30 ms·

Your face is not a bar code: arguments against automatic face recognition (2001)

229 points by panic 5y ago

dang 5y ago
One past thread: Your Face Is Not a Bar Code (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17939248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17939248 - Sept 2018 (29 comments) Related from last month: Phil Agre saw the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28159708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28159708 - Aug 2021 (42 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28167703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28167703
black_13 5y ago
But what about the children?
ftio 5y ago
Had my creepiest-ever encounter with face recognition recently. I was traveling home from our first international trip since The Before Times. The country we traveled from has a US Customs office in the airport. We walk up to the counter, look into the camera, and without having handed over my passport, the agent says my name. I know that I've given them my photo and that the search space for my match isn't huge (people on flights leaving in the next ~2-8 hours), but it absolutely freaked me out. I can't imagine it meaningfully makes us more secure, and it feels like the kind of thing that, to this article's point, could be trivially abused.
- gumby 5y ago
  You weren't greeted as a convenience but as a form of intimidation.
  - pope_meat 5y ago
    "hello, citizen #4838428069, we know who you are, now hand over the identification paperwork to prove to us who you are" ...wait a minute
    - bserge 5y ago
      "Pick up that can"
  - autoexec 5y ago
    I agree, but I prefer it when they're at least upfront about it. It's much better than just silently collecting your data and then using it against it you in ways you'll never know or be able to trace back even if it's suspected. If my health insurance premiums rise suddenly, it'd take a whistleblower for me to discover that it was because my face was flagged more often at fast-food counters or bars.
- jackson1442 5y ago
  I wonder if they maybe used a long-range RFID reader to read the chip in your passport and matched it against your face.
  - flemhans 5y ago
    The contents of the chip is encrypted with the machine-readable text on the picture page, so you cannot harvest people's data like that without opening the passport.
    - romeovs 5y ago
      But nothing is stopping the US customs service (or any other service) to store the unencrypted data for later reference right? I don’t find it farfetched that some big players would have a database that holds basically a huge lookup table that goes from encrypted data to the unencrypted data. This wouldn’t work on your first visits, but return visitors could have their rfid read like that. Or do the rfid chips hold some kind of randomness in them so they can do a type of handshake (that is unique every time) where that machine readable password is needed?
- ladberg 5y ago
  I visited China with someone who was from China but had been living in the US. It was a hot day and at one point I wanted cold water (which turns out is a very western thing and hard to get elsewhere) and the only option was a vending machine. I expected at first to pay with coins, WeChat, or AliPay but she just showed her face to the camera on the vending machine and it charged it to her bank account. She didn't have to enter a PIN or show identity and the only device she had on her was a US-bought iPhone with no cell service. I was blown away that not only was a camera able to identify her out of the probably hundreds of millions of people enrolled in the system, but it was confident enough to actually charge money to her account. I still think about that to this day and tell people about it when they talk about the level of tech in the US.
  - bserge 5y ago
    I'd say you got pranked, but that may be wishful thinking. Yeah, I don't think that system is "confident enough". Just that the error rate is acceptable. Some poor sod gets charged instead of you? Welp, tough luck. Pretty terrible.
    - wcoenen 5y ago
      Not a prank. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/04/smile-to-pay-chinese-shoppers-turn-to-facial-payment-technology https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/04/smile-to-pay-c...
      - bserge 5y ago
        And people sign up for it voluntarily... Just wow
        risyachka 5y ago
        Why wouldn't they? Their faces are probably many years already in government face recognition systems. Also they don't have much of a choice anyway with CCP. At least they get some extra convenience because of it.
- syshum 5y ago
