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Comment by bayesianhorse | Hacker News Reader

Actually no. For one thing, this isn't exactly a stealthy or cheap thing to do. It involves datacenters full of computing resources even for 4000 identies.

I also don't believe it's so much a privacy issue. If I upload pictures to facebook I actually want them to be seen by human beings. The face-recognition only helps with that.

If facebook recognizes me on a picture someplace else, I actually rather want to know about it. I'm not super famous, so unexpected pictures of myself can be more of a bad thing...

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Privacy issue is not about what you want, it's about what can be done (and often is without you knowing).

Automated facial recognition is a serious privacy concern, it's not just about the slimy despicable thing facebook is. For example, in the uk where there are more cctv video feed than people to watch them, an automated facial recognition can track you around constantly. Their current automatic number plate recognition is already a serious privacy concern.

Remember 7th cube's voyeur's dream[1] released in 2005? the same but with more camera now being able to identify you based on your facial features. [1]: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=16410

This can already be done by someone who truly wants to keep an eye on you, only it takes more manpower (well, detective power).

This is simply the same trend as ATMs replacing (some) bank tellers many years ago.

Will it be easier to perform and abuse mass surveillance? Sure. Will people with something important to hide still wear disguises? I'd bet yes.

My stance is that we can't fight progress, but we can start fighting the people bent on abusing the powers that progress bring. Identifying them is another issue (perhaps some form of facial recognition? :)

>Will people with something important to hide still wear disguises? I'd bet yes.

Facial recognition systems can be (and are) trained to not be fooled by things like facial hair, hair changing, eyeglasses and sunglasses, hats, etc. Although it can obscure your features for sure.

If someone does something really odd to try to avoid the facial recognition (I've people posting things like making your hair non-symmetrical, or just avoiding the camera in the first place) then they just train on those things too. And that person gets flagged as being really suspicious. And things like full face masks are banned in some places already.

And slowly, suspicious behavior is suppressed.

This will have two effects.

People who are truly suspicious for nefarious reasons will gradually stop being so.

On the other hand, many will be incorrectly flagged as suspicious and harassed without reason.

The trick is to strike a fair balance between the two. But who decides what's fair?

Wouldn't it actually be better to stop a government from doing that? If you can't, there's something wrong that no restrictions/bans on technological progresss will fix...

Usually it's easier to get the government in line than to prevent some technology to be developed...

So how is that NSA reform coming along? Good I hope?

> For one thing, this isn't exactly a stealthy or cheap thing to do.

That's actually the more disturbing part about this: it require computational resources that only governments and large corporations can afford, so they are the ones who gain the most from it; and it gives them more leverage over the population.

"Leverage" is kind of vague. It's hard to make money from large-scale abuses...

And it doesn't look like the NSA for example is doing anything useful from its own perspective with the data they actually have...

"Leverage" doesn't always equate to profit (or even revenue). The "goal" of the NSA is not profit, but mass surveillance. Whereas surveillance historically has been centralized, with the onslaught of mobile devices, we now have prevalent distributed surveillance (and perhaps more so than surveillance).

All the data everyone is feeding into FB/G+/Twitter/etc about their friends and acquaintances could not have been collected on such a mass scale by the NSA alone.

If you're a privacy conscious individual, there's definitely reasons to be fearful of this approach to surveillance by any governmental intelligence agency.

> If facebook recognizes me on a picture someplace else, I actually rather want to know about it. I'm not super famous, so unexpected pictures of myself can be more of a bad thing...

If all they did was notify you, that would be OK, I guess, although I'm not totally cool with it. I'm more worried about them seeing my picture and tagging it as me without my permission.

I think the crux of it is that facebook is pretty much the least trustworthy, most give-an-inch-they-take-a-mile company out there as far as privacy is concerned...

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