

EFF: Americans may not realize the impacts of face recognition technology - andreyf
https://www.networkworld.com/community/node/81052

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jiggy2011
Between stuff like google glass,facial recognition, GPS and advanced ML , NLP
techniques pretty much means the end of privacy. Even for people who don't use
social networks so much.

If the recognition is accurate enough , you only need 1 person to tag you once
and all of your movements can be tracked by cameras (that will eventually be
built into everyone's glasses).

You're out walking and you do something dumb like trip over a crack in the
pavement. Some passer by taps the "that was funny, tag it" button that is
mounted inconspicuously on their person and it's instantly fed into the
streams of all your friends and family.

The question is, what does this actually mean to society?

If everyone's personal life is on permanent display does it mean that we
become more robot like because nobody wants to have something they may regret
recorded in perpetuity or does it make people more liberal because things that
used to be considered funny/outrageous/taboo simply no longer are. In the
sense that if every woman went around topless, men would soon cease becoming
aroused by breasts.

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true_religion
I question how much privacy really did exist before the modern era of large
cities and impersonal lives.

When we all lived within spitting distance of our families in a single common
room, and everyone in town knew you from birth to death, how much different
was life then from now?

Will the 'erosion' of privacy really just return us to a state that we
(humanity) have previously been in?

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HalibetLector
The key difference is they traded privacy for personal trust and rapport. When
you live in the same foxhole with your entire family and are always
interacting with the same small community, trust is built up over time. You
knew everybody in a personal way, not just as an abstract notion of a person
on the other side of the world.

The way we're heading, we'll have neither personal trust nor privacy. It's not
JUST the lack of privacy that's a problem, it's the fact that any stranger can
know everything there is to know about you. In a small community, everybody
has to have good working relationships with everybody else or the community
dies. On the internet, not everybody has your best interests in mind.

~~~
jiggy2011
There's also the issue that information is easily spread "virally" online. The
information that is actively spread though tends to be stuff that is
outrageous or scandalous (often taken out of context) or whatever rather than
the positive but boring stuff.

Star wars kid could probably cure cancer, but he'd still be "the star wars
kid" to most people.

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true_religion
I think the issue is that if we know only one thing about you, that one thing
is your label.

I see a policeman on TV, he's a 'cop'. Sure he may be a father, avid sci-fi
junkie, and so on, but all I see is one dimension.

If Star Wars Kid cured cancer, we wouldn't forget about his light saber antics
but we'd add that to our impression of him----now he's a nobel winning
scientist, with an impressive intellect, who has saved potentially billions of
lives..... oh and in his youth he used to geek out on Youtube.

~~~
jiggy2011
True, something of that magnitude would probably change expectations. But what
if you are just a good software developer or something like that?

The policeman example is interesting, what happens in a society where a
policeman is trying to be taken seriously and discourage you from some
activity you are doing but your glasses automatically recognise his face and
say "hey, I see you are being harassed by the police, these naked pictures
leaked by his ex-wife might be of use to you".

~~~
politician
A more useful feature would be for the device to automatically stream video to
an off-site location whenever it recognizes a policeman, badge, or vehicle.

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mvzink
Not surprising; most don't even realize the impacts of basic web technology.
But indeed, the obvious fact that Americans have far less privacy than they
realize is interesting and important.

I am repeatedly reminded of Brin's "The Transparent Society" [0]. Given the
breadth and depth of privacy violations that continue to progress in the US
and elsewhere, it seems more and more likely that we will eventually face a
choice "between privacy and freedom" as Brin predicts. Sadly, people do indeed
remain unaware, and even the savvy aren't taking the issue seriously (read:
radically) enough. I count myself among the lazy, but I'm happy to preach doom
like the rest.

[0] <http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety1.html>

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burntwater
While this has been in my consciousness, I can't say I ever thought too
seriously about it. Until yesterday, when I was lounging on a lawn in the
park. I watched a woman take a photo, of which I was most likely in the
background. The photo will likely be posted online, along with date and
possibly GPS information encoded.

Though I'm in the background, likely blurred, I can fully visualize a system
that would combine near-certain images (a security camera is 90% positive it
saw me three blocks west of the park at 2pm), with the blurred image taken at
3pm in the park, 30% likely it's me, with another security image taken at 4pm
2 blocks east of the park with 85% certainty.

In other words, 10 years from now these algorithms won't just be able to
follow my every move - they'll be able to go back and scan all the pictures
uploaded, ever. And compile a film showing every waking hour of my life. A
timeline, really.

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16s
I've built OpenCV for use on HPC clusters, and while not a big facial coder, I
have help those who do it. It's interesting to distinguish between the terms
'facial detection' and 'facial recognition'. The former basically judges
whether or not a face is in a picture or video while the latter attempts to
associate faces with names/identities. Two very different things. I just
wanted to point that out. OpenCV is good at detection, but I'm told not so
good at recognition.

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uiri
At least for Facebook, I think it is possible to check if they have enough
photos tagged of you that they feel confident that they can identify you in
photos.

Facebook → Privacy Settings → Timeline and Tagging Edit Settings → Who sees
tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded? (this is not yet
available to you)

Needless to say there are very few pictures of me on Facebook and none of them
are taken or uploaded by me.

