New Yorkers want to stop landlords from using facial recognition

https://gizmodo.com/nyc-msg-facial-recognition-landlords-ban-law-hearing-1850401997

by onychomys • 3 years ago

264 172 3 years ago

Aardwolf2• 3 years ago

Landlords, under this bill, would be banned from collecting biometric data on anyone unless they have “expressly consented” in writing or through a mobile app.

So old fashioned writing is ok, a mobile app is ok, but the in-the-middle technology of a website on a PC is not ok? Why does the form factor of the computing device matter here?

This also reads like landlords can still do it, they just have to require you to consent first to be able to enter the building.

jmclnx• 3 years ago

I think this should be completely banned. I can see cases where people will say "no" and then will no be allowed to rent or put on the top of the list for large rent increases.

vegetablepotpie• 3 years ago

Rental leases are contracts of adhesion. Consent to facial recognition will be added to the boiler plate text. If tenants want to negotiate, they’ll be told that the contract is just a standard form that can’t change.

contravariant• 3 years ago

Here I wa thinking that was just journalists jumping to hasty conclusions, but no that is the actual text:

[...] except where such user has expressly consented, in writing or through a mobile application [...]

Not sure how they defined "mobile application" however.

pc862• 3 years ago

The mobile app thing is weird for sure.

I think reasonable people can disagree on the use of facial recognition by law enforcement (in the "point a camera at the sidewalk and see what happens" sense) but I see absolutely no reason why a private entity should be able to use this type of technology. A landlord doesn't have the right to know the identity of every guest every one of their tenants has - they just don't. A commercial venue like the whole MSG thing is a little stickier but the scale of it and the wild potential for abuse (again, MSG) makes my gut reaction an outright ban.

I'm not crazy about the government/LE doing this either but I'm really not crazy about private entities doing it.

tzs• 3 years ago

A landlord doesn't have the right to know the identity of every guest every one of their tenants has - they just don't.

I don't think it would give them that. My understanding is that these facial recognition systems for building access work by registering and storing the face data of the people who are supposed to be able to open the locked door.

Spooky23• 3 years ago

Unless you’re “frozen caveman lawyer”, recently thawed and awoken from the glacial ice, it should be pretty obvious that scale changes things. It’s not creepy when the guy at the coffee shop knows your order because you come in every day. It is creepy if every Starbucks barista knows who you are and what you want.

Technology has already put significant limits on free movement and privacy. It is impossible, for example, to enter or leave an urban area by vehicle without at minimum LPR footprints tracking that movement. Photos and video are increasingly common.

The problem in a place like NYC is that the residents there will feel it first. Nobody can afford property, so private entities can record everyone in your home at any time, in public or private spaces. We’ve already seen abuses of this - an employee of a law firm was ejected from Radio City Music hall because her law firm was suing MSG, the venues parent company.

endisneigh• 3 years ago

pointless. renters are hardly in any kind of position to negotiate in NYC. if the city wants to stop it, simply ban it.

pc862• 3 years ago

Yes this is exactly why it just needs to be banned outright, with no wiggle room. Don't even allow people to consent to it, especially for residential areas, because they can't reasonably consent for something like this on behalf of guests they may or may not even know yet.

If you allow FR by landlords in certain scenarios, you'll just end up with everyone slapping one line on their standard rental agreement and now it's everywhere.

cornhole34• 3 years ago

aimco properties have been requesting tenants drivers licenses or passports to be scanned by facial recognition technology from their contractors in india and then sold to advertisers. They have been doing this since 2010, you cannot live without selling your soul to landlords and advertisers

anaganisk2• 3 years ago

At a certain point it seems like the start of all shit is targeted ads, just ban em. And all the tracking and targeting magically disappears.

flerchin• 3 years ago

Yes this. 100% this. Surveillance at scale must be paid-for, and regardless of how cheap we make the surveillance, if no one pays, it won't happen.

alex_young• 3 years ago

How does this even work? Are the landlords trying to prove that the tenants aren’t living there anymore because they don’t see them on a recording? If so, isn’t it plausible that the tenant in question is bedridden or similar and someone is bringing them things to assist them?

