Face recognition is being banned, but it’s still everywhere

https://www.wired.com/story/face-recognition-banned-but-everywhere/

by laurex • 5 years ago

217 140 5 years ago

darkwater• 5 years ago

Looks like it's being deployed more everyday, rather. For example, a document-less airport experience pilot[1] is being tested in Barcelona (Spain)

[1] https://identityweek.net/josep-tarradellas-barcelona-el-prat...

flimflamm2• 5 years ago

Should police collect iPhones away in those cities where face recognition is banned?

ben_w• 5 years ago

That depends what the law says. Some of the pressure here is to stop the police themselves from using the tech, I wouldn’t know if any given law prevents personal use.

onethought• 5 years ago

It’s a government ban. Not a generalised ban.

flimflamm2• 5 years ago

Sorry, I am out side of US. What's the difference?

bayindirh2• 5 years ago

You should also collect Sony Alpha cameras too. Many of them have a preferential focus feature which uses face recognition.

You add up to five faces, prioritized, and it focuses to them if it recognizes in the crowd of people.

namibj• 5 years ago

TIL, and this sounds actually rather useful. Do you have information on which ones would support that? Especially in the range a curious hacker (who else is HN for?) would be interested in.

sib• 5 years ago

Wow - didn't know about this preferential focus feature. Sounds extremely useful...

raverbashing• 5 years ago

Face detection (that is, only identifying a face in a picture) is not face recognition (identifying the person behind the face).

1cvmask• 5 years ago

London is the surveillance capital of the world:

London is often called the CCTV capital of the world, and for good reason. The city is home to hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras, and the average Londoner is caught on CCTV 300 times a day.

https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-lo...

Facial recognition software is being integrated now into this network. No one seems to mind at all. It seems that the same is in most of the rest of the world.

ricardobayes4• 5 years ago

Not everywhere though, in Spain it's illegal to film the street. "In Spain, the law protects the rights of citizens to use public spaces, which is free from interference (Clavell et al., 2012)" If you want to live a functioning non-Orwellian society, move here.

andy_ppp2• 5 years ago

Spain seems really competent right now compared to the UK, they even have a digital nomad visa for people outside the EU.

With remote working being mainstream going forward I'm certainly going to consider somewhere with more sunshine and less harsh winters...

kenoph2• 5 years ago

Explain this to the folks at home: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/85qnx5/george_orwel...

brk3• 5 years ago

* London is the surveillance capital of the world*

That's only because China does not release much information publicly about their surveillance systems, but many parts of China are most likely far more surveilled than London.

danuker• 5 years ago

The network effects of large databases lead to an imbalance of power between surveillance and sousveillance: a personal face recognition DB will never match a government one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

As such, we can not, say, catch not-so-publically-known but well-connected public officials where they should not be.

GuB-42• 5 years ago

Obviously, a government has more power and more means than an individual.

But when it comes to databases, individuals have access to ridiculously large databases too. With Facebook and Google you can peek into the private life of most people, even the police does it because there is more data there than in their own files. And I am just talking about ordinary access. Not what Facebook and Google can do as a company.

Add a bit of social engineering and crowdsourcing and no one is safe if enough people want to find them. There have been some pretty impressive "doxing" in the past.

And staying off social media is pretty hard if you want to live a normal life. You may not have a Facebook account but your friends do, you may find your picture on your company website, maybe even in a local newspaper. And officials are no different, if they want to live normally, they are going to be exposed.

andy_ppp2• 5 years ago

It was suggested in the early 2000s that a face could be tracked moving across London by the security services. What do we think, was it possible then? I have to assume by now they have intent monitoring everywhere and can probably tell when someone is doing things like planning a bombing etc.

actually_a_dog• 5 years ago

Well, the Independent claimed in 2004 that the average Briton is caught on camera 300 times a day. [0] Since London probably has more than the average number of cameras per area, even if we wind the clock back 3-4 years, I suspect the answer is yes.

---

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/how-avera...

antihero• 5 years ago

Which is an amazing number yet the MET seem incapable of solving most crimes.

cameronh90• 5 years ago

The vast majority of cameras in London are private installations, rather than something hooked up to some central system.

