The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition and Surveillance Is Here
forbes.com
forbes.com
That elevator pitch is key. I have extensive knowledge about this issue but have a hard time coming up with it; I need to be prepared.
Change only will come through political pressure, and that requires public awareness. I had lunch recently with a journalist from a prominent publication, someone very well informed, and they told me that widespread surveillance wasn't real, a sort of urban myth. Organizations like the EFF have been unsuccessful and I think that's because they don't generate mass public awareness. It's up to us to create it, and we need a pitch.
EDIT: [deleted]
Employee-motivator - using simple webcams we can monitor the facial emotions of your employees moment to moment. Are they reacting positively to your email about the new executive jet purchase? Are they showing signs of morale fatigue as they fall behind their schedule? We can send them morale boosting emails such as ... "Smile, you still have your job".
Republican, Democrat, or independent. Do you want any party to have that much power while in office?
Most fallen regimes that we have good records for - e.g. the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, and (kind of) the East Germans had various factions competing overtly or covertly for power. Each faction had an intelligence service constructing dossiers on/blackmailing the chiefs and other interesting people associated with other factions. The nominal chief executives were spied on by everyone except their own ultraloyal people.
I don't see any reason to expect different outcomes in America, so most likely the NSA would be closely watching Nixon and everyone else, while Nixon's people tried to do the same.
And of course this isn't a special property of Nixon - it would be very naive to believe there aren't various dossiers on Obama floating around the Virginia/Maryland suburbs.
Have a nice day.
Maybe you walk home through a bad neighborhood. Maybe you sometimes grab a beer at a bit of a divey bar near your office. Maybe you've visited an old friend who's been in some trouble recently. Whatever the case may be, your face has been in a photo with some questionable folks, whether it's a security camera or a stranger's Facebook photo. So the bank's computers noticed, and flagged you as a risk. People who hang around questionable people aren't very good at repaying their loans.
I generalized this as "You have something you really want (everyone has different goals). Right when you think you are about to achieve your goal, it is taken away (because of something stupid you did in the past; everyone has done something stupid at one point). This is why unchecked data collection is bad"
Lack of information does not grant the same benefits/advantages as possession of information. Why do you think so much effort is expended to possess information?
Let's say I meet a guy at a party. Facial scanners detect me with him. He seems like a nice guy, but he is currently on trial for a number of white collar offenses -- I know none of this. "The machine" does and will now assume I hang around questionable people.
If your chances are actually higher than population average to hang around with bad people, the machine is probably correct for assigning you a higher risk.
Which all misses the point that as soon as he walked into the party, your own ocular implants would have performed the same recognition and you would have known to stay away from him.
To me, the more compelling angle to attack surveillance has to appeal to people's desire to keep some portion of their lives from being made public (rather than appealing to their wallet).
Insurance is paying for peace of mind. Most people are paying more premiums than insurance is paying them back.
Who is questionable and who defines it? Gay people were "questionable" for most of history; they would lose their jobs if discovered (that was still true in the US military until very recently). What about Muslims, overtly discriminated against in many places? Poor people? Latinos (someone might suspect they are illegal immigrants)? etc.
It might not be a person making the call. Whatever the state of the art machine learning algorithm decides. Not to suggest that a learning algorithm won't be able to learn racism.
Also it can fall down if you don't stick only to directly relatable details: "but I don't walk through a bad neighbourhood, so this wouldn't affect me and therefore I don't see how it could be a problem". The instant it ceases to speak to their experience directly, you've lost them.
A tangent: I enounter this too, all the time, with intelligent, well-educated people. It's as if people don't understand what "example" means, or can't project concepts from an example to a broader class.
What am I misunderstanding?
Tell them that the mobile phone they have in their pocket also seems like science fiction - and it was 20-30 years ago. Now it is science fact. Facial recognition is getting the same way.
If anything, based on all the shoddy movies that 'zoom in, enhance' with photos, the public should be primed to accept facial recognition quite easily.
