photo opt‐out to be quite painless. I recommend simply saying “I’d like to opt out of the photo” as soon as you walk to the platform, because saying so as soon as possible minimizes the chance of holding up the line and irritating the agent. The only observable difference in processing is that the agent takes my ID, holds it up, and compares it to my face.
CBP is another matter. When returning from abroad I find their agents to be more aggressive or snarky when I (politely) opt out, although I wouldn’t say it’s gone as far as retaliation. I often get asked why I’m opting out, and sometimes they follow that with additional questions. Several times I’ve received a standard spiel explaining that the photo is not stored permanently or transmitted; the vibe I get is that they’re trained to respond this way to “kooks.”
Can confirm that CBP is worse about this. I once had an agent insist that it was not possible to opt out, because the scan was mandatory. I pointed out that I had walked past no less than four signs proclaiming the opposite (if you are a US citizen) on my way through the line.
_He_ then held up the line as he walked off, consulted with someone who obviously knew better, came back and pouted while he verified my identity "manually."
9 times out of 10 I've found opting out of the body scanners to be painless. 1 time out of 10 I get a bully who wants to make a scene in order to create social pressure to justify opting out. I always have to suppress the counterproductive and escalatory urge to say something along the lines of "this pointless conversation will be shorter if we skip ahead to where I reiterate that I'm still opting out".
It is possible that people's experience vary. But unless we know opt out is something that is done quickly as a routine, and running into clueless TSA agent is a rare exception, I would not try that.
- A few people report they’ve had issues opting out
- Most people report they have no issues at all
Personally, I’d feel like I’m perpetuating the problem (of privacy violation/overreach) by not opting out. Even if most people don’t care, it seems critical to have at least some portion of the population holding back the tide somewhat.
If nothing else, a consistent stream of people opting out helps us understand how big the problem has become, i.e. if discussions about this flip over time and most people are getting hassled.
In Europe you might end up on the long queue with the non EU residents fighting about their place in the row if you opt not to go through biometrics check or you've got a non biometric ID. Some of the machines are also badly designed because 6'4" tall people have to bend their knees so that the scanner can level to their face.
You are not an asshole for opting out. If I see someone opting out at an airport they will get a silent nod of approbation. It is extremely easy and does not hold anyone else up. If anything it holds you up more - this is the case with naked scanner opt-outs, where you step aside and the people behind you can thank you for there being one less person in front of them on the way to get their junk photographed.
Furthermore, the TSA scanners use a hi res stereoscopic camera to take a 3D photo of your facial features. It's not the same as your passport photo or a regular CCTV camera
But I have global entry which is all done through facial recognition now (and matching to passenger manifests). No passport needed. The camera they used was just a normal DSLR, but it had no problem matching me.
The tech is getting really good.
In Singapore you can enter through automated gates without ever interacting with a person or showing a passport. All through facial recognition if they have a photo on file (citizens and permanent residents).
I assume the tech will get good enough to scan entire crowds very quickly and identify everyone.
I wonder if there's a "missing infrastructure opportunity" here. An isolated individual opt-out has the uninspiring cost/risk-vs-benefit/principle tradeoff others have mentioned. But what if that equation could be shifted?
Perhaps "I'll do the scan just now, but also, while it has my motivation and attention, I'll press the easy button to donate $N to some org effectively fighting it". Or "I'll opt out, and press the easy button to encourage others with a somewhat-anonymized "I/someone at airline-or-city-or-region-or-occupation-or... just opted-out! N+1! - Yay future!" tweet/counter"?
> An isolated individual opt-out has the uninspiring cost/risk-vs-benefit/principle tradeoff others have mentioned.
One way to shift the equation is to shift understanding of the tradeoff:
Some minor inconvenience - I think none in this case - for freedom and other human rights is hardly a tradeoff that needs much consideration. Honestly, I think it's people following the herd to the cultural trend of despair, powerlessness, and worship of strongmen - a incredible reversal from American individualism I'd read has dominated the culture for centuries.