There are the ring of steel cameras, but that area hasn't been widened recently. TFL cameras are possibly linked into some security service, and there's a fair few of them, but they're mainly pointed at roads.

bsenftner2• 5 years ago

"Intent monitoring" is fictional and does not exist beyond scifi stories and the journalist written articles selling fear about facial recognition. I work in the industry, there is no such thing as "intent monitoring".

celeduc• 5 years ago

"Intent monitoring" is a euphemism for detecting the presence of the "wrong kind of people". It's not fictional at all.

surajs• 5 years ago

Everything is touching everything

bigodbiel• 5 years ago

Pre-crime facial recognition surveillance is authoritanism. Post-crime facial recognition of surveillance is investigative process. The cat is out of the bag, the only thing that prevents it's inevitable abuse is strict legal framework for its implementation

deepstack• 5 years ago

strict legal framework for its implementation and strict legal framework enforcement

sneak• 5 years ago

There's really no chance of that happening in the USA within a generation. The US federal government has decided that it alone is trustworthy, and that everyone and everything is a potential threat, and that it is entitled to unlimited and unrestricted surveillance of the entire country (and several others), regardless of what is or is not written into law.

Snowden even blew the lid off of it, and nothing changed. That's how you know it's permanent.

nopenopenopeno2• 5 years ago

I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted. If anything, your comment is sadly an understatement.

andrepd2• 5 years ago

It's also trivially easy to regulate. Mandate that all cameras recording public spaces record to encrypted storage. The key is in possession of the judicial system. It can only be decrypted and examined with a warrant, with probable cause, as you would need for wiretapping or raiding a home or searching someone's computer.

adolph• 5 years ago

All that seems trivial to type but less than trivial to implement.

the_pwner2242• 5 years ago

The key is in possession of the judicial system. It can only be decrypted and examined with a warrant, with probable cause, as you would need for wiretapping

That's how you end up with the NSA and CIA being inside every single camera in the country :)

aspaceman• 5 years ago

Now explain that to a lawyer.

They won't get it. Trust me.

brk3• 5 years ago

Hardly sounds trivial, and how would you ever enforce or manage that? Also, that is totally counter to the current (US) laws that basically state you can record video (not audio) of any publicly viewable areas freely.

What you propose would require massive changes to essentially any camera that has any part of its view covering an outdoor area, and probably many indoor areas (malls, etc.).

Also, face recognition typically runs on live streams to build indexes, so encrypting storage would not do much. You'd need to implement something like an HDMI-style encryption to control what devices/processors/whatever can connect to a live video stream from a camera to try and control exactly how the streams are processed.

karmicthreat2• 5 years ago

If someone throws a rock through a window, why shouldn't it be legal to run the surveillance through facial recognition? A crime was committed, we have a pic of the perpetrator.

nirui• 5 years ago

strict legal framework for its implementation

And that might turn this technology into something that only big company can afford, artificially created a pro-monopoly environment.

The problem is complex.

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

Not really. I don't mind there being a near-monopoly on facial recognition software if it takes a large company to handle the needed guidelines and potential liabilities.

giraffe_lady2• 5 years ago

When did we decide that this should have a low barrier to entry. Is there any reason to think increased competition between surveillance providers will lead to more ethical surveillance?

This is not a market problem at all, I don't see why you'd use market-brain constructs like monopoly to engage with it.

One provider or thousands, the problem is the social dynamics and the power structures, not a product-consumer relationship.

midjji4• 5 years ago

Problem with a strict legal framework for implementation is that it takes 1 person just a few days to get a face recognition system working using generic frameworks for deep learning.

The laws can be as strict as you like, but its like introducing a law saying you cant watch nude cartoons at home. Even if you somehow eliminated all the existing ones, its just a pen and paper away.

Andrew_nenakhov3• 5 years ago

I believe that the efforts to ban technologies such as this one are futile. Pandora's boxes can only be opened, never closed.

andrepd2• 5 years ago

That's a cop-out. Regulation can happen, of course, if there's political will for it.

nopenopenopeno2• 5 years ago

Even with all our efforts, murder still happens, so I guess it’s time to throw the towel in on that as well.

eunos• 5 years ago

"We need to live with surveillance"

earthnail• 5 years ago

We banned mines, too, and it‘s been fairly successful. Not 100%, sure, but just imagine a world were mines weren’t banned, and what Europe and the US would look like, and you know the ban was very effective.

trasz6• 5 years ago

Most countries banned mines, but not US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty

bsenftner2• 5 years ago

Note the immature (on purpose?) nature of some of these bans: some ban the local government only, some ban only one city of a multi-city district, and nearly all of them leave the option of hiring a private agency (with zero pubic oversight, because they are private) to do the FR for them. And that private agency happens to be owned by the step-son of one of the law makers. This type of legal nonsense is everywhere they are trying to regulate facial regulation.

toper-centage• 5 years ago

The annoying part is that there's no opt out. And when there is, it's obscure (you can express that to the staff), and makes you look hella suspicious.

tartoran• 5 years ago

I see us wearing masks as a more general trend in the future. That would probably mess with all facial recognition systems

Spooky23• 5 years ago

Agreed. My guess is that post pandemic, mask advocacy will flip to more reactionary elements as well.

