EFF: Americans may not realize the impacts of face recognition technology

https://www.networkworld.com/community/node/81052

by andreyf • 14 years ago

85 43 14 years ago

mvzink• 14 years ago

Not surprising; most don't even realize the impacts of basic web technology. But indeed, the obvious fact that Americans have far less privacy than they realize is interesting and important.

I am repeatedly reminded of Brin's "The Transparent Society" [0]. Given the breadth and depth of privacy violations that continue to progress in the US and elsewhere, it seems more and more likely that we will eventually face a choice "between privacy and freedom" as Brin predicts. Sadly, people do indeed remain unaware, and even the savvy aren't taking the issue seriously (read: radically) enough. I count myself among the lazy, but I'm happy to preach doom like the rest.

[0] http://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety1.html

jiggy201110• 14 years ago

Between stuff like google glass,facial recognition, GPS and advanced ML , NLP techniques pretty much means the end of privacy. Even for people who don't use social networks so much.

If the recognition is accurate enough , you only need 1 person to tag you once and all of your movements can be tracked by cameras (that will eventually be built into everyone's glasses).

You're out walking and you do something dumb like trip over a crack in the pavement. Some passer by taps the "that was funny, tag it" button that is mounted inconspicuously on their person and it's instantly fed into the streams of all your friends and family.

The question is, what does this actually mean to society?

If everyone's personal life is on permanent display does it mean that we become more robot like because nobody wants to have something they may regret recorded in perpetuity or does it make people more liberal because things that used to be considered funny/outrageous/taboo simply no longer are. In the sense that if every woman went around topless, men would soon cease becoming aroused by breasts.

true_religion4• 14 years ago

I question how much privacy really did exist before the modern era of large cities and impersonal lives.

When we all lived within spitting distance of our families in a single common room, and everyone in town knew you from birth to death, how much different was life then from now?

Will the 'erosion' of privacy really just return us to a state that we (humanity) have previously been in?

jiggy201110• 14 years ago

Perhaps, but in past times you would live your life in a small community of people who would "know" you and would know all kinds of both positive and negative things about you.

What you are looking at in the future is the possibility of having people all over the world who don't really know you at all making judgements about you based on incomplete (even if still comprehensive) and possibly out of context information.

For example "cyber bullying" where what would once be bullying from perhaps a small group of people at a school can be escalated into cases of kids having thousands of hateful messages from people who they have never met posted on their facebook wall or their pictures turned into memes or whatever. For example the "star wars kid".

For example: Imagine going for a job interview in another country and having the interviewer say "you're that idiot who did X" because that is basically how you are known to the world despite your meaningful work in some unrelated area.

lumberjack2• 14 years ago

Privacy from family members and privacy from strangers are not the same thing and I venture say that people value the latter much more than the former.

Edit: And besides, in small knit societies the lack of privacy is reciprocal. It's not the same thing as having a small group of people who control massive data centers and have the capability to pick up on some dirt on anyone within hours of requesting it.

majormajor• 14 years ago

I've often had the same thought. I suspect that the pre-internet big-city age will end up being a blip on the historical "ease of acquiring real privacy/anonymity people had" graph.

There's too much pressure from both sides. Companies, governments, etc, all want to know, and lots of people want to share.

I think the future will be one of (social, at least) privacy through getting lost in the huge sea of people instead of privacy through actual anonymity.

HalibetLector• 14 years ago

The key difference is they traded privacy for personal trust and rapport. When you live in the same foxhole with your entire family and are always interacting with the same small community, trust is built up over time. You knew everybody in a personal way, not just as an abstract notion of a person on the other side of the world.

The way we're heading, we'll have neither personal trust nor privacy. It's not JUST the lack of privacy that's a problem, it's the fact that any stranger can know everything there is to know about you. In a small community, everybody has to have good working relationships with everybody else or the community dies. On the internet, not everybody has your best interests in mind.

wes-exp3• 14 years ago

If it turns out there is a compelling public interest, I think privacy could be protected by law rather than disappearing. For instance, it could become illegal to operate a facial recognition database except for research purposes. No doubt this wouldn't be perfect, but it could help to restore balance if certain technologies are deemed to be more harm than good.

jiggy201110• 14 years ago

This would be hard to implement, what with organisations being able to move their actual database to other locations around the world. You would need an international treaty.

Not to mention that it would stifle all kinds of things, for example the kinect uses facial recognition to recognise different people. The public would not support this sort of legislation if it meant all their fun stuff got thrown away.

Besides people could still keep databases, just locked away in encrypted partitions.

stfu2• 14 years ago

Personally I think this development is actually a good direction. People need to feel the pain before they react.

So far privacy has mostly been attributed to "some internets movements". But if everyone (incl. politicians and their families) are impacted, privacy should hopefully become a more central issue for policy makers.

jiggy201110• 14 years ago

I will be very interested to see the effect when the "privacy watershed" event happens. Which I'd be amazed if it didn't happen sometime within the next 10 years or so.

By that I mean something on the scale of the entire facebook database being exposed or a gigantic number of personally identifiable google searches being released.

It may not even be something that happens due to malicious activity, it could be a company choosing to do something with data that impacts a large number of people's lives in a very direct way.

bad_user• 14 years ago

     The question is, what does this actually 
     mean to society?

It can go both ways, depending on other factors like ... are people going to get punished for doing weird things, for not being normal? Also, once the detection of tax-evasion becomes easier, are taxes going to get lowered once everybody will pay their taxes? It might happen.

