Hacker News Reader

Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

A HN contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end-users, that will make them aware of this issue and persuade them that it is important to them. Vote up the best ones. [EDIT: The goal is to persuade them about its dangers, not sell them something based on it]

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]

View on HN

You've spent years saving up to finally buy a home. You're having a baby in a few months, and you really need the space. You have the down payment ready, your credit is great, you've ticked all the boxes on the application, but you're turned down for the loan. Why?

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.

Decent example.

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"

The problem is that there is no reason to believe that is more likely than the opposite case of "You have something you really want (everyone has different goals). Right when you think you are about to fail to reach your goal, it is achieved (because of something clever you did in the past; everyone has done something clever at one point). This is why unchecked data collection is good"

Information in this case as in many is asymmetrical hence leading to the phrase "information is power".

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?

You missed the point. In the original loan example, the lender may want to screw you, but they also know that the one that screws you least is the one you will do business with. And your good character, as determined by omnipresent surveillance, allows them to safely offer you a better deal. It's like the "good student" etc discounts that car insurance gives now.

But doesn't this cut both ways? If you don't hang around questionable people, you'd qualify for better rate for loans. Or if your credit score is not very high, but the fact you don't hang around questionable people brings your credit file up a notch and make you qualify.

"Questionable people" is hardly a concrete descriptor, nor is it something immediately obvious.

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.

The chances are just as good - not necessarily 50/50, but close to population baseline - that the person you met actually was a nice guy and "the machine" assumes you hang around with good 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.

Yeah, in my mind, this completely negates the argument. If I don't engage in a given statistically risky behavior today, I'm paying more for insurance because some people do and the insurance company doesn't know who should be paying for that risky behavior so we all pay a little more.

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).

But the whole point of insurance is to collectively spread the risk, so that when things do go bad, you are not on your own. By definition, people in aggregate pay more for insurance than what the insurance pays them back (otherwise the company would go bankrupt!).

Insurance is paying for peace of mind. Most people are paying more premiums than insurance is paying them back.

> If you don't hang around questionable people ...

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.

Who is questionable and who defines it?

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.

I think you will find this historic legal case of considerable interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yick_Wo_v._Hopkins

I've tried this one on lay people before. The problem I have is that they usually can't get past their firm belief that these things are technologically impossible, even after you explain to them that they are. "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world."

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.

> 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?

That this kind of risk is zero-sum. If higher rates are charged to people who meet these criteria, those of us who don't will get better rates from competitive lenders.

> "That all sounds like science fiction, that can't happen in the real world."

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.

Ha, when watching those shows, I am always the nerd telling my wife how it's impossible to zoom in and enhance, because you can't create more information than existed when the photo was taken. I'm not sure that she gets it.

If you take a blurry photo of a license plate - it can be possible to enhance it (e.g. using sharpen) to reveal the license plate number - just because your naked eyes can't extract that information from a blurry photo doesn't mean the blurry photo doesn't already have enough information to encode the number precisely.

There is also superresolution methods that in practice make the "enhance"-feature possible. The information from the same objects in successive frames, eg. from a security camera feed, are composited into a single frame of higher resolution than the originals. This can even be done for a single image (see. Glasner et al. "Super-resolution from a single image." Computer Vision, 2009 ICCV 2009. IEEE.).

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 know it seems crazy, it seems crazy to me too, but this is what I encounter time and time again. No matter how carefully you explain it, it seems too unlikely to them. Once the explanation passes a certain threshhold of complexity (for which the bar is frighteningly low), they tune out and shut down.

Maybe what's needed more than an elevator pitch is an open-source app using facial recognition to creep people out without abusing them.

Why not abuse them. If they let themselves be led to the slaughterhouse that easily and voluntarily maybe they have to feel the pain of being abused to learn?

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.

I tried to discuss the dual-use nature of their research with some machine learning/pattern recognition people (I was there to discuss maybe working with them as a student). They didn't seem to ever have thought about it at all, and were not open to start now. This was quite shocking to me. I'm not sure how to deal with the issue when even the people creating the technology are like that.

Do they not notice Facebook using facial recognition to automatically tag faces in their photos already? That isn't even a very new feature anymore.

> "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"

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.

> 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.

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

On the other hand you are just as likely to get a loan you otherwise wouldn't have because you haven't been seen with questionable folks. In any case that kind of policy is already illegal. And it's not even technically feasible at the moment. Even if it was, it's very unlikely there is a strong correlation between being seen with some random person in a photo, and your likelihood of paying a loan.

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.

The banks are doing things, perhaps not exactly what was described, but your facebook history, linkedin, other social media accounts are taken into account when applying for a loan. Even when you browse the bank's web page, where you hover the mouse, what pages you look at and variour other metrics. One example of a company providing such service is http://www.bigdatascoring.com/

In my opinion that is a very good thing. If they can make fewer loans to people who are high risk and lower interest loans to people who are not, everyone wins. The source of the data doesn't matter.