If machine learning is brought into play it gets even more interesting. See eg. waifu2x, the anime video upscaler based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. Basically it is a neural net, that has been shown A LOT of anime, and it can therefore creatively(?) fill in the created pixels when upscaling.
I have no idea how advanced this kind of ML boosted "enhance" technology can get in the future, and it might even get a little scary: imagine an observer with the experience of million lives spent looking blurry images in poor lighting. It might get surprisingly good at that...
I get more cynical by the day, the more I read/hear such accounts.
I am/was an idealist, but I catch myself every so often to think, that these people do not deserve anything else. Everything is clearly visible - that possible paths are not that hard to understand. The consequences can be dire if nothing is done - non the less. They keep giving away their and everyone else's privacy in the blink of a thumb-flick on "what ever the next big app is called".
Have I given up? No, I try non the less to inform people surrounding me. Do I believe in positive change? Sadly not anymore.
That's why it's called an "elevator pitch". If you get this sort of response, you get out of the elevator and pitch the person off the roof of the building.
There is a superb essay written by a law professor that was posted to HN a while back entitled "I've got nothing to hide'' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy [1] which tackled the problem with the way privacy is commonly framed (and limited) in such discussions, going into detail about the nature and definition of privacy, mass surveillance, and the difficulty in getting the point across.
One of the issues covered it that often privacy discussions hinge on singular arguments and hypothetical examples that become ineffectual when they don't relate to or affect a person's own experience, or use analogies that don't hold up well. The lack of news stories covering the real world effects of privacy harm, 'dead bodies' as one person put it, also make it hard for people to care for the tangible consequences. Now more than ever there are articles being written on company breaches and database hacks yet the problems we face from mass surveillance are a different, broader and legalized kind, the effect of which still isn't clear to a lot of people even with what we know.
Inevitably though people tend to look after their own interests, and if it doesn't affect them and they have no way to change it there are those that simply don't care.
[1] PDF: http://tehlug.org/files/solove.pdf
There is plenty of questionable shit happening right now in the NSA and stuff. I don't see why we need to resort to fearmongering about absurd hypotheticals.
I would imagine the list of things that will count against you in those situations will always be much longer than the list of things that can count for you, i.e. just because A can count against you doesn't mean that ¬A will count for you; ¬A will just be 0 points and the assumed baseline.
In one sense, it's a zero-sum game. If person A is a better debtor, A gets a better rate than B. However, a more sophisticated portfolio will try to find anti-correlated debtors. Rather than lending to 100 low-risk people all similar to each other, I'd rather diversify and include some very different people that may be higher risk on an individual basis; the aggregate risk can be much lower than individual. To that end, the more the lender can learn about me, the more chance I have to reveal how anti-correlated I am with others.
1. Cartoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y2M8BUcXG4
2. Documentary site: http://tacma.net/
"Congratulations! You have been selected for our beta testing program.
Based on data we collected on you when you were browsing the internet, we found that you [insert controversial subject, political statement, political affiliation]. We matched this data to you using facial recognition.
If this is not correct, please write to us at [website], we are always looking to improve our algorithms.
[website prominently displayed]"
The controversial characteristics can be obtained by hot reading of some sort or by simply sending party affiliation leaflets in an area where a specific party makes sense. No data actually has to be gathered.
Website reveals the trick and what you, the user, can do about it.
Should piss some people off.
You are tagged/associated with them.
Now, you're down on your luck.
P.S. Because, proprietary algorithm.
"Okay, you don't have that choice anymore. They can get it just from seeing your face now."
_________________________________
I wrote a program called uWho(https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho) for our hacker/maker convention, Makevention. Our goal was to determine how many people showed up to the convention, as it was a free-to-attend with a suggested donation event.
With a permissive license (OpenCV) attached to a GPL3 (Qt), I was able to make a real-time face scanner. My version was nice, in that it saved a one-way hash of the person's face. It is a 2 liner to save the full face instead of the nice method I did.