In our country during communism, phones were constantly wiretapped. The secret service also had countless informants that were sending reports on their neighbors on anything they deemed "suspicious". Basically anyone of your neighbors could be an informant and so everybody was watching their backs constantly.

Personally I'm not that worried about technology, because a police state can spy on its citizens just fine without any of this modern technology: they just need informants and a big militia force to read and act on those reports. And believe me when I say that this method is extremely effective ;)

Quite the contrary, with modern technology regular people can use secure communication channels that can't be wiretapped, something which wasn't possible in my country during communism.

These problems (privacy, other freedoms) are always social problems, not technological problems. Technology always provides a balance ... if face recognition will be able to identify you with high accuracy, you will also be able to detect all the photos of you that have ever been uploaded and send take-down notices or other such requests. If Facebook still identifies you, you can sue them into oblivion. If your Facebook communication is not secure, you can always have a conversation over an encrypted channel. Etc...

sit12• 14 years ago

How will new face recognition technology discriminate between identical twins?

lumberjack2• 14 years ago

Good point. I hope this doesn't become yet another forensic pseudoscience tool were procedures that are very much prone to error, are treated as infallible simple because they are use technology which the common man doesn't understands.

TeMPOraL• 14 years ago

It probably won't. However, with the numbers of cameras that are are being deployed everywhere, soon you'll only have to "tag" them once, and then you'll be able to track them as they move around the world.

stfu2• 14 years ago

Or you might just "enrich" the data with some behavioral information. Maybe one twin favors vanilla and the other strawberry ice cream.

gcr• 14 years ago

Context. Their preferences, friends they hang out with, brands they identify with, writing style, etc. will probably be different. These are things that Facebook can see.

apu2• 14 years ago

That's far into the realm of sci-fi for now, given that basic face recognition is still quite poor. See my other comment for details: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4275921

uiri• 14 years ago

At least for Facebook, I think it is possible to check if they have enough photos tagged of you that they feel confident that they can identify you in photos.

Facebook → Privacy Settings → Timeline and Tagging Edit Settings → Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded? (this is not yet available to you)

Needless to say there are very few pictures of me on Facebook and none of them are taken or uploaded by me.

joering22• 14 years ago

I think its worth pointing out that regardless of how you setup your photo recognition/face identification settings, what happens behind the scene is entirely different thing.

I can see FB user turning all those recognition features off, but yet when FB is given a photo and asked by LE for help with finding you in FB network, FB can choose to comply with that and quickly find you in a stack of 100 billions of photos, providing LE with array of all your photos organized by time and place.

edit: also, I believe there will be more way of abusing photos recognition in the future. Just like Federalies are using Google Earth Maps to find who has a swimming pool and match this information against resident's taxes (whether they paid pool taxes or not) and acting accordingly if they haven't paid, I can see IRS tapping (or at least wanting to tap) into FB photos stream and find folks that bought luxury stuff and did not claim it tax-wise.

orijing• 14 years ago

That makes me wonder two things:

1. Is it bad (or unfair) for the IRS to use technology to fight tax fraud? I mean, every dollar not collected from a tax evader is an extra dollar that must be collected from a law-abiding citizen. It sucks for the person with the pool, but if it means lower taxes for everyone else, I think that would be a good thing.

2. Google Maps is public, but what obligations does Facebook have to reveal photos that are posted privately (i.e. to friends), to law enforcement?

citizens• 14 years ago

Does anyone else here fear the combination of facial recognition + domestic drones?

daemon13• 14 years ago

BTW, how good is FR technology these days, especially in edge cases (blurred face, angles, etc)?

Also, any pointers to algos/open source tools?

apu2• 14 years ago

Terrible, unless you're in a "cooperative" setting, i.e., where the user is in controlled lighting conditions and looks directly at the camera, in a decent-to-high res photo.

Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) is the de-facto standard for looking at real-world face verification ("are these two faces of the same person?"): http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html

The top performer is currently around 93% (random chance is 50%). For a very rough guide on how recognition rates would be ("who is this person?"), it's v^sqrt(N), where v is the verification rate and N is the number of different people you're trying to distinguish between. Note that it goes down very fast with N.

16s• 14 years ago

I've built OpenCV for use on HPC clusters, and while not a big facial coder, I have help those who do it. It's interesting to distinguish between the terms 'facial detection' and 'facial recognition'. The former basically judges whether or not a face is in a picture or video while the latter attempts to associate faces with names/identities. Two very different things. I just wanted to point that out. OpenCV is good at detection, but I'm told not so good at recognition.

burntwater• 14 years ago

While this has been in my consciousness, I can't say I ever thought too seriously about it. Until yesterday, when I was lounging on a lawn in the park. I watched a woman take a photo, of which I was most likely in the background. The photo will likely be posted online, along with date and possibly GPS information encoded.

Though I'm in the background, likely blurred, I can fully visualize a system that would combine near-certain images (a security camera is 90% positive it saw me three blocks west of the park at 2pm), with the blurred image taken at 3pm in the park, 30% likely it's me, with another security image taken at 4pm 2 blocks east of the park with 85% certainty.

In other words, 10 years from now these algorithms won't just be able to follow my every move - they'll be able to go back and scan all the pictures uploaded, ever. And compile a film showing every waking hour of my life. A timeline, really.

EFF: Americans may not realize the impacts of face recognition technology

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