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Comment by QuelqueChose | Hacker News Reader

Question that struck me immediately after reading this headline: As someone in his 20’s who splits time living between western Europe and the US, just how plausible is my fear of seeing something like this either here or in my home country in my lifetime?

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I am at ISC West right now, a global security conference held in Vegas every year. I write FR and my company's software is in over a half dozen partner booths, as well as our tech is the FR core for several others. Due to the recent gun violence at Parkland, in Vegas, and on and on we are talking with many, many school districts, large retail chains, city officials, private and public parks, and reps of high net worth families who want FR systems up and operating yesterday. You're gonna see FR blanket the United States. It has already started.

How good would you say the tech is? E.g., if Facebook put cameras outside a football stadium with 60k people, how many people would they correctly recognize? And how many false positives would be generated?

I ask because I'm wondering how much China's announcement here is a stunt that goes well beyond the state of the art.

The tech is there, it works. The current hurdle is getting understanding between the practical limitations of modern computers, the resolutions and image characteristics of various cameras. Trying to use a 2K or 4K video stream simply overwhelms the current generation of processors in the systems 'normal' organizations can afford. Plus those video streams are often up-scaled and are lower resolution in their hardware, very wide angled, and placed poorly for FR. Basically, the tech is there, but the practical aspects of using FR with typical financial and logistical constraints is not there yet. This practical aspect is just the normal learning curve.

Facebook's FR is nowhere but FB, forget it. There is a range of false positive rates, depending upon how an FR system is employed. The best resource for the state of the art is probably this: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/2017/NIST.IR.8173.pdf (FYI, my work is vendor "L")

Depends on the cameras, but I would imagine Facebook and Google's tech + data to be able to positively identify 99% or more of the people. Especially with multiple shots per person. Accuracy might be as high as 99.9% if you have drones go over the crowds, and have high res cameras at chokepoints. Correlate this with cell phone data and probably they have 100% accuracy. There is a reason Google Fi exists.

I say all this as a happy Google User and a developer of Face Recognition Technology. Those in the know realized privacy has been dead for awhile now. Generally computers can do most anything we can do in say 200 ms or less with the proper training data, and they generally do it better than humans. The giants have all the data they need, they just need to spend time annotating training sets and running analysis over larger and larger sets until they reach super human performance.

It has already been used once in the UK:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/05/met-police-f...

I would suspect if there has already been one public announcement then it will actually have been used covertly for quite a while.

Another one which got a bit of press was Download (music festival) in 2015: "A police force has defended scanning the faces of 90,000 festival-goers this weekend and checking them against a list of wanted criminals across Europe."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-33132199

In the UK I suspect this is already in place and will become more and more accurate as time goes on. That's inevitable. What concerns me is that in the US it won't be the government doing it, but it will be private companies, targetted adverts will appear as you walk past billboards (Facebook Shadow profile 12491123 is approaching billboard 9874, switch to hemorrhoid cream advert)

I think the US already has big private networks of number plate recognition cameras that sell feeds to cops, bounty hunters, advertisers, and traffic alert companies. It wouldn't be much of a hop.

I can't remember the name of the project, but at least NY is full of CCTVs that record and index everything (ie tracking the position of cars, pedestrians all with searchable characteristics ie colors, car models, biometrics etc). But I haven't heard about "retail" data sales or any data sales/private sector services in general.

Example company. I think they are a data agregator for smaller local private sector networks. https://www.tlo.com/

In some sense I'm not worried too much about FR tech on its own. A few generations ago, most of us lived in small-enough contexts that human facial recognition served to identify us all the time anyhow. What I do worry about is the degree to which the video data and facial profile data is centralized.

Look at current surveillance cameras in the US as an example. There are a lot of them now, but data is held by a wide variety of people and institutions, and most of them just don't care about it unless something criminal happened.

If an individual school or workplace adds FR to their cameras such that they alerted to strangers in restricted areas, I wouldn't worry about that at all. If they own the data and have their own FR profiles, that's cool by me.

But that's very different than China's effort, where they're clearly working toward complete coverage of 1.4 billion people, with strongly centralized control. Now that they have president-for-life Xi, that's a lot of authoritarian potential.

It's already tested in Germany (a Berlin train station afair) for viability with volunteers. A similar test a few years ago failed (too many false negatives, afair).

100% certain. It exists already.

The real question to ask yourself is of all the groups you belong to (HN readers, people in their 20s, etc, etc) will any of them fall out to the point that the system flags you as deserving of "driving while black" treatment at any point in the future.

I fear the more important question at this point is if we will live to see the tide turn and most of these invasive measures be reversed...

My guess is that it's almost guaranteed that you will see it in your lifetime. Probably not too far away.

Probably already happening, but the parties doing it don't advertise with it too much because that would be creepy. Like how e.g. Google doesn't advertise too much with services like location history to not spook you.

Isn't this already happening? I seem to recall similar tech being used in Superbowl, and in other cases.

Yes. Expect by next Superbowl every major sports arena will have FR and potentially additional biometrics in place and active.

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