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Comment by Tarq0n | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if some three letter agency is paying facebook to build them the biggest face recognition database in the world.

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No need to get all conspiratorial. Picasa did it before Google, AWS does it now. It’s what people (writ large) want.

Considering nearly every adult provides a photo of higher quality to their respective governments it does seem a tad conspiratorial and like a lot of unecessary effort.

Also being a part of the 14 eyes means if the United States wanted my biometrics all they need to do is ask. My country is already moving towards real time cctv identification in airports etc. using biometrics from any issued license / passport.

This is a pretty good point. If you're the kind of person who has avoided getting a photo ID on purpose, you probably are staying well away from Facebook. The only targets I can think of would be homeschooled teens with no student ID.

It does however make Facebook even harder to use for anti-government organizing, though Facebook is already pretty clear about not wanting truly anonymous profiles.

>My country is already moving towards real time cctv identification in airports etc.

Your country must be very gullible and have poor standards of proof. Facial recognition is nowhere near capable of any such feat. Even in cases where the picture is taken under controlled circumstances, with ideal lighting, in good resolution, without extraneous background details, etc, facial recognition is still utterly terrible at matching people against a database of known images.

Tell your government to prosecute whatever contracting company lied to them and said such a thing could work for fraud and instead look into technologies that work, like those touchless optical fingerprint scanners that can take a persons prints from several feet away. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if gait recognition had a higher ID rate than facial recognition. Prints and irises are both very good biometrics, facial is less reliable than having a schizophrenic practice phrenology on people one by one.

So I have a friend who worked the security control room of large commercial building in Sydney, would visit him on the weekend and hang out there. This was not an important place, random corp offices of minor companies.

These cameras were 360 degree and nicely hidden away, you could zoom in and see the pimples on people across the street at decent resolution.

This was 10 years ago, betting against cameras improving since then or in future probably isn't a good idea.

Just an anecdote.

Seems woefully ignorant to dismiss this concern especially post Snowden revelations. Theses are business records subject to mass surveillance with special access tailored for government agencies with rubber stamp "oversight"

I didn’t dismiss it at all. There is a big risk of it being misused by any number of parties, and I agree that we should have additional protections (in our Constitution, perhaps) for personal information that is shared, yet subject to be withheld at our request.

But the movement to identify and share information is not being successfully pushed by governments, but by private industry, largely for personal use. That is where my comment came from.

> No need to get all conspiratorial

How I wish large scale surveillance was conspiratorial. Do you really believe in what you say or is it only habit?

Zuckerberg is aiming to become president. They might not even need to pay him (outside of political favors, I'd imagine), because he's probably convinced he's building it for his future self.

While I cannot condone or support the recently publicized explicit depictions my opponent claims to the subject of, both myself and the people at Facebook have the utmost respect for user privacy. As always users are encouraged to create locally computed perceptual hash values of the content in question using the publically available SDK tools and submit them to the proper support channel for assistance.

He doesn't need to; if he / they want to, they can already exert more influence on the world than the US itself does. Facebook's population dwarfs that of the US.

Facial recognition is utter garbage and until every phone has Apple's FaceID stuff, it always will be. The TLAs know this and aren't going to waste efforts in that particular snake oil.

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