
Thanks to facial recognition, a third person is arrested following a pop concert - erwan
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2018/05/23/613692526/thanks-to-ai-a-3rd-person-is-arrested-following-a-pop-superstars-concert
======
Abrecht
> "Cameras are set in China at 2.8 meters above the ground. That means they
> won't be able to capture human faces. That's a rule.

I'm confused.

~~~
parliament32
I think they mean surveillance cameras run at an angle that makes automated
facial recognition impossible.

~~~
trevyn
Today’s state of the art facial recogition systems work with close to +/\- 90
degrees of head pan and tilt. It’s really quite impressive.

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forgot-my-pw
> The man, who authorities identified only by his surname, Yu, is accused of
> having stolen around $17,000 worth of potatoes in 2015.

That's a lot of potatoes to move!

~~~
mkoryak
maybe a dozen of really expensive potatoes?

~~~
dTal
Or a single Faberge potato...

(edit: Holy shit, that exists...)

~~~
griffoa
Yeah, I hear those potatoes are the shit over in Palo Alto along with pink
BMW's for 16th birthdays.

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josefresco
Masks and temporary/permanent face altering techniques will explode as this
technology takes hold. I think about it like ad-blocking, something that may
work itself into the mainstream despite it's questionable ethics.

~~~
J-dawg
> _Masks and temporary /permanent face altering techniques will explode as
> this technology takes hold_

Along with a corresponding explosion in legislation to prevent you from
covering your face in public. It already exists in France (popularly known as
the 'Burqa Ban', but I think it covers other face coverings).

I'm especially curious to see how this will go down in the UK, which is
increasingly authoritarian while often painfully politically correct.

An ill-thought-out and ambiguous piece of law will be rushed through
Parliament, with various exemptions for religious groups. The far right will
become outraged about these exemptions, and stage protests. The "nothing to
hide, nothing to fear" brigade will be out in force. The government will make
vague statements about protecting us from terrorists. Paedophiles will
definitely be mentioned at some point.

Eventually there'll be farcical prosecutions of people who were just cycling
to work with a pollution mask, or going to a fancy-dress party. And the police
will continue to claim they're under-funded, while somehow finding the
resources to pursue bullshit like this.

~~~
derefr
You're allowed to cover your face in France, just not in such a way that it
signals religious affiliation. The point of the French law is to prevent
anyone from being able to identify, through observation in a public place,
what a stranger's religion is (under the theory that you can't commit hate
crimes if you can't identify your outgroup; and that a generation that grew up
not seeing any hate crimes committed—even if there were people who _wanted_ to
commit them, but just found it impractical—might grow up to be less hateful.)

(Anyone who wonders why France is unique in having such a law should remember
that France changed hands between Protestant and Catholic monarchs roughly two
dozen times, and each time there was a mini-crusade, with citizens of the
religion-in-power urged to "coerce" citizens of the religion-out-of-power to
converting with whatever means necessary. That died down enough that there was
never a law made to stop it at the time, but France saw the potential for such
cyclical violence to begin again when it joined the EU and began getting
increasing levels of immigration from non-Christian cultures, and so figured
that such a law was long past due.)

~~~
everdev
So can you wear a cross necklace or a yamaka? Or use a Jesus fish bumper
sticker?

~~~
J-dawg
Or to take the idea further, can you wear a cross necklace and a halloween
mask? Or a hijab and a welding mask?

One item is signalling your religion, the other is covering your face. Neither
item is covering your face in a way that signals your religion.

I feel like any attempt at imposing anti-privacy laws while keeping some
pretence of a free society ultimately descends into farce, because the two
ideas are basically incompatible.

~~~
derefr
No, you misunderstand; the law doesn't say anything about covering your face,
it _just_ says "you can't display your religious affiliation in public." A
hijab _happens_ to cover your face, but it's illegal to wear in public _only_
because it's a religious telltale, not because of its function.

You _can 't_ wear the cross necklace, or have the bumper-sticker; they signal
religion. And you _can_ wear the halloween mask, or the welding mask; they
don't signal religion. There's nothing more to it than that, and there's no
complex interaction.

If you can still see the hijab under the welding mask (and you can; the
welding mask doesn't cover the back of your head, or your neck) then the hijab
has gotta go. (And, to be extra clear, it's a unilateral rule: nuns and
priests can't wear their vestments in public either! They've gotta change into
them at the church/nunnery, and change back before they leave.)

On the other hand, if you wear a cross necklace under your clothes where
nobody can see it, that's perfectly fine. Because, again, the point is that
you can't _signal_ your religion. The symbols aren't against the law;
_displaying_ them is.

And so, actually, wearing a hijab would be fine if you wear, say, a
_motorcycle helmet_ over your head, and a _bandana_ over the lower half of
your face. You're covering all the same area—but, because nobody can tell that
you're wearing a hijab, and because neither a motorcycle helmet nor a bandana
signal religious affiliation, you're fine. The symbol is hidden, like the
cross under your clothes is hidden.

