
Photos of Kids Are Powering Surveillance Technology - hesk
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/11/technology/flickr-facial-recognition.html
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tsumnia
While I understand the outrage and fully understand it, I'd like to offer
another reason why child faces are in use - sex trafficking. My previous
research was in face recognition and mostly in artificial face aging
algorithms. One of the trouble areas in that domain was predicting how child
would look after X years. This is due to the elasticity of child faces. The
DOD offered grants for this type of research to help thwart child abduction
and sex trafficking.

Obviously this was before all of these types of stories began to emerge, but I
like to bring this up as an opposing ethical debate.

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HarryHirsch
Is sex trafficking of children really a significant problem? (Yes, everyone
has heard of the Dutroux case, but the depths of that won't be plumbed by face
aging algorithms.)

Altogether the line of reasoning sounds like the usual hype you put into grant
applications. Your line of work is highly strained hydrocarbons, so when you
apply to the Department of Energy you say in the distant future you won't
synthesize 100 mg, you'll prepare hundreds of tons to put it into a rocket to
increase its payload.

~~~
cookie_monsta
I think by now it's pretty much obligatory that any defense of mass
surveillance will at least mention one of child sex trafficking, drug dealing
or terrorism.

Bonus points are available for combinations.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I would think that at least on HN we're more sophisticated than that. Just
because child trafficking, drug dealing and terrorism are abused by
politicians to excuse mass surveillance, doesn't mean they aren't real
problems or that surveillance tech isn't able to help with them. Reasonable
people consider trade-offs, and not cast everything in light of "sides" and
"defending" yours.

~~~
matheusmoreira
> Reasonable people consider trade-offs

Let's do that:

1\. Easy to use and effective encryption for _all_ people, even pedophiles and
terrorists.

2\. Backdoored untrustworthy encryption governments will almost certainly
abuse in order to surveil entire populations.

Number 1 sounds like a very reasonable principle to have. Governments and
police forces have more than enough tools at their disposal to fight crimes.
WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption and my country's police forces routinely
catch child molesters that use it. They do not need and should not have a
"show me everything there is to know about this guy" button that they don't
even need a warrant to press.

Certain things should be inviolable, even to the state, even with a warrant.

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jonas21
So... people specifically opted in to release their photos under a Creative
Commons license, and now they're outraged that people are using the photos
under the terms of the license?

And some of them chose a license that required attribution, and now they're
outraged that the photos are attributed to them?

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EricE
Read the article more closely - at least one person they interviewed
specifically assigned it the non-commercial Creative Commons license which
means pictures shouldn't be used for things like what mega face is doing
(clearly for commercial purposes!)

~~~
Mathnerd314
They're using it for academic research, which is noncommercial by some
definitions. The companies that used it only used it to participate in the
competition.

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herf
It's a mistake to think that checking a box that says "CC" means you actually
had permission to issue a license.

If you're selling stock photos, you need written consent for everything in the
photo--artwork, brands, people. Interestingly, parents _can_ give consent for
their kids to be in a photograph, but these same identifiers can be used years
later to identify the adults in the photos.

A related question is this: do pre-trained classifiers reveal any personally-
identifying information? Or are they only statistics about many, many faces?