More practically, a little courage and action has a large effect on others. Imagine you are in a meeting where something obviously morally wrong is likely to be approved, and there is pressure to go along:
Imagine nobody raises their hand to object. Imagine the despair and powerlessness everyone would feel, that it just passes without objection, that everyone is cowed.
Imagine one person raises their hand. Not only does it greatly reduce the feeling of despair and powerlessness, it heartens people, and even more it makes it far easier for a second person to raise their hand, or for others to object to this issue or to others later.
I recently reentered the US after a short vacation (the first time I'd been out of the country for a couple of years) and the CBP now have cameras/face scanners. The agent said hello using my name before I'd even handed over my passport -- in fact I don't think he even looked at it.
I assume they must be face-matching on the passport photo database.
Yes this seems variable based on point of entry. I had (have?) a flagged passport for awhile and I never got the oh shit face from CBP until they scanned my passport.
Is this something you've blogged about or otherwise discussed in more detail?
A college acquaintance of mine ended up in Syria with the YPG and I found it fascinating in a that's-so-fucking-cool-but-I-could-never way.
While you can opt out, not every document check station has signage to that effect in my experience; the TSA individual only tells you to put your head in the camera frame; and most people have had An Experience with TSA officials becoming belligerent and even aggressive over small things.
Frankly, it's intimidating, and I don't blame people for not opting out even assuming they know that's possible
I have tried to opt out and by the time I finished my sentence it’s done scanning my face. You’re also facing social pressure to just opt in from the people behind you, because opting out often takes longer, or is implied to take longer, since it isn’t the default. People who also cut it close with their flight times will understand ;)
>Almost everyone simply accepted the new process instead of opting out.
Given the reputation of groups involved, I expect many people who might have otherwise opted out felt that trying to do so would have revealed there was no efficient opt-out process, just an empty offer of one, or that opting out would have lasting repercussions for their treatment during travel in the future.
I flew recently and didn't opt out. If you have a passport or a state ID, any federal agency has you in the system already. What good would avoiding this particular picture do?
Are they basic RGB cameras or do they collect depth as well? Would even know if they decided to change the system to start collecting depth data, even if comparisons are to flat images? Honest questions, as that’s where my concerns are.
Boil the frog. If they start to collect more, it’s not as simple as “they already have my picture.” Should there be a breach, I can’t easily change my face.
I’m generally of the opinion that when it comes to personal data collection we should always say “no, convince me you should” rather than “sure, why not?” Other than an ever-so-slightly faster processing time is there evidence of any real security gain? My initial reaction, uninformed on the specifics but fairly versed in this type of security, is that’s unlikely.
That’s true, but those are also different agencies, so at a minimum you’re spreading the data (and risk surface). My concerns are generally (though not entirely) around data breaches rather than the collector. And sadly we have ample evidence that federal agencies aren’t always great at securing PII.
But more to the point the reason for doing it is there, for better or worse — want a passport? Have a picture taken. In this case I am (at least for now) comparing opting out or not. You can still take your flight without them taking that additional picture. That of course may not stay true.
I'm certainty not advocating for more of this security theater but the genuine and imaginary concerns meld together when we talk about security so I'm more trying to ascertain what's the realistic risk here. I agree that government is awful at storing PII and it is only a matter of time before biometrics get leaked assuming they haven't already.
That’s a reasonable point. And I’ll admit I’m expressing more of an opinion on privacy in general. I don’t know what the real risk is, immediately or over time and it would vary to an extent by individual. I suspect, again uninformed, it’s fairly small for most people.
The signage claims the _image_, i.e. the pixels, is deleted but makes no claims about embeddings, biometric measurements, etc that are generated from the image.
I actually opted in (Delta Airlines Digital ID, default opt out) because I have Global Entry so CBP and TSA all have my information already anyway. Opting in was just me authorizing Delta to also share my flight data with them so they can match my records up.
The result? Faster passage through gate security, significantly faster than TSA Precheck in fact. As a frequent flyer, I like it.
TSA Precheck lines are excessively long now, to say nothing about the normie lines which probably violate some population density laws of the universe. Meanwhile the Digital ID line is (at least for now) practically empty.
