
Ban Facial Recognition at Festivals - Tomte
https://www.banfacialrecognition.com/festivals/
======
anilakar
Why are most of the tweets mentioning deportation? Surveillance aside, since
when has it been a human right to attend a festival in a country you are not
allowed to reside in?

~~~
empath75
Someone always makes this comment every time illegal immigration is mentioned
as if the law is the final word on what is just. And then they’ll complain
about someone going to prison for being a whistleblower or pirating movies or
cheer on the protestors in Hong Kong.

~~~
anilakar
Where I live, work permits are so easy (or automatic through the virtue of
being in Schengen area) to get that illegal immigration basically does not
exist, so the whole idea is vague at best to me.

~~~
angry_octet
If you are in Europe, how can you not be aware of undocumented refugees from
North Africa and Syria? What you are saying is completely delusional.

~~~
derriz
Where in Europe are you talking about? The majority of immigrants in any EU
country come from other EU countries. Of the remainder, less than 10% arrived
as refugees. The vast majority of refugees (over 90% I’d guess) are documented
and those from Syria or North Africa constitute only a fraction of all
refugees.

The average European is highly highly unlikely to have ever encountered an
undocumented refugee from Syria or North Africa.

~~~
ivanhoe
Sorry, but you have no clue how many undocumented immigrants are all around
you. Just because most of them are white you don't notice them in streets and
they work shitty and hard jobs so you don't meet them either... I personally
know like a dozen guys from Serbia and Bosnia who live in Austria and Germany
illegally, and that's a dime a dozen. Us, Albanians and Turks are for EU what
Mexicans are for US...

~~~
derriz
Sorry but an anecdote about your personal experience isn't very convincing.

What would be convincing would be a reference to a source with numbers/data to
back up your claim.

The most recent Europe-wide figures are pretty out-of-date but indicate
estimates of between 0.3% and 0.7% of people living in Eureope being
irregular/undocumented ([http://irregular-migration.net](http://irregular-
migration.net)). This is much less than the comparable estimates for the US,
for example.

~~~
ivanhoe
I never claimed there's more illegal immigrants in the EU than in US. I said
that there's more immigrants than it is maybe perceived by most, especially
tourists. For instance in Austria more than 20% of population are legal
immigrants. In Switzerland it's more than 30%. About half of them come from
other EU countries, and most of them are concentrated in big cities. [1]

Regarding the illegal immigration situation in EU is very different from US
because the laws are different. In EU state helps immigrants so they're
incentivized to register, and also it's easier to get permits. According to
the official DHS report [2]: "Of the total illegal alien population in 2015,
nearly 80 percent had resided within the United States for more than 10
years", which is super uncommon in EU, they'd be legalized by that time.

So just comparing the numbers doesn't tell the true story, but according to
the official report from Austria [3]: "Irregular residents account for between
2.9% and 1.1% of the total population.", so 10x more what you suggested. They
also note in this report: "As there are strong incentives for immigrants to
register in Austria (e.g. certificate of registration as a prerequisite for
application for state benefits), the majority of immigrants are on record at
the registration offices. In contrast, very little information is available
about irregular immigration." And Austria is one of the stricter countries in
this regard.

[1] [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/pdfscache...](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-
explained/pdfscache/1275.pdf)

[2]
[https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/18_1214...](https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/18_1214_PLCY_pops-
est-report.pdf)

[3]
[https://bmi.gv.at/Downloads/files/Bericht_des_Migrationsrats...](https://bmi.gv.at/Downloads/files/Bericht_des_Migrationsrats_PDF_komplett_ENG_23_3_17.pdf)

------
glenda
Festivals should just start inviting bounty hunters instead of using facial
recognition.

Or maybe they could just put shock collars on every attendee in case they
begin to act in an unacceptable manner.

In fact, once it's proven to work at festivals we can extend this to schools!

~~~
user9572
It will probably be proven to work in schools first as most parents don't
think children should have privacy anyway

------
habosa
There are people debating a lot of big issues in this thread.

