
Halt the use of facial-recognition technology until it is regulated - hardmaru
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02514-7
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edejong
Regulation proposal: all video data and derivatives (face recognition) of
public areas must be publicly available. Sort of GPL-like. The resulting
effects will force people to rethink and reevaluate current policies.

~~~
notahacker
"To prevent cities being turned into panopticons, we should make sharing data
with people trying to build them mandatory"

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edejong
Quote from?

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notahacker
It was a _reductio ad absurdum_ paraphrase of your own argument.

Imagine this law was passed. Joe of Joe's Garage doesn't read BoingBoing and
has no issues complying with the new law which obliges him to pass the
security tapes he used to delete because they were so uninteresting to an
agency representing SpouseTracker.com, and is not at all interested in
revising his views of the necessity of collecting data of possible crimes
against his business in the unlikely event he reads a paper about aggregating
camera data to track individuals or an article about a stalker who tracked the
target of their obsession using public feeds of nearby CCTV cameras, even if
he makes the connection. The proprietors of SpouseTracker.com and stalkers
everywhere thank the privacy advocates for their support.

~~~
edejong
Ah, I see now. Back to your original comment:

"To prevent cities being turned into panopticons, we should make sharing data
with people trying to build them mandatory"

The reason why panopticons work is because the prisoners don't know what the
guards can see. And due to this asymmetric power relation, it is very hard to
revolt. There are two solutions: either prevent the information gathering, or
make the information publicly available. The former solution is not possible
if you don't know what information is being gathered, so we are left with the
second solution (to start with).

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notahacker
Sure, but I have literally no interest in revolting and there is no possible
world in which a revolt would succeed due to the Evil Dictatorship dutifully
uploading all their information advantages to a public server.

Back in the real world, I don't have any issues with the supermarket videoing
me self-scanning, but would have issues with them being compelled to share
information on my shopping habits in real time with literally anybody that
wanted to know where I was and what I was doing right now and who I was
with...

~~~
edejong
A supermarket is not a public space. All I am saying is that all information
gathered in the public space should be shared publicly. The idea being: anyone
could have been there and recorded that information (since it is public). This
will prevent those with deep pockets to create a panopticon of our public
environment.

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newsreview1
halt use by whom? Government agencies? Security companies? Ring doorbell
companies?

~~~
AstralStorm
All of the above, preferably. Government agencies for law enforcement may be
exempt anyway. Perhaps the only decent use is a biometric ID or passport and
should be regulated as identification data on those documents, that is
rigorously.

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nipponese
The fact that we regulate credit card usage via PCI compliance and not
biometrics is bizarre to me.

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hubert1234
The dislike for facial recognition technology is another one of those hard to
comprehend stances for me. The article is more like a moral call to action, it
doesnt contain any facts or information or even arguments against it. All I
can find is that it claims "costly errors, discrimination and privacy
invasions" are the problem. How can facial recognition software possibly cause
all of that? Software operation basically free, discrimination is ridiculous -
if anything it helps with less discrimination, it scans everybody after all.
and then privacy invasion? You mean you walk around in public spaces and you
think you have a right not to be recorded? How is this different from a police
officer walking by and scanning your face? No, in reality this debate is a
weird sort of antitech sentiment. It's like a symptom of a deep
dissatisfaction with how fast the world is developing and people want to go
back to the good old times. Well sorry, but I actually like the fact that a
criminal can get caught in minutes because his face is scanned.

~~~
groceryheist
This is a very narrow view of potential applications of facial recognition. I
take it for granted that this technology has enormous affordances for social
control. "Criminality" may be an out-of date notion of the kinds of behaviors
that governments and other institutions like those in workplaces (e.g. the
academy, employers, corporations). Surveillance has major political
implications and we should not treat the advancement of technology as
independent from the society and the political economy.

Surveillance is the key concept in a major design of social control, Bentham's
"Panopticon." When anyone may be watched, people must live expecting that they
will be watched, and the will of those with the power to create sanctions will
enacted. This will be a historical novelty if facial recognition systems
become widespread. Historically, only limited public venues were subject to
effective widespread surveillance (except in extreme authoritarian cases like
East Germany). Increasingly, online spaces are subject to surveillance that is
limited by browser instrumentation, with facial recognition it will be
possible to track people offline as well, if you have access to the cameras.

Surveillance is the twin of transparency, which can be thought of as possible
tool for democratic control. I do believe that transparency i.e. through
freedom of information acts has some positive characteristics for democracy
but has a weak empirical record compared to panoptic control. Facial
recognition might have affordances for collective action, such as making it
easy to produce evidence of excesses or corruption.

That said, maybe we should not give the authorities the power to implement
technological changes without the consent of the governed? Technology moves
faster than policies can adapt to them, but old laws and institutions like the
police evolved in times when the tools of day could not have been imagined.

Edit: Regulating technologies like facial recognition popularizes the control
of social systems which counter acts authoritarianism and high concentration
of power and resources.

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hubert1234
Ok so outside of their own home people have to behave as if somebody watches
them 24/7\. No offense, but we already have data on what that kind of belief
produces and that's the belief that God always watches you. Seems to be
beneficial.

~~~
infinitezest
Not sure you have the option of not believing in the government if you find
their policies oppressive. Doesn't really seem like the same thing to me.

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danielrhodes
Not intending to tow the libertarian line here, but I find it concerning when
regulation is proposed for a technology in a vacuum. We should see how facial
recognition develops and how the powers that be utilize it first. Only then
can we see if it is being used in a way which offends societal values, and
only then should we create laws and regulations to curb such behavior which
are specific in nature and not overly broad. Right now this is somewhat
speculative.

I think much of the fear around facial recognition is that it could be (or is
being) used for mass surveillance. The Supreme Court has already deemed mass
surveillance unconstitutional under the 4th amendment [1]. Perhaps the
solution to curb the misuse of facial recognition is to ban mass surveillance
itself, and not ban the tool.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-supreme-court-
ju...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-supreme-court-just-struck-
a-blow-against-mass-
surveillance/2018/06/25/1b5ee510-7653-11e8-b4b7-308400242c2e_story.html)

~~~
hos234
Facebook/Youtube/Twitter et al uses mass surveillance to place ads. Netflix
uses it to decide what movies and shows to make. Google uses it to rank info.
Insurance companies use it to decide prices. The more data we have the more
everything is going to look like mass surveillance. Agree with your first
para. Let it play out. Allow people/orgs to fuck up as they will and then
regulate.

~~~
infinitezest
Meanwhile, they're amassing enough capital and information to make sure the
regulations look exactly the way they want.