I did this using software anyone can get. Now, imagine having this software, with mainframes combined with the ability to trawl through a user's facebook profile... Because a like allows that. And do you have a company's Facebook permission? Now they can see your whole profile, as well as your friends.
Now, tell me this: what would happen if a company downloaded every face in a user's profile, checked the names of tagged faces, and ran all of them through a face recognizer like what I already made?
That's why it is important.
With that in mind, here's how I'd see you explain in that way to a lay person who doesn't get why it's important:
> I wrote a program called uWho(https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho) for our hacker
You're a hacker?
> With a permissive license (OpenCV) attached to a GPL3 (Qt)
I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about already.
> My version was nice, in that it saved a one-way hash of the person's face. It is a 2 liner to save the full face instead of the nice method I did.
If I was following, the only thing so far is that you were taking pictures of people and recognised faces and it was really useful, and you're trying to convince me that we should be worried about others taking pictures of us and recognising faces?
> Now, tell me this: what would happen if a company downloaded every face in a user's profile, checked the names of tagged faces, and ran all of them through a face recognizer like what I already made?
What would happen? The company can recognise who people are, like facebook can and I already allow and don't care about / like?
"Hi again! Haven't seen you since Tuesday, when you were with this person [photo of other face seen with them]! Have you been OK? You haven't missed a Wednesday before?"
Make it intentionally innocuous-but-creepy.
You and I must know very different people.
Being resigned to it, feeling they can't do anything about it, or accepting some level of (usually ad-related) tracking in return for some other service are all different to being OK with being tracked constantly.
It's also striking how often people don't realise the full implications of these technologies. They're OK up to a point because nothing bad ever seems to happen to them, until it does. Sometimes they're also OK with it up to a point because they think it's necessary for some greater good, which may or may not actually be true.
But on the bright side, surveillance technology will probably mean the end of democracy. With extensive surveillance, it should be easy enough to eliminate/sabotage people who speak up for the common man, such as labor union activists, universal suffrage activists or politicians before they become major problems.
Then we über-nerds can finally rule the world! The common people will make useful servants. And we get to impregnate their women, eventually, slowly but surely, turning all of the Earth's population into nerds! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_fac...
(Granted, even this application has serious overtones of societal surveillance.)
EDIT: Anyone care to speculate on why Google Glass doesn't do this? Surely the processing capability is there.
[0] https://developers.google.com/glass/policies?hl=en [1] https://twitter.com/googleglass/status/463838878143492096
RMS called this one.
Glass, the current version, is not meant for CV-intensive operations.
Other people, with more severe prosopagnosia, can't even recognize their own family members' faces. They rely on gait and voice and other cues. It's really hard on them when, say, their spouse decides to get their hair dyed blue.
Not knowing how to treat the cause, I'm at least trying to treat the symptoms. We might not be able to stop them from seeing our secrets, but we might very well stop them from making us feel ashamed and from blackmailing us.
Certainly it's here to stay, but so is murder, theft, fraud, and many other things. We want to maximize the leverage and tools people have to fight it.
There are many good uses for the ability to instantly recognize and identify anybody from a crowd, as well as bad ones.
Probably the easiest way to frustrate these things would be the simplest; only go out in public with substantial facial features obscured or altered.
The degree to which tools with diverse uses, some of which may be bad, should be regulated is always a matter of serious controversy (cf. firearms). Whether it's legal or not, this tech will be used, so we need to get people to accept that and learn to recognize and frustrate its usage, instead of trying to deprive the populace of the tools that provide the function, which is ultimately futile.
I don't know how well obscuring facial features will really work. There might just be too much information. Partially obscured face, body dimensions, clothing, location, time... I think it might be a loosing battle.
Sorry, going out hidden means you're a terrorist.
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/sites/sbs.com.au.news/files/style...
http://www.barenakedislam.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/295...
http://qz.com/324805/china-has-just-banned-the-burqa-in-its-... ('authorities in the Xinjiang city of Karamy barred anyone wearing burqas, niqabs, hijabs or simply “large beards” from taking public buses.')