I just don't want a facially-tagged database of me doing my shitty drunk dance
moves at shows ... is that too much to ask?

~~~
user9572
At least with implants we could opt-out

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duckqlz
Ironic how they want your name and address and phone number for a petition to
protect your privacy.

~~~
Hnrobert42
It is to prevent claims that the petition count is fraudulent.

Voluntarily providing your identity is different having it involuntarily
collected.

~~~
derangedHorse
To be fair, going to a music festival where you know you have to give camera
consent is also voluntarily. Doesn't mean you can't complain about it.

~~~
Hnrobert42
In a strictly legal sense, you may be right, but in a practical sense, I
disagree. A form which asks you to actively supply information is different
from overlooking a short passage in a very long, intentionally complicated ToS
weeks before walking into a venue.

Further, collecting contact info aligns with the data subject’s goal, i.e. an
impactful petition. With FR used for security, the goals are also aligned,
i.e. a fun event. But for immigration control or marketing, the data subject
does not benefit and may even be harmed by the data collection.

------
kcdev
I always thought of festivals as an escape with like minded people. Privacy
should be upheld.

------
dbg31415
Burning Man wants to use facial recognition? Uh... guess it's time we all got
gas masks.

~~~
bredren
I can’t see how the org would choose to use facial recognition.

I can see how they would not explicitly ban participants from including it in
art. New rules can take a while to be formed and it is only if there is a real
need.

I can also see LE using it or requiring its use—but that could happen at any
of these events.

This is sort of an alarmist site / concept given only five out of the large
list “might” use it.

~~~
LeanderK
> I can see how they would not explicitly ban participants from including it
> in art. New rules can take a while to be formed and it is only if there is a
> real need.

Banning it in art would also make art that is explicitly about facial
recongnition pretty much impossible.

------
julienreszka
What is the original intent of the use of facial recognition at festivals? Is
it drug trafficking tracking? Terrorism tracking? Satisfaction tracking?

~~~
xfitm3
It starts off with obvious and socially acceptable uses of technology, such as
stopping terrorism. Over time, though, the application of technology like this
will be used to target people for lesser offenses. Unpaid parking tickets, for
example.

~~~
Hnrobert42
To whit, in China it is now used to issue jay-walking tickets.

------
NoblePublius
The arguments here are that the tech doesn’t work as well with people with
dark skin and maybe it will be used to deport visa overstays or undocumented /
illegal immigrants? Is that it?

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new_realist
Do undocumented workers avoid Las Vegas casinos because of all the cameras?
This seems like a solution to a problem nobody has.

~~~
jakemal
They are very clear this is to prevent future problems. It's a problem that
(most) people don't have yet.

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peterwwillis
Does anyone see any evidence for this website's claims? It literally just says
"big companies are investing in this". No sources quoted, no evidence of how
many groups, to what extent, or for what actual purposes.

Basically, this looks like a FUD campaign to work the outrage machine to get
more followers and donations (and e-mail addresses)

------
new_realist
Should festivals ban facial recognition, I imagine pickpockets would be a lot
more into them.

------
user9572
For obvious reasons, people didn't like microchip implants so we just invented
face recognition

------
caconym_
I want to be surveilled everywhere I go, because I trust corporations and the
government to safeguard that information and never abuse it. After all,
corporations and governments have never acted against the best interests of
the people in the past, so there is no risk in them having a live-updating
data set on the locations, activities, companions, and sentiments of every
American.

Is that what people think? We are letting this shit run wild on us, and if the
future is anything other than a bonafide utopia (spoilers: it's not going to
be that), people are going to pay for our present naivete.

~~~
nojvek
Playing the devil’s advocate here. Suppose in the perfect world we got to
design ideal surveillance, how would it work?

You could track every person and item in public space and automatically fine a
percentage of net income for violations. Think in terms of enhanced red light
and speed cameras.