  The ACLU Pizza video [1] from several years ago is a classic, but we continue to march ever slowly to that reality, few people seem to mind. [1] https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza
- fidesomnes 5y ago
  > I can't imagine it meaningfully makes us more secure, I can't imagine letting you in charge of a customs office security. > but it absolutely freaked me out and it feels like the kind of thing that, to this article's point, could be trivially abused. Okay Karen, go ahead and trivially abuse it and write back with your findings. I'll wait.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mullingitover 5y ago
If we're going to outlaw automated facial recognition, which in general is better at recognizing faces than humans, we should release every person who is in prison because an eyewitness ID'd them.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  All recognising people should be illegal
- kube-system 5y ago
  As I understand, eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. Although, it's valuable for convincing juries, because people think it's reliable.
  - genewitch 5y ago
    I was a witness to a crime that led to a short police chase and a police shooting, and I couldn't accurately describe which direction the car was facing when it passed me (reversing or forward). Up until that point I'd have thought I would be a reliable witness (I didn't, but this proved it definitively!)
    - kube-system 5y ago
      I actually have a very similar story. When I was younger, I was witness to a pretty bad car accident, and I gave them my information, and was later subpoenaed as a witness. Before going, I thought I had a pretty good recollection of the event -- it happened right in front of me. When I got there, I was also stumped by simple questions about which direction one of the cars was going. It was really eye-opening for me. Thinking about it is still kind of eerie. I remember the accident. I can see it in my head. But apparently the memory is not exactly correct.
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        > I was also stumped by simple questions about which direction one of the cars was going. Presumably lawyers are very good at finding exactly the right questions to ask to exploit the weaknesses of human memory and make a witness look unreliable.
Barrin92 5y ago
Every point against facial recognition on the list is a point about how facial recognition systems materially relate to the individual or about particular technical faults of the system. All of which miss the point. The point of surveillance is the same as Bentham's original panopticon, that is to say discipline people by making them discipline themselves. surveillance isn't scary because of the literal cameras, it's scary because it makes people aware that they're being watched and thus it forces them to police themselves, internally. People would be better off to recognize and argue this very fundamental point about the psychological intent of surveillance, rather than having obscure discussions about the legality of consent or whether the system is 97% or 98% accurate or whatever.
- amelius 5y ago
  > it's scary because it makes people aware that they're being watched and thus it forces them to police themselves, internally. People have been policing themselves since the invention of religion.
  - babyshake 5y ago
    Eventually the distinction between God and government may dissolve.
  - Wohlf 5y ago
    People have been policing themselves since the invention of tribal societies, and monkeys probably do the same as well.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      Biggest monkey is boss monkey. Biggest monkey with most monkey friends is next boss monkey. Monkey friends only harass monkeys with no friends and suck up to the boss monkeys and their friends. It's good to be boss monkey. All the other monkeys have to regulate themselves or get ripped apart.
      - 5y ago
DoreenMichele 5y ago
Two things come to mind. The first is some old humorous TV commercial where they had barcodes on your forehead and one didn't want to scan properly and the bank clerk or cashier was running this person's face repeatedly over the scanner. The second is a historical incident that led to old "biometrics" being replaced with fingerprints as our default for identification. I've read about it previously and found this as the top result when doing a quick search (I will not vouch for its quality -- it is just evidence I am not making it up, plus enough info that you can go look for more if you find it interesting and want to know more). How Look-Alike Leavenworth Prisoners Led To The Forensic Use Of Fingerprinting https://www.kcur.org/show/central-standard/2015-12-15/how-look-alike-leavenworth-prisoners-led-to-the-forensic-use-of-fingerprinting