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering ('The key argument supporting this proposal is that face-coverings prevent the clear identification of a person, which is both a security risk, and a social hindrance within a society which relies on facial recognition and expression in communication.')
Or a potential criminal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws
"Germany - [..]you may not disguise your identity in public meetings such as demonstrations so the police are able to identify you."
"Russian Federation - it is prohibited to wear masks and any other means of hiding identity during public events"
Sure there is.
For one thing, a similar level of technology to the capture and processing applications could also be used to automatically detect and obscure faces where storing them isn't necessary, probably with imperfect but highly reliable success. Consider how Google's Street View wound up hiding car licence plates for a lot of places after the privacy complaints, for example.
For another thing, the problem with a lot of modern privacy invasions is asymmetry: large, powerful organisations like big businesses or governments can do a lot more to you with lots of information than you can do to them in return.
This could be solved for businesses by imposing rules and meaningful penalties for violating them. Facebook isn't going to be processing anyone's face for dubious reasons if it's subject to compulsory scrutiny on account of processing a high volume of personal data and the penalties for repeated breaking of the rules escalate as significant percentages of annual revenue. For deliberate violations, you could remove the corporate shield from the responsible executives as well, as with other criminal conduct.
Governments is harder, because right now the governments of the West seem to be more hostile to their own people than to foreign surveillance. Ideally, our governments would actually be on our side, and the vast resources they seem to be devoting to invading their own people's privacy would instead be devoted to protecting it. Imagine how much safer we would all be from things like fraud, identity theft, commercial espionage, and worse, if instead of trying to exploit vulnerabilities and limit secure communications, organisations like the NSA and GCHQ helped to close vulnerabilities and promote safe and secure use of technology by everyone. Like everyone else, I don't know exactly what the real threat from terrorism is, but I'm pretty sure the potential savings to our economies alone from safer technology would run to many billions.
Right, isn't that just "hiding the microphone"? Google still has records of your license plates.
Can agencies subpoena them for that information? Can Google themselves use it maliciously?
The technology exists, and will be used, even if it's not accessible to the public.
How much do you trust our information oracles?
If Google applied that same fuzzing to its own internal copy of the images, it would not have records of everyone's licence plates any more. I don't know whether they do this today, but we could empower the official regulators to investigate such things in reasonable ways, for example by mandating greater disclosure of working practices or some sort of inspection regime for organisations processing high volumes of personal data.
I will not let a corporation/individual do the same if I can spot the devises they use, or the hear they are surveilling me.
The small changes I made are: I don't shop at Home Depot as much as I used to. I walk out of any store that has too many cameras. I don't shop at stores that a require membership picture. I never had a big presence on the Internet, so I didn't need to delete to many real name/identifiable ip accounts.
I think their are small ways we can fight. The problem I see is most people think, "I'm not doing anything wrong, I really don't care."--with the exception of HN members.
I have actually looked into ways to defeat facial recognition, but everything I looked into might bring more attention to myself than doing nothing. I do understand the big hoodie though. To be honest, I've never liked my picture taken. As a Photographer, I don't take people's pictures like I used to; it just rude, and shows poor manners these days. (I did look into a hat with IR lights on the brim. It seems to work now, but looks like new cameras will be able to defeate the lights, and there's always the establishment that says no to hats?)
The problem, I feel, is lack of transparency, what exactly is the government collecting, and how they are being used, etc.
Once those information are made public, then we can allow the judiciary system to decide on a case by case level what is allowed and what is not.
Forget corporations for a moment and think about your own rights as a programmer. I want to tinker with image-similarity scores by downloading random images from the internet and comparing with a photo I just took in a public place. Oops, my photo just so happened to have a stranger's face that matches a photo in my database and that filename contains the person's name. Should that be illegal?
Consider the effects of a legal requirement to have an "opt-in" for facial recognition software. That was what the "consumer advocates" thought should be a minimum standard. Large corporations with trusted brands might be able to run such an effort, but any startup certainly could not.