The system would store everything encrypted in a distributed system. Data
would automatically get wiped out after 30 days. The public would be able to
verify this (open source code and public access logs)

Any humans accessing the feeds would need a court order specifying time span +
place + item being searched for and a good reason why. The court orders would
be also be publicly accessible. May be a blockchain which is append only and
distributed. Some form of hard mechanisms to prevent anyone being above the
law. If anyone abuses access, they’d stand a trial too)

Access would would blur out all other faces other than person being
investigated.

Basically what I’m saying is let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Good Surveillance may offer the means to quickly find violators and deter
crime. A car got stolen. Boom, easily identified. A kid got lost/kidnapped.
Instant search. Some asshole didn’t cleanup after their dog pooped. They think
twice. Littering in public space. Nay nay.

Whether we like it or not, with the advance of cheap cameras, cheap processing
power and advanced computer vision algorithms/neural nets. Surveillance is
coming. It’s a god like power.

I believe we should at-least be having conversations on safe and trust worthy
surveillance.

Facebook/Google already know what everyone is doing. We don’t know what they
are doing with our data. The information asymmetry is a problem.

~~~
caconym_
> I believe we should at-least be having conversations on safe and trust
> worthy surveillance.

Yeah, we should, but we aren't. Or, at least, the people actually involved in
advancing the state of surveillance either aren't participating in such
conversations, or are there for appearances only and don't really give a shit
what the other participants have to say.

You don't have to be paying much attention to see that there's basically zero
accountability and zero effort to protect the public in what I guess I might
call the surveillance-industrial complex.

Believe me, I see the theoretical potential and value of surveillance for
keeping people safe, but it's sort of like the idea of a benevolent robot
dictator who makes perfect decisions to maximize good and minimize bad. Even a
shaky first-pass implementation of such a thing is way beyond our
capabilities, and if done even slightly wrong it could be a global
catastrophe. Surveillance is a bit different because we're starting to have
the technology to make it happen, but we don't have the social machinery
necessary to do it effectively or responsibly.

------
jmpman
I’ve always used the number of Spanish speaking radio stations on the dial as
a litmus test for how much illegal immigration exists in my city. First
generation and second generation don’t typically listen to to the Spanish
speaking stations, so the demand is being driven by the initial immigrants,
the majority of whom are illegal (in my city).

No matter how much I hear about illegal immigration being cracked down upon,
the Spanish speaking radio stations aren’t being converted to another format,
so there’s still enough advertiser demand to pay for the station. That can
only happen if the advertisers are finding a large enough customer base to
justify their costs.

If these radio stations then sponsor concerts, it’s likely that the attendees
will have a high illegal immigrant percentage.

Should the government be able to mass survey the Spanish speaking population
attending these concerts, looking for immigrants who have not turned up to
their deportation hearings?

I applaud the government for being that efficient with my tax dollars (I
expect this method is much cheaper than others), but should they be doing it?
Probably not.

Now what about facial recognition for known terrorists at large sporting
events in order to prevent an attack? Maybe?? At music festivals? I can see
the argument there too.

~~~
paganel
Known terrorists shouldn’t be free in the first place, least of all in an
Western country. And if they are free I suppose that are actively on the run
(hence the “known” part) so I don’t think they’re in the mood for a concert or
a Ligue 1 match. As such whenever the powers that be use the terrorists line
for stuff like this I call them bullshitters, because that’s what they are.

~~~
blfr
Terrorists attend these events to, you know, commit acts of terrorism, not
enjoy the music.

~~~
paganel
Yeah, you’re talking about unknown/not-yet terrorists, but I expect that
people that have actually committed terrorist acts in the past to be either
behind bars or reformed (spending 20-25 years behind bars may make you change
your mind about killing inocent people the next time). By definition, people
that have not yet committed any terrorist acts are not, well, terrorists,
thinking otherwise risks making us dive into thought-crime territory.

------
sergiotapia
>which puts music fans at risk of being unjustly detained, harassed, judged,
or even deported.

Lost me at deported. Why is this hypothetical music fan in this country
illegally? And why is it so important to allow him to stay?

~~~
angry_octet
In many places you can be arrested and/or deported for saying the wrong thing,
being seen at the wrong place.

Basically you are arguing that cultural organizations should support the
police state.

