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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

A facial recognition database of politicians would be easy to construct. There are plenty of pictures of them. We could have tracking sites for elected officials. Surveillance cameras around Washington could report their locations, and who is meeting with whom.

That might provoke something like the Bork Video Privacy Protection Act.

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As long as this technology exists, and will eventually become ubiquitous, I see no reason why we shouldn't be doing exactly that. And for police as well.

I should have an app that tells me the name, badge number and location of every officer on duty within ten miles of me, updated in real time, with constant video and audio surveillance. If a cop so much as sneezes it should be posted on the internet before they wipe their nose.

That would put the "civil" back into "civil servant" real quick.

Eh, those that make and enforce the law could easily make it illegal to track them for 'security reasons'.

Also, does anyone think of the poor, respectable paparazzi? This tech would totally disrupt that industry or it could drive them to install surreptitiously cameras all over the place, hastening the ubiquity of mass surveillance.

Paparazzi has basically been a dead industry since Instagram

Funnily enough, just strapping a camera on a LEO provides remarkable results[1]. Why not take it further? Public tracking is all the rage these days, let them have their cake & eat it too!

[1]90% decrease in complaints is impressive. Who would have thunk it...? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160929132458.h...

>I should have an app that tells me the name, badge number and location of every officer on duty within ten miles of me, updated in real time, with constant video and audio surveillance.

That's a great idea. If you're a bank robber.

You're right, we should put video trackers on all civilians so we can know what they're doing at all times.

Consider how effective it has been at reducing police complains when they wore cameras. Imagine if everyone did.

Certainly your concerns about bank robbery could be easily proven false with recent crime rates, but you left out pedophiles, terrorists, and murderers.

Let's track everyone and end all crime.

>You're right, we should put video trackers on all civilians so we can know what they're doing at all times.

Oh yes, I can see how you got that from what I wrote.

It could easily prevent robberies by telling you that an officer is always within 5 minutes of any potential heist.

At this point though, most bank robbers are idiots, they show their faces on camera and it's just a matter of time until they're caught (e.g. with this facial recognition database, but mostly people just recognize the photos, although of course there's a false positive positive problem: https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/how-a-facial-recognition...). Organized crime has moved on to more lucrative and lower-risk opportunities such as credit card and identity theft.

Not sure why you're getting voted down, it's a known fact among experts that physical bank robberies no longer provide good return on risk.

Unless you're trying to write a book! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatton_Garden_safe_deposit_bur...

Do you think the same thing should apply to other civil servants, or just to elected officials and the police?

Elected officials and the police. But my assumption is everyone is going to be tracked anyway, to some degree.

Basically, I think the cost of using facial recognition against the populace should be having it used against you. If the state is watching us, why can't we watch them back?

This is an extension, and possible inversion, of Heinlein's axiom that "an armed society is a polite society." I would rather that society arm itself with information than with bullets.

>If the state is watching us, why can't we watch them back?

Because they're going to wear riot helmets.

Good. They'll have to wear them everywhere. I feel like when that happens, we'll have won at least a moral victory.

Use gait recognition.

The advance of technology makes it inevitable that it will apply to everyone, so it's pointless to worry about whether it should.

Also lobbyists, members of ideological "think tanks", investment bankers, insurance execs, etc.

Make an app and track them in real time. See what happens.

I wonder when this technology will hit retail. Starbucks could recognize their customers. Walk into a Starbucks and your profile pops up on the barista's screen, they greet you by name, and your regular order is already being made.

Yes, it sounds creepy. But just a few years ago, it was considered creepy when American Express call center started greeting people by name when they called in from a known number. Now, if you call a call center where you have an account and they have to ask you who you are, the company seems incompetent.

It already has. My dentist uses something like this right now - as soon as I walked in the door (with no appointment, or call) the receptionist that I had never met knew my name and other details.

They use a camera to take a photo when you first come to your first appointment and they have cameras pointing at the door so they can tell which customer you are when you walk in.

All very slick but more than a little creepy once I realized what was going on.

I saw a demo by IBM perhaps 8 years ago, where all customers in a bank office where automatically tagged and tracked, and identified if they had previous photos.

It's actually of more value to super markets than banks, as the browsing habits in a super market is much more related to a sale.

And everyone would start wearing those large sunglasses that female celebrities popularized a few years back.

Hell. Go full-on mask, like people did in back in the day.

http://www.history1700s.com/index.php/articles/14-guest-auth...

Some citizens were known to wear masks during nine different months throughout the year. Some experts theorize that this gave them a way to escape from the rigid rules and class structures that controlled the actions of society members in Venice. Other scholars say this gave Venetians the advantage of anonymity so that they could indulge in certain activities, without suffering the repercussions from society and the church that they would otherwise face.

From what I understand, that doesn't fool really good facial recognition software.

Some women in Korea wear face masks to shield their skin from the sun (e.g. http://image.auction.co.kr/itemimage/f0/06/67/f00667450.jpg (and that's toned down from the style a few years ago when women were wearing this ridiculous welding-mask-looking thing http://m.cosnalmart.com/web/product/big/201505/77_shop1_3406... )) and lots of people wear masks when the air pollution drifting over from China gets bad. Combine this trend with sunglasses and CV-defeating patterns on the masks, you should be good to go.

Ah, the No True Software fallacy

If it doesn't, perhaps something ridiculous like CV Dazzle will become en vogue? (https://cvdazzle.com/)

Or ski masks.

Privasee sunglasses, by BigFacialDetection Corp.

Not so far from it, they're discussing it at the evening news. Somehow SF is great as a story (or a movie) but as a place to live, I'm pretty much good with wood cabin and hill view (and the occasional medical tech).

There's a reason why most TV shows (and actors) are far more low-key than movies.

There's the stuff you do every once in a while -- the one night stand. And there's what you want to take home and live with.

I think it would hammer home to politicians the power of this technology. Especially if you leveraged technologies like tor and bit-torrent to do the tracking, so that legislation couldn't just shut it down.

Whether we like it or not, privacy is disappearing for citizens. And it's a one way street. If we want our legal system to evolve in a way that accommodates this intelligently, our lawmakers need to be feeling the full impact of the change.

Otherwise we will end up in a place where there's a class of people with no privacy at all, and a class of people who do the surveillance.

I agree. Politicians need to have skin in the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uc4DI-BF28

I worked on a politics startup about 6 years ago (to help you find like-minded candidates), and people kept asking if we had a mobile app. I couldn't think of a good reason to add, say, location tracking, but I loved telling people I wished we could add location tracking for the politicians! I'm delighted to think that now there might be a way to do it. :-)

>That might provoke something like the Bork Video Privacy Protection Act.

Which oddly has be weakened by subsequent decisions and legislation to allow tracking of consumers while still keeping politician's records off limits to reporters.

That's actually a brilliant point.

But I'll bet their response would be to protect themselves and nobody else 'in the name of national security'.

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