Seems like a poor use for the technology even if we ignore the privacy issues.

shagie4• 3 years ago

Tenants putting the apartment up on Airbnb and not using the property themselves. That could run counter to other laws in NYC and have the property owner at least partially liable if they are complicit or didn't take action to prevent their properties from being used as short term rentals.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/specialenforcement/stay-in-the-know...

Under the NYC Administrative Code, property owners are responsible for ensuring their properties are maintained in a safe and code-compliant manner at all times. Property owners can and will be issued the violation for any illegal short-term rentals at their property -- even if it is conducted by tenants.

Even aside from that, short term rentals can generate more complaints from neighbors and increase wear and tear on the property.

bdowling5• 3 years ago

These issues arise anytime you have rent control and units with a large disparity between the legally-allowed rent and the market rate rent. Some tenants will want to capture that value (e.g., by subletting to a market rate tenant and living somewhere else).

ejb9992• 3 years ago

Honestly not sure what the big deal is - if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me - plus I am certain an awful lot of people would prefer that only people that are supposed to be let in their building, are let in. Can it be abused? probably, but that is pretty much true of any technology or business process.

epc2• 3 years ago

The doorman isn’t dumping a log of your comings and goings as well as who entered or exited with you into an unsecured s3 bucket in the cloud.

ejb9992• 3 years ago

then thats the problem to fix - your landlord could also be dumping copies of your drivers license, rental application, lease and other financial data onto an unprotected s3 bucket as well - are we going to ban them from collecting that information?

The solution is harsh penalties for negligence or willful misuse of customer data - not banning the technology imo.

Gigachad• 3 years ago

Basically every single building is doing this with key fobs.

annexrichmond• 3 years ago

as I started reading your comment I thought it was going to be about him being in the bathroom and not being able to do his job

parker_mountain• 3 years ago

Can it be abused? probably, but that is pretty much true of any technology or business process.

This is such an incredibly misleading statement. This is why we need legislation restricting the (ab)use of these technologies.

A4ET8a8uTh02• 3 years ago

I would even venture further and suggest that parent just argued for rather aggressive regulation of that space.

coldtea• 3 years ago

Honestly not sure what the big deal is - if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me

One difference is in the automation of recording your movements (and those of your friends) and giving easy instant access to it. I could not care less for a conscierge writing it down on a paper notebook.

Another difference is that most buildings don't have a doorman to begin with.

TuringNYC• 3 years ago

> Honestly not sure what the big deal is

I would want assurances that it works equally well across skin types. I hate it when, say, HR sends me to a hotline and the phone cannot understand my accent. Often, automated system experiences are optimized for only some people.

As a PoC, I dont want to be locked out of my own building because i'm being identified as someone else.

nerdponx2• 3 years ago

Or worse, automatically calling the police.

woodruffw3• 3 years ago

One difference is occurrence: most apartments don’t have doormen, because they’re expensive (and don’t make sense for a building with just a few units, which is the majority of apartments in NYC).

Even in fancier neighborhoods (UWS, UES), I’d guess that less than half the buildings have doormen. And those are neighborhoods with tall buildings with dozens of large apartments.

JustSomeNobody2• 3 years ago

Honestly not sure what the big deal is...

Then you've already given up and accepted your new surveilled reality.

bckygldstn2• 3 years ago

A human has a level of accuracy and decaying memory appropriate for the task of improving security for an apartment building.

They’ll stop a stranger walking out with a package and keep an eye out for your abusive ex for you. They won’t remember you coming home late 6 years ago shortly after someone matching your description left an abortion clinic.

They’re also human not an unaccountable automated process. They’ll let you bring home a new fling 5 nights in the same month without registering them as a tenant, and let a non-corporate delivery driver drop off a package without being registered as a SurveillanceCorp approved deliverer.