Regulating what software I can write is a slippery slope. Compare facial recognition with encryption. If there's regulation for recognition software, then regulation for encryption will be coming right after. The worst-case scenario in my mind is if the federal government has a monopoly on any kind of software. Our best defense against a government/corporate monopoly on surveillance is not to ban it, but to democratize it.
Encryption is something you do by yourself or with another consenting party, facial recognition is something you do to someone else without their permission and possibly use for nefarious purposes.
There's nothing wrong with outlawing certain activities from the commercial sphere, or any sphere. It's not an assault on your freedom, its protection of my privacy? It's illegal to stalk and harass people in person or over the phone. It's illegal to serve people undercooked food or raw milk or whatever. It's illegal to breach HIPAA.
Are you next going to say its terrible that you can't access my medical records for your startup?
How about security cameras and genitalia recognition in the bathrooms at restaurants, is that cool too?
Cameras in the bathroom? Fine. Whatever. If that's the new normal, then I guess I'll get over it. Are you saying that will now be legalized? I'm pretty sure we don't need any new laws to prevent cameras in changing rooms. The "scary" scenarios that have been described in the other threads are already illegal for other reasons -- harassment, redlining (racial profiling), spam, etc.
You should be able to collect any data you want, and use it however you want?
Why not start a business face-recognizing people who show up at battered women's shelters and selling access online for $50?
Or how about completely legally standing a public street and making notes of the schedules of when people are and are not home, and selling access to that to probable burglars, should that also be legal?
The use of information can and should be regulated. Everything from insider trading to medical privacy.
I'm all for regulating (mis)use of information, but not the collection of information.
It is perfectly possible to restrict, say, the systematic collection of facial images or the commercial or government use of facial images or the transfer of facial images to another party, without impeding casual, incidental use such as taking your own personal photos that sometimes happen to catch someone in the background.
Asserting that good laws are "perfectly possible" is a little tragic given our long history of poorly designed laws. Not to mention mismanaged and corrupt regulatory agencies.
However, those are orthogonal issues to the ethical principles and the technical aspects here. The same level of technology that can now be used to compromise privacy could also be used to help protect it, and we can surely do a reasonable job of distinguishing between the kind of inadvertent background imagery that comes from living in a world with other people and the kind of systematic, targeted collection and use of data that leads to some of the more serious privacy risks with the new technologies today.
Perhaps one day increased camera resolutions will allow trackers to identify something humans can't, like retinal scans. This would allow cameras to basically "fingerprint" people, and will be super creepy.
> Consistently identifying a single person from a database of 100Ms/billions of people
I don't need to, there aren't billions of people who are likely to be at the closest ATM to your house.
> constantly gaining weight, growing facial hair, etc
But I see you several times every single day.
> false positives will become an exponentially bigger problem as you increase the candidate space.
To be honest, I think that this is the most likely thing to scare people, that you won't be allowed to fly because a computer made a mistake and everyone trusts it or can't override it. That the police get called when you go to pick up your son because you're the same height and rough build as a child molester who was released from prison yesterday
I think we can assume many agencies have access to ALL Facebook data, Photostream data, etc. With that it is very much possible, dare one say, easy?
[1] No fly lists, for example.
Schneier makes it sound pretty scary. For a general audience, this is probably good. It takes a lot to make your average Joe start paying attention to something new.
But on a technical level, I can't help wondering, how realistic is the scenario he describes? Or, maybe the better question is, how immediate is the threat of universal face recognition? If we know what time horizon we're working with, maybe we can be better prepared.
I think Schneier makes some substantial logical leaps in the article that make it sound like automatic, ubiquitous facial recognition is a more urgent issue than it really is.
For example, he goes from this
> Today in the US there's a massive but invisible industry that records the movements of cars around the country. Cameras mounted on cars and tow trucks capture license places along with date/time/location information ...
to this
> This could easily happen with face recognition.
with no supporting evidence for how this feat of engineering will be accomplished. Recognizing letters and numbers on a license plate is one thing. Recognizing faces at random angles with random occlusions, hats, eyeglasses, makeup, etc., is quite another thing.