> On the other hand you are just as likely to get a loan you otherwise wouldn't have because you haven't been seen with questionable folks.

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.

They're actually trying to give you the lowest rate they can while staying profitable, you know, to be competitive with other lenders. There's no baseline, all our characteristics are inputs to a function that estimates risk of default. Then the lender chooses what rate to offer based on their portfolio design.

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.

This pitch reminded me of the cartoon in beginning of the documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply - a concise documentary related to the topic of how your data can be used by the company whose services you are using. The cartoon may be good to use too.

1. Cartoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y2M8BUcXG4

2. Documentary site: http://tacma.net/

This isn't a good example because the technology already exists to deliver this service to lenders - read up on Canadian Tire's JP Martin. He did the first experiments with rewards-credit-cards and data mining, and found he could pretty-well correlate certain behaviors with missed credit-card payments. Apparently there's a dive bar in Montreal that indicates you're a screw-up if you drink there.

I reckon some subversive art projects. Set up a camera and an SDR in a fairly well trafficked public place (shopping mall, train station concourse, etc) and have the camera do face detection/recognition and the SDR grab MAC addresses from bluetooth and wifi radios. Collect a few weeks worth of data, then put a screen on it so it can put up a big sign

"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.

HusbandWatcher - provide a photo of your cheating husband, and we will scan hotel, car and street surveillance to show you who he is with every moment he is out of your sight

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".

"Would you tell your full name to a random person at a bar that scares you? No, because they can find a lot about you just from knowing that.

"Okay, you don't have that choice anymore. They can get it just from seeing your face now."

I have a great way to explain Facial Recognition and why it's important....

_________________________________

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.

I think you're coming from this already feeling that privacy is very important. The people you're trying to explain it to probably don't really care.

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?

Leaflet:

"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.

Automatic social network shortest-path finding: point your phone at someone and find out if you're friends-of-friends, if you went to the same school, worked at the same company once, etc.

I hate to say this, but: I think this would be very cool. See someone interesting at the bar? Scan and check to find a convenient ice breaker. "Oh! We both went to the same summer camp as kids!"

That is cool until every man uses it on you daughter.

Your daughter would be fine if her paranoid luddite father hadn't forbidden her from getting her own setup.

I am not sure I follow this comment. No one said anything about forbidding anyone from anything It was simply a statement about how upsetting it would be as a parent.

Hopefully by then we'll have progressed past this patriarchal protect-the-defenseless-women mentality. Who's to say my daughter won't be the one using it on men at the bar?

Who said anything about protecting? It is simply a statement about how men feel when other men are interested in their daughters.

Real-life targeted advertising: bus-stop ads that scan your face, look up your private browsing history, and try to sell you the complete works of Nickelback or something equally embarrassing.

"Other customers who purchased Nickelback also liked..."

The EFF should by a bus ad with this pitch on it.

It's now easier than ever for the political party in power to spy on the opposition. Imagine what Nixon would do if he had the NSA surveillance powers that are available to the current President.

Republican, Democrat, or independent. Do you want any party to have that much power while in office?

If history is any guide, you've got the surveillance directionality mixed up here.

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.

This is a strange perspective on the history. Why are you emphasizing comparison to the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis, and dismissing the similarity to the East Germans? Why not look at what domestic intelligence has actually already done in the US, which seems quite reminiscent of the Stasi?

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

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

I just mean that the surviving Stasi records are incomplete. The Stasi parallels to our own surveillance state are indeed eerie.

In the near future, I will be able to point my phone at you, and know who you are.

Why bother pointing the phone, just use the camera built into your eyeglasses.

Did you know some businesses have the ability to instantly identify you by nothing more than physical features? Did you know the storage and exchange of that identifiable information can be used by businesses or governments to violate your rights and privacy? By the way, there is no regulation regarding the use of this information, nor can you do anything about it.

Have a nice day.

Your friend / family member is down on their luck. Or, you help "those less fortunate."

You are tagged/associated with them.

Now, you're down on your luck.

P.S. Because, proprietary algorithm.

It might be too late for that, it's not a matter of elevator pitches anymore. People are already ok with being tracked constantly. I think it's a matter of going back to the fundamentals and re-instilling an appreciation for individual liberty and the value of privacy. That's not something that happens with an elevator pitch, that's something that takes essays, and blog pieces, and conversations, and lots of time.

People are already ok with being tracked constantly.

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.

A carriage manufacturer contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end users that will make the aware of the danger of automobiles and persuade them that it is important.

I don't think it's possible to educate non-technical end-users (ie. most of the general public) about this. They're too dumb.

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!!!!

www.cantheyseemydick.com

More like "Do they know that it's MY dick?"

Yes they do.

Link for the lazy: https://cantheyseemydick.com/

How reliably does dick pic recognition work at this point?

Very well if you use one of the many popular email or messaging services which does not use end-to-end encryption to send it or one of the popular cloud service providers that does not encrypt to data on your computer first to store it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com