The concept of doormen is dumb, but we don’t need to automate away every human interaction in our lives.

mertd• 3 years ago

Counter point: a non human won't gossip with your neighbor about you bringing an overnight fling.

djcannabiz• 3 years ago

I agree with the rest of you comment, but I am curious to know why you think the concept of a doorman is dumb

matsemann4• 3 years ago

Having a doorman sounds arcane to me. Don't you just beep your key to get in? Why should I pay for someone sitting there all day watching the entrance? Will they stop my brother from coming in and watering my plants while I'm on vacation?

tetromino_• 3 years ago

A doorman helps keep randos who intend to steal packages, jiggle door handles to check if any apartments are unlocked, or urinate and puke in the elevator from tailgating their way into the building.

jabroni_salad• 3 years ago

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/facial-recognition-too...

imagine this but now you are being evicted because of "lease violations". You see the footage and none of it is of you, but they dont really care to bother with manual error correction.

Oh, and do you think Ring is the only private surveillance company with a police integration?

jollyllama• 3 years ago

Good doorman forgets if you slip him a tenner, unless the cops show up that week.

bombcar5• 3 years ago

A doorman costs money; upwards of 3x salary a year (as you need three if it's manned 24 hrs a day). That's a cost too high to catch people subletting illegally.

A camera and an internet connection is a tiny fraction of that.

petsfed• 3 years ago

This is line of reasoning is a pro-tech disease: "Dangerous thing X has always been technically possible, but logistically prohibitive. Since we have not explicitly done anything to prevent thing X in the past, new technology that removes all logistical barriers to doing thing X is not at all problematic."

It is a problem that our only guardrails to thing X were that human labor was too slow and costly to do it at scale. That we built no other guardrails does not imply that thing X is not a problem, nor that automating thing X at scale is no worse than doing it manually. Moreover, if the only additional guardrail you support is that every time thing X occurs, it goes to the courts, then the reasonable bad actor only needs to make the rest of their operation efficient enough to profit before they go to trial.

ironmagma• 3 years ago

This is borderline ignorance in this age of privacy erosion. Is someone overhearing your phone call the same as a warrantless wiretapping program?

lisasays3• 3 years ago

If you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me

So you're trusting your cheap-ass landlord to install an additional system layer reliably let you in at 2AM?

You know - the same landlord couldn't figure out how to check his camera backups last time someone got mugged in the vestibule?

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me

A doorman isn't putting detailed records in a database that can be combined with other databases.

wildpeaks• 3 years ago

Landlords, under this bill, would be banned from collecting biometric data on anyone unless they have “expressly consented” in writing or through a mobile app.

Even if it probably started from good intentions, this sounds more like CYA when the biometrics and surveillance data gets leaked given it's not really consent when they'll just refuse to rent to anyone who doesn't agree to the data collection.

JustSomeNobody2• 3 years ago

... in writing or through a mobile app.

Great, so now tenant is required to have the app to pay rent. But to use the app to pay rent, you have to agree to the ToS which includes expressly consenting to having your bio data scooped up.

A4ET8a8uTh02• 3 years ago

I am already mildly aggravated about app only menu at some restaurants ( and promptly leave if I can't get basic service from the waiter ), but there is something to be said about requiring app for an actual necessity ( eating at a restaurant isn't a necessity ), where one can't simply walk away.

matsemann4• 3 years ago

GDPR is nice in this regard: Consent isn't enough. The consent must be freely given (aka no stipulation saying you can't rent without accepting), informed (aka you should be told all your rights and what's included in your consent, just not a general "by signing the rental agreement you're accepting us collecting your data"), and they can't even collect the data unless they have a legitimate use for it (which again someone could challenge, the landlord doesn't need to know when I come&go to do their job).

UweSchmidt• 3 years ago

All of that might not be enough. Renters might still find they are in a weak position to negotiate a contract details like that, if they even comprehend the full meaning and consequences. Landlords will figure out the "Legitimate use" legalese and paste it in each contract, and it is in the nature of data collection that mose abuse goes unnoticed.