Nextgrid2• 5 years ago

Gait analysis/recognition covers that.

donkarma• 5 years ago

wait until you put a pebble in your shoe

reaperducer2• 5 years ago

Gait analysis/recognition covers that.

My wife has a hundred pairs of heels of varying heights and widths. Good luck with that.

ordiel• 5 years ago

As I heard "somewhere", 'now that they have forced you to wear a mask, dont remove it ;)'

(I know the profiling works even whit only the eye section yet you get the gist)

LeifCarrotson• 5 years ago

"I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can so I can..." avoid an automated surveillance state.

pueblito• 5 years ago

CBP says it has processed more than 100 million travelers using face recognition and prevented more than 1,000 “imposters” from entering the US at air and land borders.

I wonder how many of those 1000 were incorrectly bounced back

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

The software only flags people for manual review. It’s not an automatic software-only rejection.

0xcde4c3db2• 5 years ago

If a selection process is screwed at the outset, I don't think one can generally un-screw it with any amount of post-hoc analysis or manual review.

diebeforei485• 5 years ago

At least at airports, CBP never bounces anyone back at the first instance. At the immigration counters, the dude either lets you in or sends you to secondary.

142• 5 years ago

If they ban facial recognition then companies will start using other tech like gait recognition. So are we wanting to ban facial recognition or is it something more like the right to not be tracked(if that even is a right). I think we need to establish what our end goal is because you know clever companies will find a way around such restrictions and find other creative ways. They will use shoe detection instead or something maybe not as accurate but enough to get them around the law but still detect a percentage of criminals. Or jewelry detections or tattoo or whatever isn’t banned by law.

petermcneeley• 5 years ago

This is the same issue I have with 'right to repair' laws. When you create a tangle of specific laws banning or regulating specific things all that you really have done is created a world where he who has the most lawyers wins.

What is the end goal with banning face recognition? I think this is all about asymmetry of information.

midjji4• 5 years ago

Switching from defending the right to privacy to the right to not be exploited due to power/information asymmetry would solve a great many problems.

fortran77• 5 years ago

I don't care too much about face recognition for check in. But I don't like it for bag drop. If it mis-matches me, I may never see my bag again!

kotaKat• 5 years ago

Hell. Walmart's security DVRs by Verint all have facial recognition enabled on the firmware, along with other security analytics options.

reaperducer2• 5 years ago

The apartment building I lived in from 2009-2010 had facial recognition.

When you walked through the main lobby, your face appeared on a screen for the inside doorman so he could grant you access to the elevator lobby. It also showed your name, apartment number, and lease end date.

That was over a decade ago. I can't imagine what new tech must look like.

latchkey• 5 years ago

I just flew to Dubai and back.

On the way in, they scanned my face at the immigration counter.

On the way out, you go through a locked turnstile that scans your face and won't open until it recognizes you.

It took about 2 seconds for the doors to open. Pretty amazing and creepy at the same time.

ctdonath• 5 years ago

Can’t stop a idea whose time has come.

wintorez• 5 years ago

Once the genie is out of the bottle...

midjji4• 5 years ago

Seems rather obvious to me that will remain the case.

Both encryption and face recognition software rely on math and programming simple enough that a single person can make a functional one in less than a year from scratch. However, if using existing open source frameworks anyone can put it together either in a few days, though collecting a face database takes slightly longer, though in most cases anyone with an existing app of some kind can very easily collect the data largely automatically. Arguably I would not trust an encryption framework put together like that, but when it comes to face recognition I would.

So the question of if governments will be able to prevent non-sanctioned face recognition systems from the public sphere is rather similar to the question of if they are able to prevent the use of non-sanctioned encryption.

How is that going these days?

Face recognition is being banned, but it’s still everywhere

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