~~~
anonuser123456
As someone that believes in substantially increasing legal avenues for people
to reside in the US, I do not agree that we should constrain law enforcement.

We should fix the damn laws, not make a conflicting hodgepodge of regulations
meant to mitigate ones we don't like. Putting police and law enforcement in
the middle of a political debate is a recipe for disaster.

~~~
angry_octet
Given that legal immigration (and from PR to citizenship) is being
increasingly choked off by unilateral executive action, and many norm busting
actions are undertaken by ICE, can you understand why people feel that
counteracting efforts must be taken?

------
matz1
Trying to ban FR seems to be a solving the privacy problem in the wrong way.
Instead of banning FR, what should be fixed is the misidentification problem
or the issue that come out when the FR become public.

~~~
martin_a
This problem needs to be tackled from several angles, I think. Omnipresent
cameras, linked to FR systems, are just as big a problem as misidentification.

~~~
otterley
Can you explain the problem in more detail?

~~~
martin_a
The problem with omnipresent cameras which are nowadays able, through facial
recognition systems, to track any number of people fully automated?

Which problem do you _not_ see with that?

~~~
otterley
The one making the claim is the one burdened with the justification.

~~~
martin_a
Ok, I will give you two examples, but you will need to use your brain to try
to adapt the problems to other situations. Can you do that? Great!

Example 1: So, let's say you're on a festival where cameras and facial
recognition systems are used "for safety purposes" and everybody is feeling
really safe because of that. Now some crime happens, like sexual assault or
whatever. Nobody really saw the culprit and there's no usable evidence on the
victim or crime scene, but cameras filmed him when he flew from the scene.

The images are not the best. It was dark, he ran quite fast and he was also
wearing a black hoodie. Facial recognition systems worked hard on every frame
of the video material and are somewhat sure (90% probability) that you are the
sexual offender. You also happen to have a black hoodie with you and you were
not with your friends when the assault happened.

Obviously you will tell the police that you were on your way to the toilet and
that's why you split from your friends for half an hour, just as the crime
happened. But what reasons do they have to believe you? The software solution
is quite sure of two things: You are the suspect (90% probability) and the
system found nobody else that matched the video frames. So, it can only be
you, right?

Well, seems like you could go to jail for some time before the real culprit is
found. Or maybe you will be convicted for something that you have not done.
That is a real possibility when law enforcement starts replacing "real" police
work with automated solutions which are prone to errors.

Will those systems even say that they are only 90% sure? Or will there be
pressure on the manufacturers of those systems to only deal in absolutes and
have great hit rates?

Example 2: You're on this march against right-wing politicians. Police is
using cameras to watch the march and is also using facial recognition
technology to save who attended the march, in case something happens. Your
face is detected and linked with your personal information because a reference
picture of you is already present in the passport database, which the police
obviously has access to. Police says that the data will be deleted after the
march, but somehow it's saved for testing purposes in a MongoDB hosted on AWS
and never got deleted after all.

Elections come and go and now those right-wing politicians your protested
against are in control. Or some hackers stumble over the database, copy it and
sell it to whomever is willing to pay for that. Or some corrupt members of the
police get payed a nice bribe for a copy of that list and they don't really
care about "that data". Nothing of that really sounds unlikely in this day and
age.

In any case you are now on a list of "political enemies" because you were on
that march. Nobody knows what will happen with you from here on. Maybe you
will just lose your job when working in a public institution, because there is
somebody more "loyal". Or you simply don't get promoted anymore, although you
are doing really great work. But maybe you end up on some kind of bounty list
for some ultraradical people, who knows.

Just look over to Hong Kong. Would you really feel well when the Chinese
government knew that you were attending the protests against the government?

