Chinese police don high-tech glasses to nab suspects
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Privacy is important because basically we all are, at least once a day, committing some kind of crime. I mean the definition for loitering is so broad that alone gets most people.
The ad-tech companies of the world think they are criticized now, but they have no idea the judgment history will render for some of the attitudes and practices that have been promoted regarding data and privacy. Some of this stuff is as naive as Charles Lindbergh helping the Luftwaffe because he believed airplanes would connect all the peoples of the world and promote global peace. What is it with “connecting people” and really terrible ideas?
All totalitarian governments, not being very innovative, have thrived off of inventions that have been developed elsewhere and have been bearable, and then mutated into unrecognizable monsters under them.
It's not about the technology.
It's about the will of the government.
Think about all the horrendous evils rendered upon the citizenry of early nations and empires in the distant past. No advanced technology there. Just a twisted view of right and wrong.
What this tells us is that regardless of what technology is available, a good government will do good, and an evil government will do evil. That really goes for any entity. You name it.
Nothing is black and white, but the current trends about how people are equaly treated and human life is valued is still in the darker greys in my opinion.
Let me say that currently, because the technologies are new, not well understood, and not regulated by any kind of international treaty or norms (even national regulations sometimes) they can and will be abused in ways that are hard for other countries to protest against in a credible manner.
In China during The Great Famine under Mao, 50 million people died. I know numbers and history can seem so distant, but that’s more than the number of people who died in WWI and near the low end of estimates for WWII (especially the early estimates).
It was insanity on a level no society has ever perpetuated. A good example of this was that 40% of all structures were torn down during this period. Incredible. It’s all probably worse than we know too due to a lack of records and archives that individuals have access too.
The National Book Award winner this year was about Russian totalitarianism called “The Future is History”. If this is true, the future is a much worse place for the Chinese people.
I think that is the big issue we will see and have seen recently.
Surveillance tools are better than ever in history. Many times, laws were created as deterrents to some behavior, that maybe shouldn't be laws, because it wasn't easy to nab everyone doing it. Back then cops, judges and more weren't as locked into forced outcomes i.e. three strikes, mandatory minimums etc and there was more humanity in corrections at that level.
Now that we have surveillance at this level and going up, we need to remove the criminalization of certain things otherwise everyone will be locked up.
Moral laws or making illegal non-violent/no civil violations actions will not work in mass surveillance, only laws that are violent and infringe on civil rights of others should remain.
An example might be the criminalization of drugs or old laws on the books. If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the country at least would have a record.
With surveillance this high and going up, we MUST decriminalize and re-evaluate every law. The problem is our 'corrections' and law enforcement, is that both have turned predatory along with the advancements in technology that have been used to erode privacy.
If everyone has a record, no one has a record.
I think what carlmr is saying is quite relevant to more democratic countries.
At least one former UK Home Secretary has said that it's a good thing to have laws that aren't usually enforced, as it gives the authorities something to use when they do want to go after someone.
So (for at least one country) the answer is "yes".
[1] AI and robotics might change this later.
I feel that if these things are fining apparently widespread behavior at such a scale the laws should change.
Last week a judge ruled that the Student Loan administration can use mandatory personal RFID equipped train tickets to detect scholarship fraud.
A mechanism no-one but the strongest privacy advocates had imagined would be used in this way.
You don't even need the law itself. If you've got the infrastructure to fine everyone who exceeds the speed limit in a place that it's not a big stretch to use dynamic speed limits set to the 90th percentile speed with only a little bit of lag.
Eventually, law enforcement will become dependent upon the speeding revenue, but the people will wise up and slow down to avoid the fines. Then how are they going to replace the lost revenue? Especially if it is "needed" because of onerous contract termination agreements agreed to.
That's what a cynical person like me can take from your argument.
I have heard white supremacists use this logic to say that DUI laws unfairly target white people, because in major cities maybe white people have cars and the minority populations use public transportation. You could also use the same logic to say insider trading unfairly effects white people.
You couldn't use the same logic to say insider trading unfairly effects white people because there isn't evidence that enforcement of insider trading is uneven, whereas there is evidence that enforcement (and sentencing) for loitering, jaywalking, and drug laws are biased against minority groups
But I have a problem with arkh's assertion that... >> Most vague laws have been created to be enforced on some specific population.
> "You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
That is the nightmare scenario: when 51% of a population decides they want to lock up the other 49% and technology makes that possible.