https://www.kcur.org/show/central-standard/2015-12-15/how-lo... The early part of the article makes the distinction between "unobjectionable" uses of facial recognition -- such as for secure facilities -- and facial recognition in public places generally. And it seems to me we are leaving out some important things when we discuss such things. We are not talking about how our historical social norms and laws were rooted in a social reality that no longer exists. The world has changed radically in a short period of time and there are both upsides and downsides. Historically, people lived in relatively small groups of close-knit people. Tribes. Small towns. Etc. We mostly interacted with people we knew fairly well. This both provided some baseline security and also could be a prison from which you could not readily escape. Once labeled a "troublemaker" you would have a hard time living it down. People could easily frame you as the guilty party based on social expectation that it was typical behavior for you to do X. It was hard to leave your place of origin and go elsewhere but if you could, you could potentially start over. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid might have successfully started over had they genuinely left their life of crime behind entirely after moving to South America. But they relapsed and it did not end well. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-01-19-1997019144-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-01-19-19970191... We have statutes of limitations on various crimes because we have this idea historically that if enough time passes, you should not be held responsible for stupid mistakes you made in your youth. People can change, if they are given the chance to change. It's complicated because it is human nature that if you make it too easy to get a pass for bad behavior, then you actively encourage bad behavior. But if you make it impossible to redeem yourself and start anew, then you give people no reason to bother to even try. One of the problems with trends like facial recognition is that we are veering increasingly towards a very unforgiving world where every little thing you do will haunt you forever and there will be records even if you might have forgotten the incident entirely. Yes, this is motivated in part by the fact that really terrible people like to look for the cracks in the system. They like to actively exploit loopholes. They will happily take the deal that they can get a free do-over without having to prove themselves only to keep doing terrible things because nothing is really stopping them. But hard cases make bad laws. Designing a world optimized to treat everyone like they are this worst case scenario causes a great many problems while solving relatively few. In a world with 8 billion people (roughly) and international passports required to go anywhere, etc. we are increasingly being painted into a corner individually and this will soon start to really come back to bite us, if it hasn't already. If nothing else, it makes it harder to migrate as one practical response to climate change making some areas less hospitable. We need to begin thinking more deeply and more broadly about the social context in which our laws and expectations developed, how the world has changed and how to find a path forward in this new reality that isn't overly paranoid, overly controlling, etc.
armchairhacker 5y ago
Also people’s faces can change, if they get disfigured, age, gain/lose weight, or possibly even exposed to the elements. Even subtle changes, AI models could be worse at recognizing than humans.
conspiracist 5y ago
Since 2001, and through the other numerous times that this this argument(s?) has been posted on HN (thank you @dang for the links) - how have things changed for the better? Its time to stop thinking that posting "arguments against" something is somehow equivalent to making a difference, and start making a difference for real.
- vegetablepotpie 5y ago
  > start making a difference for real What is the actionable advice here? Go the technical route and develop countermeasures to facial recognition? And then play the cat mouse game of counter-counter measures, and making counter-counter-counter measures to those counter-counter measures until the facial recognition is as good as humans? Then what? Or do we go the political route and try to affect legislation? What I’ve learned from reducing climate change is that politicians only listen to you if you represent a group of people. Building coalition’s are a must for any kind of political change. We do build them, for tech people, on HN by posting articles against facial recognition. The thing we’re missing here is a way to organize collective action. But I think YC would want to avoid the kind of attention that would generate, so I think the site is designed against incentivizing that.
