U.S. Gov Privacy Watchdog Under Pressure to Recommend Facial Recognition Ban
thehill.com
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Many local cities are building out vast networks. Including my very own Miami Beach Police Department.
The invention of the bulldozer didn't change property rights.
The point is that the degree to which something is possible at scale has an impact on the practical applications of that thing, and therefore on the people subject to its application. Viz., earth moving machinery (and related engineering) has made possible things that would previously have required orders of magnitude more time and/or manpower, likely making them economically infeasible except in rare cases where money was no object.
He didn't say anything about property rights. That was you... for some reason.
These technological changes add additional dimensions, they may not radically change the initial structure but they lead to radically different outcomes than anticipated which society doesn't have to accept.
The problem is also that there are a LOT of laws, and it's very easy to manufacture a crime.
I would also suggest reading about people who have been subject to unwarranted surveillance just because of their views, and the damage it does them. A good example is the environmental groups in the 90s in the UK.
That said the difference between law enforcement collecting your data and private citizens should also be obvious.
It's like the difference between listening to Coltrane in the afternoon, vs operating a 24h trumpet school out of your living room.
2. I suppose you would be ok, then, with a police officer tailing you everywhere you go, recording everything you do, everywhere you go, everything you say, and to whom, peering in the windows of your home if you forget to keep your blinds drawn? Just in case that information happens to be useful to a government at some point in the future?
I find it acceptable that if I go outside I might get caught on some store security camera and that video sits on a hard drive for a week and then gets written over but I do not find it acceptable that the store camera recognizes my face and stores my presence in an easily searchable internet connected database.
There seems to be a lot of conflation on this subject between "expectation of privacy" in the practical sense and "expectation of privacy" in the legal sense. Like, you'd better fuckin believe I expect not to be followed by cops or secret agents everywhere I go. I expect it on the persistence forecast basis and because I understand that it's practically impossible to allocate manpower in that way, assuming they don't think I've done anything wrong in particular.
I also expect that the government, local and federal both, will try to erode my effective privacy in any and every way they can afford and get away with.
None of that has much to do with e.g. the fact that legally, if a cop peers in my window and sees bales of cocaine stacked on the floor of my living room, or whatever, he can come in and take them from me and arrest me.
They can sit at home, and watch you, and you yesterday, and if they're really intrigued, you ten years ago!
> Expect: 1. To look for (mentally); to look forward to, as to something that is believed to be about to happen or come; to have a previous apprehension of, whether of good or evil; to look for with some confidence; to anticipate; -- often followed by an infinitive, sometimes by a clause (with, or without, that).
I expect the government to erode my rights.
> Expect: 2. To consider obligatory or required.
I expect the government to respect my rights.
https://nissenbaum.tech.cornell.edu/papers/toward_an_approac... (pdf)
Because this is basically what this will sooner or later boil down to, except that's more subtle (i.e. instead of having a person following you you have a innumerable amount of cameras sharing the recording burden, but producing the _same end result_).
Also, you might want to say you don't have to hide anything.
But consider how "god" the cyber security of the police is (or most times is not). Also consider that there are frequently cases of police misbehaving by e.g. stalking or discriminating. (I mean there is a lot of police and they are human so it would be surprising if there wouldn't be such cases). Lastly consider how long it will take until police stations would want to sell some most likely very badly anonymized data about people in the city to e.g. shops.
That too will be gone soon when biological recognition services are in the hands of people. I suspect it won't be long until you can arbitrarily pull your phone, grab some video/image and/or audio data, pass a few (hundred) signature markers off to a service and identify people with a variety of metadata associated with them.
>>Because this is basically what this will sooner or later boil down to
This exists now in Miami Beach, Florida, USA.
You'd expect someone on probation to have that kind of situation.
Also, I guess you won't mind publishing all of your passwords, physical location at all times, never wearing clothes, living in a transparent house and being video and audio recorded 24x7 either. (Yes, it's unreasonably absurd ad infinitum.) Still not wanting any privacy? How about other people can have as much privacy as they want, and stay the heck off my lawn? ;-P
should we have kept filing cabinets full of papers instead of databases for tracking criminals across state lines as well? see? I can make bullshit comparisons too!
Yes.
(basically; you cannot film/photograph anyone without their consent, including in public)
Maybe they own goog stocks in secret.
Edit: this isn't serious.
"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
There are roads near me which do "toll by mail" where they snap a picture of your license plate, and then bill you the toll even if you don't have EZ-Pass. There are signs which announce this, but unless you're planning to drive 90 minutes out of your way, those sections of highway aren't avoidable.
Even if there are other viable options, the average citizen doesn't really understand the implication of losing their privacy, so they can't make an educated decision about whether to give it up. A simple sign doesn't solve that fundamental problem.
Some of which may find it reprehensible. And maybe lobby to change.
> The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent agency, is coming under increasing pressure to recommend the federal government stop using facial recognition.
The PCLOB exists to advise the government on compliance with civil liberties and privacy principles, not to recommend bans on private activities. This proposal would only restrict federal agencies, not third parties--unlike proposals by the EU which would ban private data processors and companies.
Chinese ‘gait recognition’ tech IDs people by how they walk https://apnews.com/bf75dd1c26c947b7826d270a16e2658a
An ex-CIA disguise specialist said that you can change your gait by putting a pebble in your shoe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8
Her comments were targeting human recognition, and I speculate that one of the reasons she was allowed to share her disguise techniques is that maybe they're ineffective against automated facial recognition and therefore obsolete.
https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2020/01/were_bannin...