So that's an easy 10~20 minutes shaved off. Once I'm ushered through to screening I have the same convenience benefits as TSA Precheck since it's a prerequisite for Digital ID anyway.
Cool. You must be at ATL. I hardly ever run into a line long line at pre check, I am thankful most flyers dont sign up. A line even shorter sounds good, and with global entry and passport, the government has everything it needs to track me down.
The closest major airport I use is SEA (which unfortunately doesn't have Digital ID yet), but I've definitely enjoyed the time savings whenever I fly through ATL or LAX.
The TSA Precheck lines at all three airports are horrifically long. ;_;
I grew up in a post 9-11 world. To me, flying has always been something involving security and federal oversight. I have no problems with the federal government knowing that I have taken flight A123 to Chicago, or something. If I wanted to travel incognito, I'd take a train, or perhaps a greyhound bus.
Pre 9/11, the government still knew what flight you were taking. You ID was checked at the gate just prior to boarding the plane, and the passenger manifests were uploaded to a federal database in real time. A similar process happens on trains and Greyhounds - your ID is checked and manifests are monitored - so those are not necessarily more incognito options.
However, non-passengers (such as family members or friends) could accompany travelers to the gate, or meet them there when they disembark, passing through security without a ticket
The article mentions NIST standards for face recognition. NIST evaluates face matching systems.[1] They've gotten considerably better in the last decade, as would be expected.
Facial recognition, and the lack of regulating it: a victim of conflating privacy in the sense of limiting government powers and privacy in the sense of whether or not a piece of data is sensitive of embarrassing.
Well not quite. They keep getting money every year, but officially their mandate expired in the 90’s and has never been renewed. As crazy as that is by itself, they certainly don’t have the authority to do anything.
Genuine question, are the ethics of "anonymous facial recognition", where the system keeps track of a particular face, does not remember the face, and does not correlate the face to a identity , comparable to a social-credit like system?
I don't have an answer to the specific question, but I have experience working on single and multi-camera person tracking systems and I can tell you that they highly focus on the faces for recognition[0]. There is no such thing as anonymous facial recognition or even person tracking. Data creeps in through things that can be later extracted, though you can make this process more difficult and that's about the best you can do.
For a non-technical intuition of this you might notice that you can often recognize a friend walking away from you (no visible face) down the street. Even if you don't know why you can recognize them, it is down to subtle things like the way they walk, dress, hair style, etc. It might be harder to identify people this way and more prone to mistakes, but even when less accurate you could significantly narrow down possible candidates (even more with correlating information like location and time).
[0] This was a surprising thing to me because I suspected clothing would be a stronger indicator especially when face isn't always visible but this could also happen for other reasons and can be highly influenced in pretraining. Even saw it with blurred faces in testing, but depended on how these were blurred. Gate tracking also seemed to be picked up but I never confirmed.
The reason I ask is that india has a bit of a littering problem at bus stands, and the fines for littering are hardly enforced due to lack of budget.
I was hoping to fix the issue by applying a small fine, all the time.
To do it, I was hoping I could build a sort of person-hood tracking system that says, see, that fellow who threw a packet of chips is now standing at platform 10, near the concession stand, go catch him, easy 100₹.
By consistently enforcing penalties, we can change the behavior of people. It is worse than useless if it is inconsistently applied, for those caught will be likely to reoffend, considering it plain chance that they got caught.
Yeah I think this is kinda the danger of these types of systems, and why I don't want to work on them anymore. While I think there are a lot of good uses to this tech, it also has the power to do much more harm and the way I've seen it used even in democratic societies makes me uncomfortable about authoritarian overreach. I could not see a way this can be used in a privacy preserving manner, even for things as simple as counting number of patrons in a store[0]. Right now, I don't feel comfortable furthering this technology in the US, not to mention how I saw it being used elsewhere[1]. I'm sure if you take some time thinking about how the tech could be abused you would find a lot of ways. But it is up to you to decide if it is worth it after doing that exercise (your mind might even change later).