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    The actionable advice is to start posting "arguments against posting arguments against something".
  - jrm4 5y ago
    Mostly the latter, I think. Also just the "public perception" space (which these days, you'd think would be a pretty easy sell, given vaccine skepticism and all, but maybe not?")
  - conspiracist 5y ago
    You've eloquently buried in there a number of problems. But I would like to make one change to what you just mentioned: it's not that politicians only listen if you represent a group of people. Politicians listen to power and money, first and foremost (and not always in that order). Everything else is secondary. That you're on a website that is designed against incentivizing collective action, and yet tries to pass itself off as a bastion of, well, let's call it practical and realistic rhetoric most of the time, is part of the problem. You're not going to find collective action anywhere because the moment you do, "they" are going to insert themselves into the collective to try to sabotage and break apart. "They" have decades worth of experience at it and don't mind killing people left and right, either. The actionable advice, for this community, would be to put all that great intelligence together and try to come up with a way to subvert whatever opposition would stand in the way of a collective action. I don't know if there's money in it so sadly it probably couldn't be a YC backed start up. Quite the contrary - the money would most likely try to kill you, but nevermind that.
pts_ 5y ago
BS next ban all humint spotters. Well you can't.
jrm4 5y ago
One thing to consider (when arguing against this stuff as you definitely should) is that there are two distinct classes of arguments against; One is "What if it works wrong?," and yeah, as a black person seeing the current state of the tech, that's already a pretty scary one. But probably the more important is "What if it works perfectly well and exactly as intended?" It's still an outrageously bad idea. Now, I'm actually not sure if you'll be able to ban it outright, but this is where you have to slog through the extremely important but perhaps slow-going route of "public policy."
nbzso 5y ago
Surveillance economy is the new business model. Billions of dollars are invested in surveillance tech. Military technology as usual creeps towards consumers. Politicians are serving the corporations. So we already lost this by accepting that technology advancements and economy benefits are more important than human privacy and overall dignity.
risyachka 5y ago
Like any tool, it's not the recognition or surveillance is bad but the abuse of it.
timdaub 5y ago
It's weird have to conclude that none of the biomining having been done in the last decade has provoked clear and binary opinions on its legality. You can mine features on pictures you don't even own and those people you don't even know (or asked for consent). It's entirely legal. Metadata is taken in masses to surveil us all. But there's no one calling for an outright ban or regulation of such things. Or let's say it's far from mainstream and only a tiny minority that does. The usual arguments are always balanced as in: "yeah but if it was forbidden, we couldn't do X anymore." On the other side, for some tech that isn't unconsentual exploitive like crypto currencies people just simply feel like shutting it down. Here, though it arguably has use cases too, nobody cares. If it's a security in the US, it'll get shut down no questions asked.
firstSpeaker 5y ago
I believe the train for this has already departed. It is very very unlikely that in next two decade state of surveillance, from either of its many pillars, slow down or stop. Lots of factors contributed to surveillance becoming as widespread as it is.
zaptheimpaler 5y ago
The big joke is that any of these arguments matter. As if we live inside an enlightened society where citizens are engaged and informed on every issue and their preferences then bubble up to lawmakers. lmao. 90% of people don't give a shit at all. The airports are already running face recognition. PRISM continues, seemingly without opposition. Every 4 years we get to choose between puppet X and puppet Y who promise different variations of "more jobs" or "America good" or some equally vague idea. There's no debating your way out of apathy or idiocracy..
- nexuist 5y ago
  Giving up isn't how to escape apathy or idiocracy either.
  - zaptheimpaler 5y ago
    You're right. I don't know what the right answer is, all i'm saying is the current ways don't seem to be working.