Casual surveillance and the landlord-renter power dynamic are things that should be established at the society-level.

judge2020• 3 years ago

(aka no stipulation saying you can't rent without accepting)

Is this specifically for landlords, or are companies forced to serve you even if you reject data collection?

Also, will this actually be enforced in practice? Websites with n > 1 million users are one thing, but landlords / apartment management companies with a few hundred units are going to be tough to go after one by one.

rolph• 3 years ago

if the rental application, looks like im installing windows, im renting elswhere.

tpxl3• 3 years ago

they can't even collect the data unless they have a legitimate use for it

They can collect any and all data if you give free and informed consent. They do not need consent to collect data with a legitimate interest, but they do need to inform you of it.

brvsft3• 3 years ago

Yeah, unfortunately, the agreement will make its rounds into boilerplate leases soon enough.

lisasays3• 3 years ago

They'll just refuse to rent to anyone who doesn't agree to the data collection.

Fortunately they won't "just" be allowed to do that.

Tenant law is quite robust in NYC, and most likely such requirements (or even asking about them) will be prohibited as well.

scsteps• 3 years ago

Sad that this is happening and sad that it had to come to online shaming to make changes happen.

Physkal• 3 years ago

"If left unchecked, she said, racially biased algorithms driving these systems risked further fueling gentrification, which threatened to, “erode what should be a diverse collective identity in the city.”

I don't get this statement. If s minority already has a apartment lease, how is registering their face data leads to all of that?

perihelions• 3 years ago

It's explained right there in the same paragraph,

- "she feared aggressive landlords could use the tech to issue petty lease violations against tenants, which could eventually lead to their eviction"

Selective enforcement is a tool for capricious abuses. If you allow landlords to spy on their tenants with automated systems, passively collecting vast amounts of data, it's very easy for them to "find" an infraction if they deliberately set out to find one. It empowers petty tyrants.

zdragnar3• 3 years ago

As if the landlords didn't already know their renters were in minority groups.

Your fear is no different than if the landlord had surveillance cameras in public areas of the property, recording 24/7... which they absolutely should anyway.

olalonde2• 3 years ago

What kind of violation can happen in a building lobby that leads to an eviction? I'm seriously confused. Littering?

2rsf• 3 years ago

Maybe this? but then it has nothing to do with face recognition but with any kind of renovation:

he saw it as a sneaky attempt to jack up prices in a gentrifying area and force people like him out.

“They were trying to find ways to expedite ways of flushing people out of the building and then try to market new flipped-over apartments to gentrifiers,” Rogers told Gizmodo.

woodruffw3• 3 years ago

Facial recognition is well known to have racial biases with respect to accuracy.

If the building I’m currently renting in suddenly decides that I’m not a legitimate visitor some random percent of the time, then I’m very likely to move and go somewhere that isn’t going to do that to me. That percentage doesn’t have to be very high; it just has to be higher than a key, which has a success rate approaching 100%.

Edit: forgot to mention: it’s also somewhat common for a building’s owner to change beneath its tenants, with the new owner enacting policies that are clearly intended to flush to old (and therefore less profitable) tenants out. Cameras that track the activities of tenants and make them feel unwelcome would typify this kind of policy, even before any racial bias in the technology itself.

hbossy• 3 years ago

System records all people smoking on the staircase. The smoking tenant is evicted. New non-smoking tenants pay more. Old tenant can't sue the landlord over his eviction being racially-driven.

ndsipa_pomu• 3 years ago

Seems like the U.S. needs some kind of data protection law like the EU's GDPR.

I can't see any reason why the data needs to be stored and it sounds like an invasion of the tenants' privacy if the landlord is recording their coming and going.

anaganisk2• 3 years ago

But but freedom, free market blah blah. That's the argument I receive. I strongly believe the free market only works when a business is small, but not when companies become big.

philip1209• 3 years ago

I'm curious how these systems deal with COPPA. If a young child is coming home from school, how does this internet-connected system comply?

bombcar5• 3 years ago

Existing security cameras don't turn off when a kid walks by; otherwise they'd be easy to defeat.

say_it_as_it_is• 3 years ago

Tenants are breaching contracts with landlords, sub-leasing and renting out their property to others without the consent of the owner-landlord. The lease is a contract that always specifies who is permitted to use the property. It is the right of the owner-landlord to hold the tenant accountable for breaching contract. Facial recognition access control systems are the same as a human being posted at the door permitting the same. However, the latter is far more costly and unnecessary.