The War on Drugs was started by Nixon to target hippies and blacks, those who supported his opponents. I can imagine a War on X being brewed up by either side to do the same if they have the means to automatically enforce it.
The militant leftists and their bombs, the hippies and their antiwar stuff, the racists, the FBI/government and it's BS, the black power groups and their violence, they all were reacting to each other while failing to understand in any meaningful way the grievances of the other groups in any meaningful way.
Cracking down on the millitant left was right. They were the second the most destructive domestic terrorist movement (the post civl war KKK is 1st by a mile). The government at the time used it as an excuse to cast way to wide of a net because of personal beliefs (in aggregate) and because they didn't understand the where the problem was coming from. It's unfortunate.
If people hadn't been such idiots in the late 1960s there wouldn't have been a millitant left to crack down on. If civil rights of the late 1960s or the Vietnam war had happened a decade apart from each other we probably wouldn't be mopping it up in 2017. It didn't so here we are trying to wind down the war on drugs and demilitarize the police (and we'll probably revert some gun control too since it's part of the same anti-minority, anti-hippy package of knee jerk decisions).
In the 2040s we'll probably be in the same situation trying to wind down the post 9/11 expansion of government surveillance.
The guy who ran the beta version of the DEA at the time specifically used "marijuana" instead of the more common "cannabis," because he hated Mexicans and wanted to make people associate pot with an unpopular minority.
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
> If we had arrested everyone that used cannabis half the
> country at least would have a record.
Now we face a world where that same disproportionate enforcement may be applied to Democrats, or the young (who disproportionally vote against Republicans).
That doesn't make any sense! To affect elections, you'd need a really huge number of prisoners. Moreover, you'd need to deny prisoners the right to vote. Wait ...
Not sure why you feel the need to throw political affiliation into the conversation.
Right now, said police officer can and does enforce laws disproportionally against Black Americans because to the police officer, they're all leftists.
But if we give the police officer access to all sorts of profiling information about humans, when making a traffic stop, the police officer can be extra-zealous about performing a search if the person is profiled as being a "leftist."
The point is, prosecuting people for their political views has existed for some time, but it didn't scale well. Now it will scale extremely well, up to the point of wearing glasses and tagging people with certain social profiles in real time.
Hehe, nice framing. I'd say the answer is "power." Collectivising, aggregating and connecting people yields power, new abilities that exist as a product of increased network size.
Yuval Noah Harari (grand narrative historian) identifies this network effect as the defining characteristic of human progress. Increased size of a functional group.
The bottlenecks are travel and (more importantly) communication. To him, the difference between modern palaeolithic sapiens and archaic humans (including archaic sapiens chronospecies) is "fictions:" abstract concepts like kingship, nationhood, religion, law, money and such that allow cooperation between strange individuals. Airplanes yielded similar power.
Increasing cooperative group size and the quality of that cooperation yields power, a lot of it.
Air travel improved group size and quality. You can send a letter, visit or bomb places 1,000 km away within an hour. European ships allowed the subjagation of foreign places, transcontinental trade and centralised global administration.
China does not have the same philosophical or legal lineage. They will have to find out on their own whether the cons outweigh the pros.
Theoretically, if the system is not corrupted by misinformation (false or incomplete information), it has the potential to keep the streets free of wanted criminals --which is a noble goal. The question is whether keeping criminals off the streets will trample on innocent people's rights and if so whether the general Chinese public would accept that deal.
That said, I can see this technology also taking off in some public areas in the West --ports of entry, for example.
I also think human rights orgs also are concerned that China might show enough effective use of the tech that states outside Asia will want to at least trial it out.
By that I mean, I understand they don't have a political say. They don't get to "vote on the issues" like others might [the party makes those decisions]. At the same time, I would tend to think if you put the question to your Chinese on the street over there they will favor this technology (and its use) with a few conscientious objectors who will be few and far between.
More importantly, I do not think it would help to catch people that much other than further police's assumptions as to who is a criminal (if all they have is name, gender, address, ethnicity). Even putting that concern to the side, think about how many people a foot solder can "scan" on a crowded train station.
It’s trivial to train a CNN image classifier that can identify an individual, even when they are wearing a hat, grew facial hair, have a scar, etc
Hardly trivial.
But I was attempting to rebut GP’s point that a small camera is incapable of performing facial recognition. That’s plain incorrect. Speed/scale are orthogonal issues.