I think this is one of the difficult things about creating things. It is easy to get caught up in the benefits of a technology and how it can be used for good. But technology isn't good or bad, it is a tool. Like any tool, you need to consider how it will be used, and that means how it will be abused. My undergrad was in physics, and this lesson is often taught when you get to atomics (or maybe because my advisor worked at Los Alamos and with many of the people who built the atomic bombs). Physics tends to not hide the skeletons in the closet because atomic weapons. But I think CS still does and maybe we haven't caught up to how influential our work is in modern day. How software can (and does) kill people. Or maybe it is the abstraction of software, working at a high level it is easy to feel disconnected. Either way, I think we need to tread more carefully and just make sure we're concerned about ethics. It is a personal decision where the lines are drawn, but they can't be ignored. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? Unfortunately evil isn't only created by evil men, but often good men with good intentions.
FWIW, I'm all for the intent. But I question if there are other ways to solve these issues. But that may require a more complex and nuanced approach[2]. But if enforcement is already a problem, then I think there are bigger problems at play that this technical solution might make worse. Unfortunately as we advance the world gets more complex haha
[0] You can get pretty good if you do upfront processing to blur people, but that first means you need to detect people lol. So this would need to be done on device (as in, the camera itself. Which is possible btw).
[1] I saw a lot of videos from India (as well as the whole subcontinent and South East Asia), where the customers were trying to prevent theft (good usage), but there were some other things that had me concerned and were being hinted at. I also think one big difference is that I appeared to be the only person on my team that would look at data we were processing. Not to snoop or be invasive, but because this is the best way to solve data processing problems; you need to check your assumptions, learn what is creating errors, find things you didn't consider, and all that. To be good at ML you can't just pipe in data and expect results, and you shouldn't treat the algorithms like black boxes. While they aren't transparent ("white boxes"), that doesn't mean they're completely opaque either (and we're learning more every day).
[2] I think one key piece of information is that we need to ask why things like littering and theft is less common in richer neighborhoods. Or at least by their residents. Personally, my belief is that this is more to do with a personal safety net. It's easy for ethics to be eroded when you're worried about your next meal or being able to afford rent. These are obviously harder issues to resolve, but I think they are worth addressing. Because I think lifting up the quality of life of the lowest class of people benefits everyone. A rising tide lifts all ships, and I do believe it even lifts the biggest ships more.
You have no right to privacy in public. If you make this illegal private companies will do it instead, and the first amendment makes that impossible to stop.
The fundamental flaw of cynicism is that it invariably opts for the path of least resistance—a facile dismissal rather than a constructive lens for genuine improvement. If an overwhelming majority—say, 80% of the populace—were deeply invested in this issue, they would elect representatives committed to outlawing it, and thus it would indeed become illegal.
The cynic might retort that such laws are perpetually vulnerable to subversion under the guise of national security. While there's a kernel of truth in that, it's equally undeniable that if 80% of the citizenry truly felt impassioned, any rogue elements within the government would face severe repercussions. Acts of retribution against such actors would not only be tolerated but perhaps even tacitly endorsed by the public.
Well, a true cynic would note that if an 80% of a dictatorship all agreed and felt so passionate -- if even 40% did, such a government would easily fall apart or be capable of reform.
If we could reliably attain passion, cooperation, consciousness? And ultimately, a belief in agency?
Then we would hardly even need to protect institutions against such subversion.
I'm reminded of ceausescu. Everyone agreed, up until they suddenly didn't and he and his wife didn't even seem to get it until they were lined up and shot.
I think it takes both agreement and desperation for that kind of thing to happen, though. Comfortable people don't tend to buck the people who can freeze their bank accounts in any serious way at simultaneous scale, even when they're in mass disagreement.
Very well put, especially about the necessary dis-comfort.
I've always personally envisioned some terrible end-state of human history where vast swathes of people are in something more like a zoo than a prison. Without escape, but also without enough pain to push them toward resistance, until it's too late to turn back.