FooBarBizBazz• 3 years ago

It's like when neighbors in an apartment building get a Ring. I immediately think less of them.

bearjaws• 3 years ago

My HOA (condo) banned Ring door bells thankfully. Not only does it track everyones movements without consent, it would stare directly into neighbors apartments depending on door locations in the hall way...

fwlr11• 3 years ago

A minor technical nitpick: the article, and the activists it quotes, make the claim that facial recognition discriminates against minorities because it is inaccurate. The state of the art in facial recognition technology has been superhumanly accurate (e.g. telling apart identical twins better than humans can, finding pictures with significant weight or age differences) on all subgroups for several years now, and the racial disparities in accuracy are minuscule relative to the level of noise. It will keep improving: e.g. it is quite plausible we will be able to infer parts of a person’s genotype from ordinary pictures of their face.

I call this a nitpick because “face rec discriminates because it is inaccurate” vs “face rec discriminates because it very accurately reproduces society’s bias” doesn’t make much difference to the activists’ argument; after all, it matters little whether the discrimination arises by bumbling incompetence or by efficient indifference. But I thought I would mention it so that the more technically-minded are not accidentally misled about the technological progress in the area.

lesuorac2• 3 years ago

Sure and state-of-the-art cars will hit the brake before running into another car.

Doesn't mean the car behind you at the red light will brake. Just like the fact that a model can tell twins apart doesn't mean the model the cops used can tell you apart from the actual criminal. Or that a Landlord will have tested the model at all or required it to meet some standard of twin detection.

fwlr11• 3 years ago

My usage of “state of the art” was misleading, I apologize. To be more precise I should say “most of the companies offering services in this area are this good and getting better”. This is not like batteries or carbon nanotubes where research is way ahead of production; it is more like LLMs where commercial offerings are significantly ahead of published research offerings.

Timshel• 3 years ago

To nitpick :) : SOTA is nice but there is often a wide gap between validation dataset and real world usage accuracy. Additionnaly accuracy percentage are often misleading something over 99% sounds great until it's applied thousands of times and you end up with dozens of failure and if those failure are not gracefully handled it can quickly become a nightmare.

And I highly doubt that a "penny-pinching landlord" will install anything close to Sota.

TheRealPomax2• 3 years ago

When was the last time you saw state of the art being applied to a cheap surveillance camera? These aren't video production studios, these are "landlords", which aren't even people, they are housing corporations who spring for the cheapest shit that lets them maximize income and if you don't like it, for you 10,000 other renters willing to put up with their BS to live in NYC.

fwlr11• 3 years ago

Facial recognition is an algorithm applied to ordinary picture and video data, it does not require special or even particularly high-quality cameras. In fact, if the footage is too high-quality it actually has to be downscaled before being analyzed; something like a picture of your face taken with a 720p laptop webcam when sitting at the laptop, or a video of your face from a 1080p Ring doorbell camera as you go to ring the bell, would likely be already big enough to require downscaling first.

shiftpgdn• 3 years ago

Sounds like NYC needs to add more housing supply to take the power away from corporate landlords.

biofunsf• 3 years ago

For the landlord situation, what's the additional harm here if the facial recognition system is inaccurate for people of a certain skin color?

From the article, the concern here is that the landlords are "trying to find ways to expedite ways of flushing people out of the building". Presumably this tech could make it easy to identify tenants violating their lease agreement. For example, detecting repeat non-residents using keys to enter the building as a sign of illegal subletting.

