Face recognition app taking Russia by storm may bring end to public anonymity
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Sounds like neither of the founders has been on a date lately.
http://uselesspress.org/things/smell-dating/
Waving an electronic nose around is even more inconspicuous. Now you could have an app that would match the current odors smelled around and your state of mind, and automatically match them with a database to point you to people giving you good feelings.
https://billetto.co.uk/en/events/romancing-the-armpit-25-may
In a way, what's happening in Russia is better for society because it means the general public is aware of the technology and it's implications. Here in the US we presume we have a lot more privacy that we actually do.
“Right now, our government is doing things we think only other countries do.”
And unless you are into serious plastic surgery, there isn't really a clear cookies button with this tech.
EDIT: a.k.a. the Minority Report billboard/storefront that changes based on people around it.
Same works for any kind of identification of interests, including political - if your CCTV network captures faces of people who attended an opposition rally, you get to match them to other venues, spot patterns and recognize leaders/organizers.
Not to say your favorite taxi or banking app may include some unadvertised extras that cough "improves your customer experience" by enhancing your device screams.
Most of these have some sort of counter-measures, such as being able to turn off features of the phone. The facial thing is both universal and very hard to "disable".
For Facebook, does anyone remember when they released their auto-tagging feature, it would tag people who weren't your friends too? They quickly removed it when it started auto-tagging random people in pictures you took in public.
For Google, this was an initial feature of one of their mobile apps (I forget which), which they removed because people were creeped out by it.
However -- bureaucracy has always been vulnerable to its own overreach. An invasive legal system is a tax on productivity & innovation. If laws are society's immune system, an invasive police state is a society with an autoimmune disorder.
Tiny countries that can offer alternative systems will become destinations for a new generation of skilled or wealthy expats. Delaware offers benefits to corporations; Estonia is offering benefits to tech expats; this phenomenon will increase.
Anyway, What is the relation between this app and legislation? As I see it this app is perfectly legal right now, even if I don't like it.
Private companies are using surveillance technology on their employees and on their users.
If it's an everywhere issue, then I doubt that it will result in e.g. mass migration towards the few places that won't do it; people have shown in practice that they do not "vote with their feet" (or with revolutions) unless the abuse escalates to either very severe state violence or very severe economic hardship.
Sure, a minority of idealists will do so, but in the thousands, not in the millions. That doesn't matter in the large scale - to do so, it would have to match something like the jewish and other refugee flow from central europe in 1930ies. Currently, for every talented person that would consider leaving USA for political reasons, there are ten or hundred talented people that would rather come to USA for economic reasons, even if their current country doesn't do much or any surveillance.
Look at the shenzhen special economic zone in china; it evolved into something special because entrepreneurs were able to act without extreme government control at every step.
It's forgiveness vs permission. It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, i.e. it's more efficient. But surveillance-based law creates a permission society. Opportunities to fail or break the rules are also opportunities to succeed. You can't say 'we're only going to allow you to run the experiments that will work'.
Personal identity is not an exact science, no matter how much we would like it to be, there are always ways to fake it given the right tools.
Consider the roots of the concept: the word "person" originates from the ancient Greek persona, meaning a theatrical mask worn by actors.
Per+sona
Per: that through which
Sona: sound goes
The problem is, this doesn't scale. While this could be acceptable for a person some may call a "tinfoil-hatter", it's certainly unreasonable to think of general population to walk with rocks in their shoes and heads masked.
So, this doesn't solve the issue.
People also claim to have learned new ways of walking through posture exercise like Alexander Technique or Irene Dowd's work, although I don't know if those are big enough changes to be visibly different.
You'd have to maintain different personas, with different outfits, postures, gaits, cell phones..and still hide the fact that your phones, if you use any, probably connect to a lot of the same towers & networks. And those personas would still be tracked, even if separately. Sounds like an awful lot of tradecraft for the average citizen.
THAT was how he proved that he went to Oxford. Nowadays, if you want to know where someone went to school you'd do a quick search and take the first thing you find. If you are more diligent you'd dig deeper.
It's also very clear that Gatsby treasures his anonymity and the reputation he's built around being mysterious.
The reason I bring this up, is that it represents (in my mind) an indicator that there is an argument to be made that public anonymity has already changed so much in the past 20 years. Granted there were still ways of verifying all of this information before it was just a lot slower.
This post just stirred up some thoughts that I had this morning while reading. The internet more drastically technology have changed our culture so much it's almost impossible to realize the effect.
Just thought I'd share some musings I had this morning that tied into the current topic.
500,000 users and 'only' 3m searches ? That's 6 per user - way lower than what I would expect (or one of the numbers is false).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face.com
One nice mashup of that Face.com and Facebook APIs was the "AutomaticDJ": the computer will start playing the favorite music of the person in front of the PC, great for parties:
Upload a photo, toggle a true/false positive control, get your online-safe photo back. Looking forward to an announcement on HN.
I had an idea like this before, actually I think it might even work with just descriptions (no photographs needed). Like if you see a stranger on a train - you don't need that many bits of information to identify them. But you need the data of all people living in a city...
Enforcing such rules would take nothing short of a totalitarian state.
There was no privacy when we lived in villages, and we will return to that state in the mid-term future. The anonymity of the modern metropolis and the accompanying sensation of privacy in our day-to-day lives is but a temporary aberration in the history of the human experience.
Do not get used to it. It is not long for this world.
It seems what's actually needed to prevent that is controls on the creation and use of large databases in order to identify faces (except under some list of acceptable uses). People who work in IT often express disbelief that laws like that could work. In fact, factors that humans understand like scale and intent are an important part of law, and laws written in those terms are commonplace.