(Interestingly, since the point of the hijab tradition is to _cover_ these
areas, not to look a specific way, anything that covers these areas is
"functionally" still a hijab as far as Islamic social norms are concerned. So
wearing _just_ the motorcycle helmet + bandana would actually be a perfectly
legitimate way to cohere to your religious beliefs, without [legibly]
signalling your religion. ...until, that is, every Muslim woman started doing
it; then it'd become a legible religious symbol, and so be banned as well.)

~~~
J-dawg
I don’t think this is correct. A hijab is a scarf around the head that doesn’t
cover the face. I’m sure I’ve seen women in France wearing them.

The Wikipedia article suggests it’s a straightforward ban on covering the
face, not as you describe.

So in fact the welding mask or motorcycle helmet would be illegal (in a public
place). The hijab would be irrelevant.

I still think it’s a bad law, but at least it seems basically consistent.

Are we talking about different laws? Is there a different one about signalling
your religion?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering)

EDIT: I think we are indeed talking about different laws. You’re referring to
an older one that bans religious symbolism in public institutions. So what you
describe is correct, when we’re talking about schools and hospitals.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_scarf_controversy_in...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_scarf_controversy_in_France)

~~~
derefr
Ah! I didn't realize there was a newer law. It seems dumb :P

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drdebug
npr.org gave me a choice between agreeing with all the cookie sharing stuff,
or decline and get a text-only version, I love the choice !

~~~
0x006A
sadly the text only version links to the home page not the article, which is
odd since one can guess the url from the link ->
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526)

------
heyyyouu
And yet:
[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44089161](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44089161)
\-- did they maybe get lucky?

I tend to believe there's still issues with the technology and/or data in/data
out issues (unless, for example, the Chinese have REALLY good photos of people
to start with -- that's the excuse the British police gave in the above story
for the 91 percent false positive rate).

------
joering2
10 years from now frontpage HN: "Thanks to cameras placed in every room of
every Chinese house, 10,000 people have been saved from otherwise being
abused, kidnapped, raped or trafficked this month alone!"

Yay!

~~~
wedn3sday
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!

~~~
nnq
If you have nothing to hide, you are literally _worthless!_ (In a _financial_
sense, not saying this as an offense.)

People should get it that in a full fledged information economy the only thing
that will have value will be information that _they only they have._ So
_encrypt, don 't share, obsfucate, and when applicable use legal protection
like patents for anything you can..._

Never know what might be of value. One of the few good ideas I've hear in the
crypto space is owning and encripting your personal data so that _only you_
can sell it to advertisers. Sounds retarded, but as more and more things will
become worthless there might be some prophecy of a future to come...

------
m_t
Direct access to the text only version:
[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=613692526)

Thanks to GDPR, I can now acess a page with what I want to read way faster
than before!

~~~
2bitencryption
I'm still a bit ignorant on all things GDPR, which part of it says they must
provide a plaintext site?

I'm wondering if I will start seeing more of these in the future.

~~~
fapjacks
I'm just guessing, but GDPR does require that if a person says "no" to
tracking (or rather, if they do not explicitly opt-in), that the service
cannot be degraded. So I'm wondering if NPR is just serving completely script-
less, ad-less text to provide the same thing to this audience?

~~~
gnode
I wonder how regulators would look at this practise. It would depend on
whether taking away formatting and any image / video content counts as
degrading. For some people this is desirable, but for others it may not be.

My interpretation is that they would be free to give the text-only version to
EU residents unilaterally, but not to make formatting tied to tracking
consent, as tracking is not functionally necessary for formatting.

As an extreme example, I don't think Youtube could have "yes, track me and let
me watch the video" and "no, read text transcript of video" as options and
claim equivalency.

~~~
fapjacks
Yeah, it's an interesting question. I'm sure the lawyer-nerds are really
having a great time with it. I've heard it said elsewhere and here on HN that
EU courts are mostly concerned about the _practical_ intent of the laws and
not the explicit wording of the law like it can be here in the States. I have
no idea if that's true, but it does sound reasonable to me, the part about EU
courts. That being said, I think personally it's strange to say that the
United States isn't also concerned about the practical intent of laws, because
anytime I read a ruling or an opinion, it's always trying to drill into the
intent behind the law and not picking nits over verbiage. But I'm not a
lawyer, so maybe I'm completely wrong. The American system seems to be more
about loopholes, though, so perhaps there is a looser interpretation of this
comparison that rings true.

~~~
gotrecruit
the american system is definitely more geared towards the letter of the law,
while the rest of the world is more inclined towards the spirit of the law.

------
beenBoutIT
$17k potato heist. AI-Powered Facial Recognition. The "Michael Jackson" of
China. I can't help but think of how cool it would be if Michael Mann put
together an updated Chinese remake of "HEAT".

------
petermcneeley
Many forms of privacy will disappear but these are all modern creations
anyway. Think of how a small tribe use to behave. Was there anything that was
private in a small community? Would a criminal also too be instantly spotted
in the local lodge as the bard plays his tunes?

~~~
maxxxxx
I don't think you can compare small tribes watching each other with the
current situation where someone with access to surveillance systems can record
all movements in a whole country and get them analyzed automatically.
Surveillance used to be expensive and cost a lot of effort but increasingly it
can be done more complete and cheaper. The world may look differently if
previous dictators had had the surveillance systems of today or the near
future in their hands.

~~~
petermcneeley
Yes but this is just a further expression of our unaddressed ever-increasing
social inequities. Even among the basic primates there is a great variety
present in their visible social hierarchies. The shape that our reconstituted
tribes take is for us now to choose.

------
nikkwong
Anyone have thoughts on how the public will feel about this kind of tech being
applied to the streets of the U.S.? We seem to be so libertarian, yet it seems
like other countries (and even law enforcement currently in the US) have been
implementing it with little concern of public opinion and/or public outcry.