I'm of the opposite opinion,that recording is a liberty and the right to mass record and identify people is a healthy sign of private free speech rights. I feel banning it would be dystopic. Where I disagree is the use of government at all in many of the capacities taking advantage of this such as TSA, DHS, CBP etc as they are essentially unhinged violent pirates.
Interesting opinion but there is no dystopian literature i know of that worries about banning mass surveillance. Mass surveillance on the other hand features very prominently.
Then you're looking in the wrong section. You don't want the sci-fi section, you want history - Cold War. The investigation of the government by the people was violently suppressed and the the official mouthpieces were jokes - "There is no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda."
Mass surveillance played out privately means every plated cop car can be tracked, every noted confidential informant and every detective, tax stasi, etc can be traced. This is already becoming the case on networked mapping apps where the road pirates are losing their revenue. It's more of a worry for the state than citizens IMO.
That's actually a very fair point i haven't considered, i can't say i've changed my opinion to worry more about the citizens than the state but i agree with it part of the way!
It's not exactly about the privacy in public, though. YMMV, but I'm 101% fine if a camera looks at me and a machine processes the image. What matters is what happens afterwards.
Heck, I want an aid like that - my built-in wetware face recognition is barely functional (I don't even recognize actors in the movies, save for a few most iconic ones), and tying faces only works after repeating it a dozen times. I can pinky swear I won't be sharing this with anyone. I probably won't even keep records, because it's literal digital junk (but I'd like to have a right to record everything that happened around me that I could've possibly remembered naturally). But that's not about it - I just hate how mass surveillance made a lot of people hate all the cameras without making any distinctions (sure, I think I get it).
What this is about is that while individual privacy in public is not expected (save for stalking or other forms of harassment, which aren't exactly about privacy anymore), privacy at scale is an open question. Large entities, like governments or big companies, can collect unprecedented amounts of data, and at that scale it holds a significant potential both for good use and for abuse. So, in a functional democracy, it must prompt a public discussion and search for a consensus. It can be argued that there are benefits, and whenever benefits outweigh the risks, and it also can be argued that old principles must be still upheld to the letter, or if reality had changed too much and those principles are not matching to the ideas and reasons...
It especially matters when it's about the government, because government abuse can get really nasty, even deadly. That's why all the safeguards, checks and balances.
Basically, I think it's not really about cameras, it's about ability to build large databases with information that may be, uh, socially sensitive.
There are two things wrong with this: first, in the U.S., you do have certain rights to privacy in public. Whether this is a case of those rights being violated is a different question. In any case, I don't like the creeping redefinition of civil rights I infer from that statement, intentional or not. Second, just as civil rights can be eroded, they can also be expanded, and the idea that we should just throw up our hands is not helpful in a free society that depends on people giving a shit.
Recording things is generally interpreted as a form of speech. For example, recording police officers in public is speech. If the government can ban private parties from recording people's faces in public, the same could be done to prevent recording the police.
>Recording things is generally interpreted as a form of speech.
Then make it not so, we aren't forced to live with the status quo for eternity.
The law wouldn't be banning people recording faces. It would be much more specific: corporations can't record peoples faces at a mass scale to log them away and sell the data for a profit. If there's any edge cases to this, then let the courts handle it. We let the courts sort out grey areas already, that's their job.
Commercial speech is substantially less protected under First Amendment case law. You can't prohibit random individuals from declaring themselves a citizen journalist and recording people, but I think it would be entirely possible to pass a law saying private companies may not assemble facial recognition databases for sale to third parties.
They don't need to sell the database, just the video that builds the database. Or give it away for free and magically number go up in some bank account in Cyprus or Hong Kong.
Resolving this pathological impasse is straightforward - differentiate between personal activity and commercial activity. Individuals recording the police, other people happenstance, or even spending a considerable amount of their personal time compiling a self-administered facial recognition database of people - fine. Businesses (or really, entire industries) creating surveillance databases that would make a Stasi agent blush, likely by paying the salaries of many people to do this, and likely selling [access to] the databases to pay for it all - not fine. Societally, we've basically been hoodwinked with this temporarily embarassed millionaires fallacy - scale itself creates logical contradictions of our rights and we need to attack this head on.