But if the face rec system incorrectly identifies someone for potential lease violations, the landlord still needs to go through additional human verification and present proof to a judge to start the eviction process. Especially in NYC, the landlord needs to go to court with a lot of evidence to secure an eviction. So it seems like inaccurate facial recognition would be good for the tenants. If the results are inaccurate enough it eventually defeats the whole purpose of the system.

(this is very different from situations like Madison Square Garden's use of face rec, where a someone might be denied entry unilaterally because of misidentification and have no recourse)

bastawhiz• 3 years ago

I have no faith that landlords will be using the state of the art. Especially when the not-state-of-the-art version supports (in a plausibly deniable way) the biases of the landlords. Make no mistake: landlords are absolutely not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts to make their buildings safer.

afavour• 3 years ago

Is the state of the art facial recognition technology deployed in real world, scenarios, though? It's one thing to use it in a lab setting with a person sitting still the perfect distance away from the camera, and quite another to operate on hundreds of people at once from a distant ceiling. Not to mention cost (i.e. the landlords don't actually care about accuracy that much, would they really pay a premium?)

nerdix2• 3 years ago

Where are these state of the art facial recognition systems deployed? Because as someone with dark skin and a Nest doorbell with facial recognition, I can tell you from experience that Nest still struggles with dark skin.

And if Nest is not deploying state of the art facial recognition then what are the odds that some random landlord is? I'm going to say close to none.

harvey9• 3 years ago

Are there any light-skinned people set up on your doorbell for comparison? Would help to eliminate other possibilities like low light, or the algorithm being generally bad.

fwlr11• 3 years ago

No, I do agree that Nest’s face rec (and face detection too, for that matter) is pretty awful. I don’t have first-hand knowledge of what Google is actually deploying but I suspect they’re performing so poorly because they’re training the recognition on just the home’s dataset; it is sort of like each home training it’s own LLM just on text written by that home’s inhabitants, while GPT4 gets unlimited resources to train on hundreds of gigabytes of text from all over the web. But it is still a bit of a mystery why Google is allowing Nest’s facial recognition to remain so weak.

Actually, if Nest is representative of what most consumers experience when interacting with facial recognition, then I understand why there’s this common perception that facial recognition is buggy and unreliable. I’m drawing on my experience working on commercial models.

mixmastamyk• 3 years ago

Yes, and "digital cameras will never compete with film," ammirite?

I heard this a lot twenty years ago, and even a little ten years ago.

mc32• 3 years ago

Have you considered that the activists might be okay with surveillance if the surveillance is fair? That is, if it's not misidentifying people and adds a sense of security and auditability, maybe they would be okay, just as they themselves might install Nest/Ring in their own abode?

Now, I agree that if the argument is "surveillance is inaccurate" then some landlords and landladies might come back and say, "ours is more accurate than trained crowds of professional forensic experts" and it's possible the activists would not want that and just don't want any surveillance, or maybe they are looking for accuracy and the elimination of misattribution.

fwlr11• 3 years ago

I have considered that, empirically speaking I’ve seen a few activists do exactly that, and I am definitely not going around believing that activists are all some kind of anti-all-surveillance, defund-the-cops, legalize-crime parody. But also empirically speaking, I have seen that highly accurate systems with no racial bias still disproportionately impact minorities (often because they are employed by institutions like law enforcement or landlords that have racial bias themselves).

I really just think that if activists see two stats like “provably 99.999…% accurate” and “provably impacts minorities more” at the same time, most of them are still going to care about the impact than the accuracy - and I don’t think that caring about the impact is in any way intellectually dishonest, it’s quite moral really.

NegativeLatency• 3 years ago

In practice I suspect we’ll see many more misidentifications like the one that happened recently https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/27/california-p...

cm2187• 3 years ago

I played with AWS rekog, I agree that it is remarkable, but even with a 98 threshold you get occasionally some false positives (but rare), and often some false negatives (I didn't count but I'd say of the magnitude of 0.1-0.5%). That would mean that several days in the year you can't get in because the system mis identifies you.

dmbche• 3 years ago

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discriminatio...