Realistically, smartphones are tracking everyone all the time and provide rich datasets. Camera, microphone, and GPS. If you turn off location services your phone still connects to cell towers, WiFi access points, and Bluetooth beacons, as you drive or walk around throughout your day.
So the agency came into existence as a fig leaf for the Bush administration... Any reason to believe it's grown teeth since then?
Biometrics is GOING to happen.
I'd rather companies be (potentially) honest, rather than move on the next thing and not publicize it.
Diesel cars are not. (Trucks yes, but as ever ever those standards are far laxer)
But you brought up VW's emissions fraud. Do you really believe what they did should be legal, just because they got away with it for years?
Vehicle testing (emissions, especially, but MPG also) are highly synthetic measurements that aren't very representative of real world conditions.
But to come back to the point at hand - a ban on "facial recognition" is so vague that it doesn't actually accomplish anything - the companies will still do it, they'll just call it something else. "Biometrics", "Posture analysis", "Location monitoring".
Historically, government gets tech wrong, and getting it wrong fast just makes the situation worse.
Biometrics is only happening if you let it by legislation.
Further, the idea of facial recognition being used in every store is atrocious. Not only can they track you online, now advertisers and the government can track your offline spending habits and location at all times, too!
Why hasn't anyone proposed a use for facial recognition that isn't:
1. Useless (like it is in iOS)
2. Completely scummy (like it is in both of your examples)
3. Using it to increase surveillance on populations that cannot legally offer consent in any way, in areas that they're forced to go to?
I kind of expect it here on HN, given how large of a proportion of adtech and other surveillance-oriented employees there are here, but I see it everywhere, and it's just confounding.
If you're going to be sarcastic over the text on the internet, please make your intent clear with a "/s".
The privacy policy I have on my website is used for exactly one app in the Google/iOS App store and is based on a template one I found on GitHub. FWIW, that one app collects exactly zero data on users other than whatever Unity collects for serving opt-in ads.
That would combine with AR. But that AR has already flopped due to several issues even without the added camera needed. Plus the issues of existing eyeglass combining.
Really that Glass backlash was bizzare along with the post 9-11 "anyone pointing a camera near anything man made must be a terrorist" yet nobody bats an eye or does more than snark at surveillance cameras everywhere. There is probably some psychological principle behind it but the simplest explanation is that "normal people" are fundamentally fucking insane and only care about it conforming to norms instead of actual harm.
As if we already don't track students? You just think it's somehow better if a fleshy neural net violates their consent and privacy by manually checking up on them when they are are truant because why...?
And who says everything must always be taken to the extreme? Just because facial recognition technology exists don't mean it will always abused. I'm a volunteer secretary at a local community center and I'm sick of manually performing facial recognition and updating a google doc to track attendance. It wastes an hour of my time every week. Is it so bad I want a raspberry pi attached to a camera that can auto-update the google doc for me?
There's a difference between "We're writing your name down in a spreadsheet" and the inevitable "Your facial structure is being processed by a private company that is absolutely going to share with anyone who asks" that happens with the types of companies that contract with schools.
Even assuming that they were decent companies, the Fed has shown a tendency to force companies to give up fingerprints, DNA, and so on: there's no chance that they wouldn't do the same for facial recognition data.
And who says everything must always be taken to the extreme?
Your only proposals were extremely extreme, and neither of them were particularly rare desires for this tech.
Just because facial recognition technology exists don't mean it will always abused.
Sure, like I said, there are some useless uses of it, too, like facial unlocking. What you're proposing is an abuse, however.
Is it so bad I want a [Raspberry Pi] attached to a camera that can auto-update the [Google Doc] for me?
While your proposed use, facial recognition for presumably-consenting adults, is more mundane than the initial two proposals, I spent an hour looking for an example of facial recognition that was accurate and detailed enough to tell the difference between individuals that ran on a Raspberry Pi, and came up blank. It seems as if the hardware is too underpowered to do so (or, at least, the current tooling is too bloated to), which means that you'd end up processing it in the cloud or similar, which would still mean their data was leaving your control; that is pretty bad, I'd say.
I don't see why that is inevitable. My high school in 2007 had its own IT team and kept all of its data on-premises (this was before "the cloud", but still, you could just mandate that all facial recognition models have to be stored/processed on-premises).
> Even assuming that they were decent companies, the Fed has shown a tendency to force companies to give up fingerprints, DNA, and so on: there's no chance that they wouldn't do the same for facial recognition data.
Yeah, it's called warrants. I don't see what is wrong with that. If the FBI wants to know if a student was in school on a certain day, I don't see how a warrant for checking facial recognition logs is any different from checking a manually maintained spreadsheet, other than the latter being more error prone.
> I spent an hour looking for an example of facial recognition that was accurate and detailed enough to tell the difference between individuals that ran on a Raspberry Pi, and came up blank
I haven't done it yet, but this seemed good enough for my purposes[1]? As far as I can tell, that runs completely on a pi with no cloud resources...
> which would still mean their data was leaving your control; that is pretty bad, I'd say.
Even if I needed to use cloud compute, I take issue with your phrasing. I don't believe people "own" information about themselves. If we are both in public, and I take a picture of you, write down facts about you, or otherwise observe you, I have not stolen anything of yours, and I do not need your consent to have done so.
[1] https://www.hackster.io/mjrobot/real-time-face-recognition-a...
Systems like this could be very nice and useful but as long as companies make shady data deals and can't do basic data protection, implementing such a system is just a plain bad idea.
Tracking students should be opt-in anyway ("go study some place else if you don't like our tracking system" isn't opt-in) and I doubt you're going to get much support for tracking someone's exact movements every minute of the school day as long as the equifaxes of the world prove that data protection is none of their concern.