Re villages: another thing commonplace in the past was brutal violence. In the past, it was obvious that brutal violence was inevitable. Then, we made it illegal, and it largely stopped. We should do that again, in this case.
I'm more worried about untargeted collection of data because it produces a larger data set, which can be used to data-mine all sorts of juicy tidbits about people's lives.
Zuckerberg has an agenda: http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-supp...
It seems like a norm of human nature.
> You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our prior permission.
Rate Limiting on the Graph API [1];
> Your app can make 200 calls per hour per user in aggregate.
The Graph API terms, and end-user terms are lengthy, I'm sure someone else could better answer this, but I don't believe a developer would get away with it via the API, due to the rate limit, and a raw-HTTP image scraper would not be possible due to the randomly named images Facebook assigns.
---
[0] https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/advanced/rate...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/11/facebook-...
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/18/facebook-scoops-up-face-com...
So, if you search for yourself and don't see any photos of you - all chances are you're somewhat "safe". For a time being.
(A good thing about photo tagging is that a lot of tags go on memes and random pics just to gain the tagged person's attention. This must generate some noise.)
I don't think this is true. Tagging with a reference to a social network profile requires a social network profile, but just like you can tag a bear "the bear," you can tag a photo with someone's name without them knowing, being on the site, or even being alive.
If you have a profile, it's most likely there will be a link rather than just a text note. And the value of text notes ("here's John") is generally much less than of a profile link.
Still - you're correct - it's well possible that someone tags a photo with a full identity information - and that person won't know it. But I think it's quite uncommon.
(Still, if one respects the person it makes sense to respect what they ask for. But that's a separate thing.)
Russia heading fast to dystopia is not surprising, really.
Even though I'd really like to have control over the information that concerns me, I also find it highly morally questionable to restrict others ability to see, know or remember, either naturally or technologically assisted[1]. Even for those who are unfriendly or outright malicious. That just feels unnatural to me.
And if someone shares their knowledge[2], while I fully reserve the right call them assholes if what they do caused me grief or worse, I'm also not sure it's still morally right to demand for me that they shut up.
Still, if I can apply this sort of logic to myself (i.e. I surely can decide for myself that I can't complain if my photo was published and is a part of some database), it would be plain wrong and even inhumane to apply this to anyone else. Can't impose this sort of thinking on others, especially given that the general expectation and attitude seems to be drastically different with all those "right to be forgotten" and other privacy laws and stuff (which - I'll be honest - feel just unnatural to me, but, heck, I guess I can't really argue with majority).
This damned dilemma sucks. /rant
___
[1] And where to draw a line? Glasses for poor eyesight? Pen-and-paper notetaking? PDAs (phones or whatever)? PDAs with cameras? Networked PDAs? Those sci-fi brain implants concepts that don't exist but would probably happen in the future?
[2] Given that it's about valid true facts that literally anyone who sees me in public can obtain. So this is drastically different from the restricting what others say when what they say constitutes a defamation.
It isn't necessary to restrict others ability to see, know or remember per se, but only to prohibit the application of those powers -- by means of large computer databases collected by many people -- to particular purposes. In exactly the same sense, it isn't necessary to constrain people's ability to move their arms and hands in order to prohibit strangulation.
Perhaps your dilemma is caused by something along the lines of a tacit incorrect assumption that moral principles are not constrained by other moral principles. Can you think of a moral principle about freedoms that is not restricted in any way by harm caused to others and to society?
I think you are right to say that "it just feels unnatural" is not a good argument, but I don't think that's because you are arguing with the majority: the majority are often wrong.
What's dystopian?
Mass surveillance grants power, to the public and to institutions, to control individuals. One consequence is 'chilling effects': good actions are not taken because of possible future consequences. Planning is hindered, because any action may have unpredictable consequences because of side effects caused by surveillance 'global state' (state as in data, not as in country).
I think there is a negative psychological effect on some (most?) people of being at all times under observation, retroactively, by all people.
Today's governments and today's public often err in their ethical judgements, and "the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny". Some future ones may be worse. Such large databases (and the social/legal/technical all-seeing surveillance systems we are building) would make it easier to allow bad governments to lock themselves into power more firmly, and once in power to use it in very bad ways: this is Snowden's "turnkey tyrrany".
This kind of information reduces the scope for experimentation, error, and the correction of mistakes. Because that is the source of all knowledge, that is a problem.
Of course some uses of such data will be good. But, power should be localized to prevent it being abused (the principle of least authority). Some good uses (like helping your bad vision) don't actually require the "sudo" superpower to recognize every person on the planet. All others are not worth the costs (this is a hypothesis, as are all statements I guess).
I think there are good reasons to expect the current ongoing disaster that is computer security will one day be fixed. Then, radical surveillance will still be with us, but radical transparency will operate in one direction: from those in power to everybody else.
Until then, especially in a society that is showing signs of starting to lose the means for criticism of bad ideas, extreme surveillance does not imply that the same data will be collected and stored about everybody or every institution. The UK government has already introduced data transparency laws. It makes special exceptions for... government. Even though they might eventually be caught, your local population of bureaucrats, with easy access to every detail of your life, will have an asymmetric information and legal power advantage over you, and adding information amplifies that asymmetry. Massive data leaks are still surprisingly infrequent. If we had regular Snowdens across government, what makes us think we know that would be a net good, a general purpose cure-all nostrum for government?
Meanwhile, the rest of population, given data, are happy to "know" the moral truth as they see it about other people and impose their own tyranny without due process (see e.g. Jon Ronson's "So you've been publicly shamed"). And corporations -- but they are discussed often enough that I don't want to add anything now.
Not to speak of progress, planning, and the morality of imposing "radical transparency" on other people.