While I'm sure some algorithm is provably unbiased, it's a little naive to imagine landlords (you know about the landlord special? Load bearing paint and the likes?) caring about what they are running.

libraryatnight2• 3 years ago

Just so everyone knows this is an account that just bullshits elaborately. Everything the account says is just for argument sake.

pepperonipizza• 3 years ago

He explains his point convincingly well.

You should make your point in reply if you disagree with OP, because slandering OP is not changing my pov to yours here.

lisasays3• 3 years ago

The state of the art in facial recognition technology has been superhumanly accurate

That's SOA and in controlled circumstances you're talking about.

Not real-life FR using cheap cameras, with bad lighting, against shitty lookup databases (with built-in biases). Which is what's at issue, here.

Your apologetic does make for excellent ad copy & pitch deck material, however.

darth_avocado• 3 years ago

The state of the art in facial recognition technology has been superhumanly accurate

On a clear pictures, maybe. On a regular blurry surveillance footage from a gas station camera on a day with bad weather and poor lighting, absolutely not.

janalsncm• 3 years ago

It’s also an extremely weak argument to say that FR is inaccurate. It’s contingent on an engineering problem that will be solved. Algorithms will get better, HD cameras will become cheaper and more ubiquitous. We are rushing head first into a future where every public and semi-public interaction is recorded and analyzed by functionally omniscient systems, and the temporary inaccuracy of that analysis does nothing to argue against that future.

And then I ask myself, is that really a bad thing? I am far more likely to be the victim of a crime than the perpetrator of one or the victim of inaccurate accusation. The places I’ve lived with pervasive surveillance were also some of the safest, and those who argue against this “oppressive” surveillance rarely are forced to balance that with the actual oppression of crime, or the second-order consequence of the lack of security cameras (that low level crimes will probably go unpunished).

I should also add that going back to a time where surveillance doesn’t exist is not an option. Everyone is walking around with a security camera in their pocket. Very soon those videos will be able to be run through facial recognition tech as well.

JohnFen2• 3 years ago

We are rushing head first into a future where every public and semi-public interaction is recorded and analyzed by functionally omniscient systems, and the temporary inaccuracy of that analysis does nothing to argue against that future.

I agree. We need to be fighting the panopticon. The more accurate it is, the more objectionable it is.

dragonwriter• 3 years ago

The state of the art in facial recognition technology has been superhumanly accurate (e.g. telling apart identical twins better than humans can, finding pictures with significant weight or age differences) on all subgroups for several years now, and the racial disparities in accuracy are minuscule relative to the level of noise.

That may be true of state of the art models that have been demonstrated under some conditions; it continues not to be true, frequently, of models actually adopted in major products, even new ones, in the actual deployment conditions (e.g., the recently adopted CBP One app that US asylum seekers are required to use for appointment scheduling and other purposes, and which requires facial recognition, and disproportionately fails for dark skinned users, who are not uncommon in the population required to use the app.)

rglover• 3 years ago

Join the Dark Carnival [1].

[1] https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recogn...

anovikov2• 3 years ago

From the article it seems like that "current tenants don't want the building to be improved at all so it won't become more attractive to new tenants and current ones get priced out". Looks like inverse NIMBY, NIMBY for tenants? Sad.

bdowling5• 3 years ago

Current tenants won’t be priced out because the apartments in question are under rent control. Tenants sometimes want to move, however, but if they do they will lose their below-market-rate rent. So, they instead sublet their apartment to someone else and keep the difference in value. This is a violation of their rental agreements, but if the landlord doesn’t find out they don’t see a problem. Facial recognition and other technologies help landlords identify these tenants who are gaming the system in this way. The tenants gaming the system obviously don’t like that.

bombcar5• 3 years ago

This is the root of the issue; smaller landlords can find out that subletting is happening because they only have one or two properties, and may even live in one.