~~~
joering2
I think its worth pointing out that regardless of how you setup your photo
recognition/face identification settings, what happens behind the scene is
entirely different thing.

I can see FB user turning all those recognition features off, but yet when FB
is given a photo and asked by LE for help with finding you in FB network, FB
can choose to comply with that and quickly find you in a stack of 100 billions
of photos, providing LE with array of all your photos organized by time and
place.

edit: also, I believe there will be more way of abusing photos recognition in
the future. Just like Federalies are using Google Earth Maps to find who has a
swimming pool and match this information against resident's taxes (whether
they paid pool taxes or not) and acting accordingly if they haven't paid, I
can see IRS tapping (or at least wanting to tap) into FB photos stream and
find folks that bought luxury stuff and did not claim it tax-wise.

~~~
orijing
That makes me wonder two things:

1\. Is it bad (or unfair) for the IRS to use technology to fight tax fraud? I
mean, every dollar not collected from a tax evader is an extra dollar that
must be collected from a law-abiding citizen. It sucks for the person with the
pool, but if it means lower taxes for everyone else, I think that would be a
good thing.

2\. Google Maps is public, but what obligations does Facebook have to reveal
photos that are posted privately (i.e. to friends), to law enforcement?

~~~
joering2
1\. No, its not bad. I was not looking at the issue from "right" or "Wrong"
perspective. This is only one example. I am sure there are others.

2\. Unfortunately, its not even up to the judge to determine "obligations".
Companies that grow as big as Facebook tend to turn evilish. ATT is a private
company with healthy profits; your phonecalls suppose to be private and you
pay ATT for delivering of service, but yet you have NSA and others involved,
where the Government publicly saying "yes we listen everything, we OCR your
conversations looking for terrorism, we record everything in our trillion
terabytes storage center". Skype is private too but its been known they are or
may be listening too.

To think that profits-seeking revenue-troubled Facebook will not want to look
for additional ways of making money such as selling your data to government is
naive. I really can imagine, sooner or later, an official set aside budget
that Govetnment will come up with that will be spend only on asking Facebook
for full access to their databases. Who knows, perhaps this is they way FB
will turn profitable-healthy. Guess the question would be if that, hopefully,
will finally scare ppl off of using it.

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daemon13
BTW, how good is FR technology these days, especially in edge cases (blurred
face, angles, etc)?

Also, any pointers to algos/open source tools?

~~~
apu
Terrible, unless you're in a "cooperative" setting, i.e., where the user is in
controlled lighting conditions and looks directly at the camera, in a decent-
to-high res photo.

Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) is the de-facto standard for looking at real-
world face verification ("are these two faces of the same person?"):
<http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html>

The top performer is currently around 93% (random chance is 50%). For a very
rough guide on how recognition rates would be ("who is this person?"), it's
v^sqrt(N), where v is the verification rate and N is the number of different
people you're trying to distinguish between. Note that it goes down very fast
with N.

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citizens
Does anyone else here fear the combination of facial recognition + domestic
drones?

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sit12
How will new face recognition technology discriminate between identical twins?

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TeMPOraL
It probably won't. However, with the numbers of cameras that are are being
deployed everywhere, soon you'll only have to "tag" them once, and then you'll
be able to track them as they move around the world.

~~~
stfu
Or you might just "enrich" the data with some behavioral information. Maybe
one twin favors vanilla and the other strawberry ice cream.