229 points by panic 5y ago

dang 5y ago

One past thread: Your Face Is Not a Bar Code (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17939248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17939248 - Sept 2018 (29 comments) Related from last month: Phil Agre saw the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28159708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28159708 - Aug 2021 (42 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28167703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28167703

black_13 5y ago

But what about the children?

ftio 5y ago

Had my creepiest-ever encounter with face recognition recently. I was traveling home from our first international trip since The Before Times. The country we traveled from has a US Customs office in the airport. We walk up to the counter, look into the camera, and without having handed over my passport, the agent says my name. I know that I've given them my photo and that the search space for my match isn't huge (people on flights leaving in the next ~2-8 hours), but it absolutely freaked me out. I can't imagine it meaningfully makes us more secure, and it feels like the kind of thing that, to this article's point, could be trivially abused.

gumby 5y ago
You weren't greeted as a convenience but as a form of intimidation.
- pope_meat 5y ago
  "hello, citizen #4838428069, we know who you are, now hand over the identification paperwork to prove to us who you are" ...wait a minute
  - bserge 5y ago
    "Pick up that can"
- autoexec 5y ago
  I agree, but I prefer it when they're at least upfront about it. It's much better than just silently collecting your data and then using it against it you in ways you'll never know or be able to trace back even if it's suspected. If my health insurance premiums rise suddenly, it'd take a whistleblower for me to discover that it was because my face was flagged more often at fast-food counters or bars.
jackson1442 5y ago
I wonder if they maybe used a long-range RFID reader to read the chip in your passport and matched it against your face.
- flemhans 5y ago
  The contents of the chip is encrypted with the machine-readable text on the picture page, so you cannot harvest people's data like that without opening the passport.
  - romeovs 5y ago
    But nothing is stopping the US customs service (or any other service) to store the unencrypted data for later reference right? I don’t find it farfetched that some big players would have a database that holds basically a huge lookup table that goes from encrypted data to the unencrypted data. This wouldn’t work on your first visits, but return visitors could have their rfid read like that. Or do the rfid chips hold some kind of randomness in them so they can do a type of handshake (that is unique every time) where that machine readable password is needed?
ladberg 5y ago
I visited China with someone who was from China but had been living in the US. It was a hot day and at one point I wanted cold water (which turns out is a very western thing and hard to get elsewhere) and the only option was a vending machine. I expected at first to pay with coins, WeChat, or AliPay but she just showed her face to the camera on the vending machine and it charged it to her bank account. She didn't have to enter a PIN or show identity and the only device she had on her was a US-bought iPhone with no cell service. I was blown away that not only was a camera able to identify her out of the probably hundreds of millions of people enrolled in the system, but it was confident enough to actually charge money to her account. I still think about that to this day and tell people about it when they talk about the level of tech in the US.
- bserge 5y ago
  I'd say you got pranked, but that may be wishful thinking. Yeah, I don't think that system is "confident enough". Just that the error rate is acceptable. Some poor sod gets charged instead of you? Welp, tough luck. Pretty terrible.
  - wcoenen 5y ago
    Not a prank. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/04/smile-to-pay-chinese-shoppers-turn-to-facial-payment-technology https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/04/smile-to-pay-c...
    - bserge 5y ago
      And people sign up for it voluntarily... Just wow
      - risyachka 5y ago
        Why wouldn't they? Their faces are probably many years already in government face recognition systems. Also they don't have much of a choice anyway with CCP. At least they get some extra convenience because of it.
syshum 5y ago
The ACLU Pizza video [1] from several years ago is a classic, but we continue to march ever slowly to that reality, few people seem to mind. [1] https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza
fidesomnes 5y ago
> I can't imagine it meaningfully makes us more secure, I can't imagine letting you in charge of a customs office security. > but it absolutely freaked me out and it feels like the kind of thing that, to this article's point, could be trivially abused. Okay Karen, go ahead and trivially abuse it and write back with your findings. I'll wait.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mullingitover 5y ago

If we're going to outlaw automated facial recognition, which in general is better at recognizing faces than humans, we should release every person who is in prison because an eyewitness ID'd them.

shapefrog 5y ago
All recognising people should be illegal
kube-system 5y ago
As I understand, eyewitness testimony is extremely unreliable. Although, it's valuable for convincing juries, because people think it's reliable.
- genewitch 5y ago
  I was a witness to a crime that led to a short police chase and a police shooting, and I couldn't accurately describe which direction the car was facing when it passed me (reversing or forward). Up until that point I'd have thought I would be a reliable witness (I didn't, but this proved it definitively!)
  - kube-system 5y ago
    I actually have a very similar story. When I was younger, I was witness to a pretty bad car accident, and I gave them my information, and was later subpoenaed as a witness. Before going, I thought I had a pretty good recollection of the event -- it happened right in front of me. When I got there, I was also stumped by simple questions about which direction one of the cars was going. It was really eye-opening for me. Thinking about it is still kind of eerie. I remember the accident. I can see it in my head. But apparently the memory is not exactly correct.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      > I was also stumped by simple questions about which direction one of the cars was going. Presumably lawyers are very good at finding exactly the right questions to ask to exploit the weaknesses of human memory and make a witness look unreliable.

Barrin92 5y ago

Every point against facial recognition on the list is a point about how facial recognition systems materially relate to the individual or about particular technical faults of the system. All of which miss the point. The point of surveillance is the same as Bentham's original panopticon, that is to say discipline people by making them discipline themselves. surveillance isn't scary because of the literal cameras, it's scary because it makes people aware that they're being watched and thus it forces them to police themselves, internally. People would be better off to recognize and argue this very fundamental point about the psychological intent of surveillance, rather than having obscure discussions about the legality of consent or whether the system is 97% or 98% accurate or whatever.