Second of course you CAN do recognition on something that’s low resolution. But if the question is how many labels can you correctly identify with high precision and recall... well... that’s a harder problem.
I mean you're not trying to ID every person in front of you. You want to be able to pick out known bad elements within your coverage zone.
>Banks are beginning to use facial recognition instead of cards at cash machines while the travel and leisure industry also sees opportunities — China Southern Airlines this year began doing away with boarding passes in favour of the scheme.
If your facial recognition data in the system is out of date you will eventually find it difficult to withdraw cash or travel. People will update it themselves.
Strange thing to include for something designed to find wanted criminals. A great addition however if you wanted to do something like prevent people who have seen/made certain posts from entering public spaces/events. You can kill the protest before it even begins.
https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull...
Just like you, I believe we will achieve this some day. The problem is that if the system is corrupt - and it very much looks like it is, anywhere in the world, not just in China - these tools allow that corrupt system to live on, without correction.
Technology has long passed the advance of society and individual human minds, and that is a major problem, for which I have no solution for - nobody does.
Please let society catch up, let basic income become reality (essentially let us not worry about lowest level of the Maslow Pyramid), and only after that have this level of control. There is an incredible difference between a thief who steals food because of hunger, and someone who steals from banks for the thrill and fun, but this level of tech will only be useful on the first, who'd instead deserve help.
Wow. So just by looking at you, they can see how often you visit Hacker News - or what else.
Scary as.
A potential target for a harmonization effort.
""The app brings up the suspect’s vital information, including name, ethnicity, gender and address." Presumably version 2 of the app will also pop up the person's social credit score."
That being said, this will definitely come to the west sooner or later. I mean, doesn't London already have cameras at every street corner for instance ?
I'm concerned about things like these in the UK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016#...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Act_2017#React...
The Met's supposed "super recognisers" have always made me suspicious that they're cover for a recognition computer system. Also for use at protests.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_plate_recogni...
The only difference is facial recognition vs numbers and letters.
Querying for more invasive information such as medical history, sexual orientation, online accounts, "undesirable people" they are acquainted with) is a simple as a DB connection string and a select statement.
Two can play at the "I don't care about your problems because they don't affect me" game.
Some people live in rural areas with little to no government infrastructure that can be used for dragnet surveillance. They don't have to care about the government tracking faces with the subway security cameras.
That's a dumb game to play. Dragnet surveillance is bad in all forms.
I saw a demo of sorts about 6 years ago, and heard rumors of various research projects @ FB. Banner tracking in malls that link banner "views" to "conversions" using a camera armed cash registers. Hi-res cameras on streets that collect data like wildlife tracking collars. A stadium cam that can id all the people at a match. A smart building that knows who's inside it & where. Casino cams that dispatch cocktails waitresses to VIPs wherever they are. Casinos've been using face recognition since early days, for persona non grata identification. Coffee shop loyalty stamps. School attendance. Prison monitoring, with relationship graphs and ML conspiracy detection. Traffic Analytics....
There are a ton of applications, commercial, security, intelligence or general nosiness. IMO, the best way of thinking about face recognition is: Google Analytics will now work for physical reality.
All this stuff just exists. FB (and many others) have an enormous, proprietary set of tagged photos. You could probably create your own set just scraping social media and google image search. Some applications don't even need it. Face recognition works. Cameras are high-res & cheap. The software is fast. Customers want it. It will happen.
We (our generation) has not shown the political will (or competence) required to create new rights and limitations on power sufficient to moderate this kind of technology, thus far. The only thing preventing wide-scale & unlimited use is creepiness feelings and that is temporary.
Putting the technology onto AR robocop glasses is just an illustrative way of demonstrating implications. If this is well implemented, every police force will want it in some form. Fugitives are needles-in-haystacks and I suspect this will turn up a ton of them. It's probably a genuinely useful police tool, unlike the dragnet digital snooping they do.
I have a hard time finding any use that is positive for society. Advertising and surveillance. Given that, what if we try to convince as many people as possible to not research this tech, nor work for any company working on this.
You wouldn't work for a weapons manufacturer, maybe the same metrics need to be applied to adtech and all this other tracking stuff
Fighting technology with artificial bans have never worked, and privacy or ethics based arguments won't work now either. The only hope is better technology of controlling the government: better ways to vote, better ways to monitor financial dealings of politicians.