I found a couple of papers from CMU and UCF a couple of years ago where they look at the problem of recognizing people in photos at "web scale" [1]. The recall/precision rates of the algorithms they tested are pretty decent, but they're still pretty far from the dystopian future described in the article.
[1] http://enriquegortiz.com/wordpress/enriquegortiz/research/fa...
I know software is now scoring as people on various standard AI tests. But most people couldn't recognize a million other people correctly. The situation is kind of odd. It's like how engineering a car to drive automatically in a variety of controlled situations which might represent 90% of the normal driving. They are still nowhere near ready to drive on real roads.
The supposed advantages are perverse; Face recognition with a 1% false positive rate can translate one fugitive to 10 or 100 false arrests of random people.
A store clerk knowing your name when you walk in the store is mostly creepy and wouldn't help sales - the store that had their clerks saying goodbye by name to credit card holds a few years back have stopped.
So, benefits? Changes? The article is kind of light on the whole subject.
Saying your name might be creepy (but maybe people will become accustomed to it). Knowing your identity I think would certainly help sales, the same way it does when you shop online.
How?
I suppose you could have store change it's stock based on who it knows has visited it. But that sounds cumbersome and speculative. The store might find itself removing the things people like to buy from that store and stocking things people prefer to buy from other stores and so wind-up selling less.
Kind of like when things I've searched for on amazon reappear as Facebook ads. It don't click through and buy 'cause I've already decided on whether or not to get them.
IIRC this already happens and businesses can buy DMV databases.
> Is facebook going to torpedo their business by selling this info?
Many businesses collect and sell this information. Where do all these online businesses, who charge users nothing, get their revenue? [EDIT: More simply said, that info arguably is the basis of the Internet economy]
> why would they want it?
To discriminate. They may offer different products or prices. They may discriminate because you are gay or transgender, because of your ethnic background, or because of your religious (e.g., Muslims) or political affiliation (e.g., communist, right-wing extremist, etc.). This can happen in more serious situations too, such as when dealing with government, law enforcement, or in employment situations.
Certainly such discrimination has been widespread for centuries and is today. Why would it be any different when they have new tools?
Facial recognition + a database allows POWERFUL and fine grained discrimination!
Imagine being able to know ${Things} about people -- via analytics / The Internet -- whenever any prospective customer comes into your store.
You could refuse to do business with gay people, divorcees, adulterers, married people, transgender people, politicians, members of the opposing political party or religion, or even police officers with X number of complaints. You could exclude people from the wrong side of town, or who didn't go to the right schools, or whose parents were (or who themselves are) illegal immigrants.
Many of these things are Probably Legal (some are likely not), but most of them strike me as unjust treatment of others. The technology allows frightening things, and there are MANY people who would do so right now if given the ability. (Religious and political boundaries are one such place where people are quite willing to do so.)
I only touched on business owners. Now imagine that roving bands of jerks (or criminals) got their hands on the same technology or data, and could tell who was a stranger in town, or was more vulnerable than others, or fit their desired target criteria. It's pretty scary, and I'm sure that within ten years we'll hear stories of such abuse happening.
That tendency exists quite strongly in humans, yes. Unfortunate, but true. On the other hand, businesses also have the tendency to want to make money. If I've got a business, and I make it hard for group X to buy stuff from me, they're probably going to try to find someone else who wants more strongly to make money and/or less strongly to be a jerk. And that business will get their money, and I won't.
And there may be businesses that are okay with that. But it ought to be somewhat of a self-defeating behavior.
Note well: I am not claiming that this behavior is moral or legal.
The criminal aspects mentioned in your last paragraph is quite frightening, and more so because it is also quite probable...
Which is true, although there are a few rubs:
1. It's not so easy to start a business, and if the group you exclude are small there's very little [edit - forgot to finish this sentence, sorry] incentive to open a new business just to cater for a small proportion of people. Depends on the business, obviously.