amelius 5y ago
> it's scary because it makes people aware that they're being watched and thus it forces them to police themselves, internally. People have been policing themselves since the invention of religion.
- babyshake 5y ago
  Eventually the distinction between God and government may dissolve.
- Wohlf 5y ago
  People have been policing themselves since the invention of tribal societies, and monkeys probably do the same as well.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    Biggest monkey is boss monkey. Biggest monkey with most monkey friends is next boss monkey. Monkey friends only harass monkeys with no friends and suck up to the boss monkeys and their friends. It's good to be boss monkey. All the other monkeys have to regulate themselves or get ripped apart.
    - 5y ago

DoreenMichele 5y ago

Two things come to mind. The first is some old humorous TV commercial where they had barcodes on your forehead and one didn't want to scan properly and the bank clerk or cashier was running this person's face repeatedly over the scanner. The second is a historical incident that led to old "biometrics" being replaced with fingerprints as our default for identification. I've read about it previously and found this as the top result when doing a quick search (I will not vouch for its quality -- it is just evidence I am not making it up, plus enough info that you can go look for more if you find it interesting and want to know more). How Look-Alike Leavenworth Prisoners Led To The Forensic Use Of Fingerprinting https://www.kcur.org/show/central-standard/2015-12-15/how-look-alike-leavenworth-prisoners-led-to-the-forensic-use-of-fingerprinting https://www.kcur.org/show/central-standard/2015-12-15/how-lo... The early part of the article makes the distinction between "unobjectionable" uses of facial recognition -- such as for secure facilities -- and facial recognition in public places generally. And it seems to me we are leaving out some important things when we discuss such things. We are not talking about how our historical social norms and laws were rooted in a social reality that no longer exists. The world has changed radically in a short period of time and there are both upsides and downsides. Historically, people lived in relatively small groups of close-knit people. Tribes. Small towns. Etc. We mostly interacted with people we knew fairly well. This both provided some baseline security and also could be a prison from which you could not readily escape. Once labeled a "troublemaker" you would have a hard time living it down. People could easily frame you as the guilty party based on social expectation that it was typical behavior for you to do X. It was hard to leave your place of origin and go elsewhere but if you could, you could potentially start over. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid might have successfully started over had they genuinely left their life of crime behind entirely after moving to South America. But they relapsed and it did not end well. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-01-19-1997019144-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-01-19-19970191... We have statutes of limitations on various crimes because we have this idea historically that if enough time passes, you should not be held responsible for stupid mistakes you made in your youth. People can change, if they are given the chance to change. It's complicated because it is human nature that if you make it too easy to get a pass for bad behavior, then you actively encourage bad behavior. But if you make it impossible to redeem yourself and start anew, then you give people no reason to bother to even try. One of the problems with trends like facial recognition is that we are veering increasingly towards a very unforgiving world where every little thing you do will haunt you forever and there will be records even if you might have forgotten the incident entirely. Yes, this is motivated in part by the fact that really terrible people like to look for the cracks in the system. They like to actively exploit loopholes. They will happily take the deal that they can get a free do-over without having to prove themselves only to keep doing terrible things because nothing is really stopping them. But hard cases make bad laws. Designing a world optimized to treat everyone like they are this worst case scenario causes a great many problems while solving relatively few. In a world with 8 billion people (roughly) and international passports required to go anywhere, etc. we are increasingly being painted into a corner individually and this will soon start to really come back to bite us, if it hasn't already. If nothing else, it makes it harder to migrate as one practical response to climate change making some areas less hospitable. We need to begin thinking more deeply and more broadly about the social context in which our laws and expectations developed, how the world has changed and how to find a path forward in this new reality that isn't overly paranoid, overly controlling, etc.

armchairhacker 5y ago

Also people’s faces can change, if they get disfigured, age, gain/lose weight, or possibly even exposed to the elements. Even subtle changes, AI models could be worse at recognizing than humans.

conspiracist 5y ago

Since 2001, and through the other numerous times that this this argument(s?) has been posted on HN (thank you @dang for the links) - how have things changed for the better? Its time to stop thinking that posting "arguments against" something is somehow equivalent to making a difference, and start making a difference for real.