It seems like an impasse caused by the first amendment, which does not distinguish between "personal" and "commercial" activities. I suppose there could be another amendment to add in these categories, but the freedom of the (commercial) press seems to fall under your "commercial activity" category? I suppose the government could license the commercial press, but that seems problematic, as it's what many totalitarian regimes do to suppress speech, and is exactly what the first amendment was meant to forestall.
On a slightly different note, why is the impasse "pathological"? Are you just throwing in a pejorative term?
The jurisprudence of the first amendment already makes many distinctions that are not there in the text of the amendment itself. This is inevitable - rights conflict with other rights and even with the same right as exercised by someone else.
> why is the impasse "pathological"? Are you just throwing in a pejorative term?
The current jurisprudence is a pathlogical (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_case) interpretation that clamps the solution space to maximal commercial/corporate rights at the expense of individual rights.
The example of the press is actually quite poignant. The current legal regime neuters the free speech rights of most of the press. People can be fired for writing articles saying things their employer does not want to be said. They can even be fired for saying things in their own personal time that their employer does not want to be said! The end result is greatly diminished rights for the individuals making up the press, in order to support greatly increased rights for the controlling owners of the press.
I don't see how you can differentiate between humans and corporations. They are both fundamentally the same. They are born... and oh wait, yeah. But still under the 14th ammendment's equal protection clause the Supreme court determined they were in 1886 (some argue 1819).
Maybe we shouldn't treat corporate speech the same as human speech under the 1st amendment, but that would allow regulation of corporations giving money to political organizations? Ok, well that's beyond the pale. That's obviously originally the founders intent in writing the bill of rights. I'm sure it's in the Federalist Papers somewhere.
We treat corporate speech as an extension of human speech because corporations are made up of humans, and there is no way of abridging the speech of corporations without also abridging the speech of the humans within that corporation.
Also, abridging corporate speech creates a precedent for abridging the speech of all human collective entities like religions, political parties, advocacy groups and the press, because there is no particular reason why corporations as an abstract entity created by humans to express collective human will should be unique in this regard.
You can't simply nullify rights when people exercise them in aggregate. That isn't how free societies are supposed to work, and it's too easy to undermine.
> there is no way of abridging the speech of corporations without also abridging the speech of the humans within that corporation
Sure there is. If corporations (/LLCs) were prohibited from directing their humans to say specific things as part of their employment, those humans can still say whatever they want on their own time.
> Also, abridging corporate speech creates a precedent for abridging the speech of all human collective entities
It's disingenuous to pretend that a corporation (/LLC) is just some group of people. Rather it's an entity that has gone out of its way to obtain a government created liability shield. Conditioning that grant on following extra regulations aimed at mitigating the harm caused by the extreme scale fostered by the limited liability makes perfect sense.
> corporations as an abstract entity created by humans to express collective human will
Wut? The corporate mechanic is that of directing humans in a top-down fashion. The only people thinking corporations represent "collective human will" are the ownership and managerial classes who either are the people directing the corporation top-down, or at least have to repeat enough of the corporate kool-aid to get promoted. The majority of people view them as the least-worst option to receive a paycheck and often see their own wills suppressed - even though respecting that distributed intelligence would often help the corporation (ie "shit rolls downhill").
As AI, facial recognition, cameras, etc. become more widespread, we'll need to rethink privacy laws.
Imagine a company in the near future called MyPI that uses a ubiquitous camera network and facial recognition to track someone you have an interest in. You could surveil dozens or hundreds of individuals this way, all for a low cost. What time they leave the house, start work, where they go after work, etc. All legal because, hey, they're in public.
It should be straight-out illegal. Governments do not have "free speech" rights.
As for private citizens doing it: I think there are already sufficient laws about recording people without their consent. You can hire someone to stand on a corner and watch for a specific person to walk by, but a law prohibiting you from recording everyone who walks by is most likely going to withstand a court review. It's a question of scale.