2. You're ignoring any influence other customers have. If 90% of your customers threaten to boycott you because you (bake cakes for gay weddings || print leaflets for republicans) it'd be good business sense to not serve that small percentage of your client base.
With 2, consider a "realistic" situation. In the future, all sex offenders will have their photos published on some public crime database. Cue outrage that sex offenders are being served in the local bar (or choose the establishment of your choice), they are then banned. Are people going to open up bars with the motto "sex offenders welcome here!"? To make people more wary of this, what happens when it thinks you're a sex offender because of a false positive?
I'm always really concerned when people argue that the free market will remove discrimination, and perhaps they're right in the long term but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that there was a fair amount of time when people in the US were discriminated against because of the colour of their skin (not to get into a discussion about now as it's not too relevant).
This type of libertarian self-solution rarely works. Things do not self-defeat because the affected groups are small and grow slowly. Consider the restricted fly list -- part of it was was government lead but part of it was implementation lead -- companies decided their own filters. Some were horrible -- you selected "Muslim Meal" option and the next thing you know you cant get a boarding pass. Problem is, you dont always have options. If you got restricted form American Airlines, as I did, suddenly you found yourself with half the flight options. If you got flagged again by United, now you were in real trouble...are you going to fly from NY to Charlotte via Detroit?
- they already do once you scan your store card
The store’s cameras and computers will have figured out your identity,
- store card
and looked you up in both their store database and a commercial marketing database they’ve subscribed to.
- store card again.
They’ll know your name,
- store card
salary,
- if you entered it and if you didn't lie when you filled out your store card form
interests,
- if you entered them and your didn't lie when you filled out your store card form
what sort of sales pitches you’re most vulnerable to,
- if the "deep data" / AI is actually correct
and how profitable a customer you are.
- store card
Maybe they’ll have read a profile based on your tweets and know what sort of mood you’re in.
- MAYBE. assuming the AI is anywhere near correct.
Maybe they’ll know your political affiliation or sexual identity,
- MAYBE, probably wrong.
both predictable by your social media activity.
- PROVE THIS.
And they’re going to engage with you accordingly, perhaps by making sure you’re well taken care of or possibly by trying to make you so uncomfortable that you’ll leave.
Why do you need a store card when a credit/debit card track has more than enough information to identify?
- Card number (useful on its own as an identifier) - Name (not perfect, decent secondary info)
Granted, these don't generally make for a super-continuous history on someone, but they're pretty decent for the average person for a year or two.
Also, if you make any returns at one of these stores that you've previously used a CC, your real state-issued ID will be correlated with your purchases (via your CC).
Also, if you do any online shopping with a retailer and use the same cards in the store: instant correlation.
Checks? Necessarily correlated with DL and account numbers, even better than CCs.
Outside of cash: there're just too many ways to establish purchase histories for most individuals.
He is.
Besides, your face is (for all practical purposes) all the data needed to identify exactly who you are, you name is just a few bit (albeit extremely discriminating one) of info and can have collisions.
Being able to efficiently do thing that was possible but inefficient is a huge deal. Especially since the government was designed with inefficiency in mind as a check of power. Removing them means increasing their power, and absolute power corrupt absolutely.
More info on that weird pregnancy story: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...
> the woman needs to know she's pregnant before her habits change.
There are always stories of people who don't realise they're pregnant, do their habits change in a reasonably identifiable way?
This wasn't particularly relevant to the point, I just wondered and thought it was an interesting question.
>> - MAYBE, probably wrong.
>> both predictable by your social media activity.
>> - PROVE THIS.
There's plenty of work on that, google "link mining" or "entity resolution". Or have a look at this video for an introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn91Jbc5UV0
But the point is really not whether your sexuality or political affiliation, or whatever characteristic is _really_ predictable. What is important is that people will _think_ they can predict it and then act accordingly- and treat you unfairly based on the knowledge they think they have.
The technology is certainly advanced enough and complex enough that a good salesperson can sell it to people who can't ever hope to understand it. In other words: it's consumer-ready as Google might say.
It's no different from the idiocy around fingerprints.