vegetablepotpie 5y ago
> start making a difference for real What is the actionable advice here? Go the technical route and develop countermeasures to facial recognition? And then play the cat mouse game of counter-counter measures, and making counter-counter-counter measures to those counter-counter measures until the facial recognition is as good as humans? Then what? Or do we go the political route and try to affect legislation? What I’ve learned from reducing climate change is that politicians only listen to you if you represent a group of people. Building coalition’s are a must for any kind of political change. We do build them, for tech people, on HN by posting articles against facial recognition. The thing we’re missing here is a way to organize collective action. But I think YC would want to avoid the kind of attention that would generate, so I think the site is designed against incentivizing that.
- kgwxd 5y ago
  The actionable advice is to start posting "arguments against posting arguments against something".
- jrm4 5y ago
  Mostly the latter, I think. Also just the "public perception" space (which these days, you'd think would be a pretty easy sell, given vaccine skepticism and all, but maybe not?")
- conspiracist 5y ago
  You've eloquently buried in there a number of problems. But I would like to make one change to what you just mentioned: it's not that politicians only listen if you represent a group of people. Politicians listen to power and money, first and foremost (and not always in that order). Everything else is secondary. That you're on a website that is designed against incentivizing collective action, and yet tries to pass itself off as a bastion of, well, let's call it practical and realistic rhetoric most of the time, is part of the problem. You're not going to find collective action anywhere because the moment you do, "they" are going to insert themselves into the collective to try to sabotage and break apart. "They" have decades worth of experience at it and don't mind killing people left and right, either. The actionable advice, for this community, would be to put all that great intelligence together and try to come up with a way to subvert whatever opposition would stand in the way of a collective action. I don't know if there's money in it so sadly it probably couldn't be a YC backed start up. Quite the contrary - the money would most likely try to kill you, but nevermind that.

pts_ 5y ago

BS next ban all humint spotters. Well you can't.

jrm4 5y ago

One thing to consider (when arguing against this stuff as you definitely should) is that there are two distinct classes of arguments against; One is "What if it works wrong?," and yeah, as a black person seeing the current state of the tech, that's already a pretty scary one. But probably the more important is "What if it works perfectly well and exactly as intended?" It's still an outrageously bad idea. Now, I'm actually not sure if you'll be able to ban it outright, but this is where you have to slog through the extremely important but perhaps slow-going route of "public policy."

nbzso 5y ago

Surveillance economy is the new business model. Billions of dollars are invested in surveillance tech. Military technology as usual creeps towards consumers. Politicians are serving the corporations. So we already lost this by accepting that technology advancements and economy benefits are more important than human privacy and overall dignity.

risyachka 5y ago

Like any tool, it's not the recognition or surveillance is bad but the abuse of it.

timdaub 5y ago

It's weird have to conclude that none of the biomining having been done in the last decade has provoked clear and binary opinions on its legality. You can mine features on pictures you don't even own and those people you don't even know (or asked for consent). It's entirely legal. Metadata is taken in masses to surveil us all. But there's no one calling for an outright ban or regulation of such things. Or let's say it's far from mainstream and only a tiny minority that does. The usual arguments are always balanced as in: "yeah but if it was forbidden, we couldn't do X anymore." On the other side, for some tech that isn't unconsentual exploitive like crypto currencies people just simply feel like shutting it down. Here, though it arguably has use cases too, nobody cares. If it's a security in the US, it'll get shut down no questions asked.

firstSpeaker 5y ago

I believe the train for this has already departed. It is very very unlikely that in next two decade state of surveillance, from either of its many pillars, slow down or stop. Lots of factors contributed to surveillance becoming as widespread as it is.

zaptheimpaler 5y ago

The big joke is that any of these arguments matter. As if we live inside an enlightened society where citizens are engaged and informed on every issue and their preferences then bubble up to lawmakers. lmao. 90% of people don't give a shit at all. The airports are already running face recognition. PRISM continues, seemingly without opposition. Every 4 years we get to choose between puppet X and puppet Y who promise different variations of "more jobs" or "America good" or some equally vague idea. There's no debating your way out of apathy or idiocracy..

nexuist 5y ago
Giving up isn't how to escape apathy or idiocracy either.
- zaptheimpaler 5y ago
  You're right. I don't know what the right answer is, all i'm saying is the current ways don't seem to be working.