Massive landlords can't do that, because they have thousands of tenants; but facial recognition and computers could flag the ones to be interested in, and then they hire the private investigators.

anovikov2• 3 years ago

Then maybe the very existence of regulated rentals is the problem that should be fixed. It's little but bending of market, Soviet Union style, which naturally creates abuses. Commonplace in Europe especially in Nordic countries, where a net worth of a typical family is mostly the value of their regulated rental contract stretching from 1950s, which they sublet and make sometimes more than their entire income.

coding123• 3 years ago

New Yorkers Want to Stop Landlords from Existing

ausbah• 3 years ago

unironically this

axus• 3 years ago

In a perfect world, 100% accurate facial recognition and record-keeping would encourage apartment owners to make their leasing decision based on a person's actual rental history, instead of deciding based on prejudice.

But my own prejudice is that the people selling the renter blacklist software solution will only care about sales, and not the software accuracy or people affected by false positives.

gooseyman• 3 years ago

How does this jack up prices and force people out?

The article mentions petty lease violations, but if a tenant is committing "petty" lease violations, then there are lease violations. Neighbors in my building regularly left trash in the hallway. It was gross and fits the bill for a petty violation. The landlord had no proof and so couldn't (wouldn't) enforce.

That said, lease violations go both ways with the added requirements of NYC housing laws. If a landlord is violating either, however petty, they are violating. If hot water is 119 and not the required 120, its a violation. It's binary.

To be clear, I'm not in favor of biometrics for this use case. A key fob, pin code, or dial by name system doesn't seem broken, so why "fix it" and add the risk that sensitive biometrics info is leaked because of hacking/theft/accidental loss.

I'm seeking to understand what the root of the concern for being forced out is over a change in method used to enter the building?

bdowling5• 3 years ago

Two issues:

(1) Subletting by a rent-controlled tenant to a sub-tenant, for a profit and without the consent of the landlord.

(2) “Giving” a rent-controlled apartment to a friend or family member, without the consent of the landlord.

A rent-controlled apartment that a tenant has held for 20+ years and is renting at a small fraction of the market rate is a valuable asset that some tenants want to capitalize on.

olalonde2• 3 years ago

Bingo. I think that's exactly what tenants are really worried about. The "racist gentrifiers" narrative just doesn't hold up.

ocrow• 3 years ago

It doesn't even require that the tenant be trying to "capitalize". Perhaps they are subletting for a few weeks, or just having friends stay over on the regular. If that is disallowed by the lease agreement, it's enough for the landlord to begin an eviction proceeding.

jobs_throwaway• 3 years ago

Yeah, this is a huge thing here. I have some friends moving into one of their great-uncle's 3-bedroom apartment in the West Village that is rent controlled at < 1/3 the market price. They've been scheming it for literally years. Its great for them but terrible for the market at large, and we'd be better off as a society if these things didn't happen.

bdowling5• 3 years ago

One more issue:

(3) Tenants holding onto apartments that they no longer live in.

shagie4• 3 years ago

If the tenant is short term renting out the apartment to more than two people or is not there during that time (e.g. Airbnb), then the property owner is in violation and will be cited.

How does a property owner protect themselves to identify if an apartment has more than two non-tenants staying there for less than 30 days or that the tenant isn't in residence in the apartment during that time?

Key fobs and PIN codes are not sufficiently strong to ensure this.

thrwy_918• 3 years ago

the real issue here is that rental control is awful policy and leads to these kinds of bizarre market distortions

abolish rent control and legalize building more housing

jayess• 3 years ago

Don't just ban facial recognition for landlords, ban it for everyone, including the government.

CraigRo• 3 years ago

NYC LLs suffer huge penalties if a tenant airbnbs an apartment (there are extra special fines for that). They basically can't get a tenant out without tons of video evidence that the T is violating their lease. Now this. Basically it is a set up to enable different groups of people to sue and bankrupt LLs.

yakireev• 3 years ago

Oh these poor poor NYC landlords, hardly evading the bankruptcy under the unfair and unjust pressure of the evil renters. /s

shipscode• 3 years ago

You’d have to be a maniac to want to become a landlord in NY these days.

New Yorkers want to stop landlords from using facial recognition

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