From here on you might think about more examples where facial recognition
could go really wrong for you, although you did nothing wrong.

~~~
otterley
> Ok, I will give you two examples, but you will need to use your brain to try
> to adapt the problems to other situations. Can you do that? Great!

There's no need to be uncivil or rude.

Let's take Example 1.

It would indeed be problematic if we convicted people based solely on the
algorithmic conclusion of a machine. But thankfully, we still have jury trials
in the U.S.; it requires a unanimous verdict to convict someone; and it
requires a level of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt."

It's important to understand that a machine is not a witness. It can't be
cross-examined. So whatever result it produces is evidence. How strongly that
evidence is believed is up to the jury; and a good defense attorney is going
to do whatever it takes to attack the machine (using expert witnesses and so
forth) to introduce reasonable doubt if its conclusion is incorrect. The
defense attorney is also going to introduce whatever other exculpatory facts
and witnesses they can find.

In your example, if a sexual assault occurs, the victim is likely to testify.
Without the victim's testimony identifying the defendant, and without any
corroborating DNA evidence, the defendant is likely to walk, even with the
machine saying it's 90%+ probability match.

In any event, I think what's needed here is some additional law forbidding the
sole use of FR data as evidence used to convict a defendant. That, I think,
would help assuage most people's concerns -- even though I think it unlikely
that a conviction would result this way anyway.

A really important fact that you're not considering is that FR has a strong
potential to _prevent_ false identification. Many studies have shown that
eyewitness identifications, including line-ups, are extremely unreliable; and
yet, we've been using them for decades to convict people. And we've released
innocent convicts many, many times, sometimes decades after imprisonment, when
it turned out the witness was lying or simply had a faulty memory. And in your
example, if you in fact went to the toilet during the crime, the cameras would
be able to corroborate that.

OTOH, if a machine strongly disagreed with the eyewitness, I have little doubt
that the defendant would be dismissed.

Example 2 is a bit trickier.

You don't need FR technology to have a police state: North Korea has had one
for nearly 70 years without one. East Germany had one for over 40 years (see:
Stasi). There are cruder methods than using FR technology; spying is a very
old game.

So, FR can help enhance control for regimes that are already inclined to
preventing freedom by making it much more economical than having a spy
network, but it's by no means necessary. Besides, you can trivially foil FR by
wearing a mask.

I don't know how to prevent a police state, other than to employ violent
resistance, and even that doesn't always work. I don't think anybody knows.
But if you want a prevent a police state, I think banning FR isn't really
going to help. At least so far, history shows that many police states resulted
from democracies or republics ceding control under some sort of "necessity."

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Facial recognition is just math. Why are people trying to classify certain
matrices as illegal?

It seems this was a convincing argument for a lot of people in regards to
encryption. Facial recognition is math just as much as encryption is.

~~~
nexuist
>Why are people trying to classify certain matrices as illegal?

Certain encryption algorithms, which are at their core applied math, are still
illegal to export to this day to certain countries such as Iran. They are
regulated and banned under the same treaties that apply to nuclear weapons.

If you publish an app to Apple's App Store, for example, you have to sign a
waiver explaining if your app uses encryption (such as for SSL/TLS) before
being allowed to publish in international markets.

Not saying it is right, but there is definitely legal precedent to ban
mathematical knowledge at the international level.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States)

------
bsenftner
The ban is not going to happen. It's an issue of public safety and venue
liability. FR use at video game conferences is a must, because every one has a
series of morons threatening the venue, the conference, and the host. It is
very difficult today to host any type of public event without multiple
individuals taking their displeasure to extreme levels and making threats they
might carry out. For such reasons, FR is booming.

~~~
greggman2
what changed? FR didn't exist 10 years ago but the events did so why do the
events need FR now?

~~~
bsenftner
Yeah, 10 years ago a venue receiving threats had to purchase additional
insurance, hire additional security, and run a SWAT team like surveillance
operation. After that became routine, every venue that can host any gathering
of any size became a security sink that ate attention and distracted potential
opportunities as public levels of casual violence simply skyrocketed to the
levels we see today.

~~~
pault
Can you point me towards any sources that show skyrocketing levels of casual
violence?