If, people lose their privacy, but government loses it's privacy too, ordinary people will be the ones who benefit the most.
Not that I disagree with the larger points, it's an uphill fight.
Even when the tech is known, if you aren't good at software development then the projects will have difficulty.
First, arms industries and even mercenaries don't seem to have much difficulty operating. So, whatever boycotts individuals might practice don't really do much. Even tobacco companies find employees, and no one likes them.
Second, we (in practice, eg eu cookie laws) rarely define these effectively. Is face recognition the problem? Let's ID people based on some other markers. You'd probably need very broad, principled, constituion-esque language. It is illegal to de-anonymise, store data or somesuch. My guess is that this will be almost impossible politically with bootleggers and Baptist's left right and centre.
There are just very few examples of what we would need, in modern legislation.
Think back when Y combinator funded that "installer bundled with ads" startup. They got yelled at for it by a lot of people. It slowly changes things
One sleazy startup is a rounding error to yc. Online snooping is worth at least 100 bn to Google and FB, most of the revenue of two giant and otherwise desirable startups. Also, it's important to all the businesses that buy these ads, the creators that publish on YouTube (for example, but they honestly get very little from this), etc.
I don't think we can away that with appeals.
1. Educating the general population how the latest technologies can/are being used to affect their privacy
2. Working hard to be an independent, trustworthy part that scrutinises the government
I honestly don’t understand the general attitude of most of the comments on articles like this, particular when you are not living in a country where censorship is “okay”.
In an ideal society (in my opinion) the government would act in the best interest of the society and the government is scrutinised by a well-informed population. This is certainly not what is happening in most, if not all, countries; but seeing some of the comments on HN repeatedly that don’t go beyond “scary as” or “this is not okay” is quite disappointing and makes me wonder where else I should look for reasonable opinions sometimes.
Have we not learn anything from storeis about govermental mass surveillance programs in recent years? How about perhaps we should all sit down, think, and set standards for how to protect everyone while setting encforcabke standards for what is an isn’t okay?
Simple defences of this or that extreme get a lot of attention because anyone can understand that. Maybe it's time the average "above average brained citizen" grow up and start uniting. But then we all know what can happen to such groups, either being eradicated or hijacked by political interests.
Sorry, I'm feeling very cynic today.
from there you will need to still sign-up via their free tier via dreaded portal for API key:
https://console.bce.baidu.com/ai/?fromai=1#/ai/face/overview...
Apparently "立即注册" means "Sign up now"! So you will have to go through that and lovingly translate each field. If you right-click in Chrome and click Inspect on a textbox you will see they have English names for their control namess (like name="userName") ... lol.
why are they getting up in arms about this? networked cameras with facial recognition have been around for years. what's so different about mounting it on a police officer's head?
I'm not even mad at the implementation in general, the article implies that the officer first identifies a suspicious person and then engages the technology to make an identification. However, it's probably due to the fact that China is a country where your religion can get you arrested or kidnapped by the state.. so, it's still unsettling.
Fairly thick tether cable, seems thicker than you'd need for just power, unlikely it operates standalone. Could be like a USB-C cable, maybe, to run all the power, display, and camera data to another unit on her person?
I've been fiddling with a Vufine, which I can connect to pretty much any HDMI feed. Very cool, though it's a fair bit larger and bulkier than the state of the art.
Reading visual information from the mind is still far off, but if someday smart glasses become widespread, and assuming that they backlog their video input to the cloud or something, then for all intents and purposes, it'd be basically the same.
A very significant fraction of the population already wear glasses, so it's not too far fetched to imagine that soon, everything we see will be logged somewhere.
Not something Google would get to choose whether to participate in.
The product and the logo look so similar to google glass though. Good product and use case from technical perspective.
I remember a client who approached us a few years ago to develop software to surveil his employees in departmental store (containing no particularly special commodity). To track his employees 24-7. We refused to take up the project. I can't believe we are on the way to implement to the same idea at this large a scale!
No matter what the short term benefits are, I believe the long term effects are going to be very very unpleasant. Orwell's world doesn't seem too far off.
Currently in some country people pay to live in cities or neighborhood with better security theatre. I can imagine 50 years from now when you'll be recorded and traced everywhere people will pay for the privilege of living in closed neighborhood with no sensor inside.
Just a http call away from "enemy of the state".
It's not about the technology.
It's about the will of the government.
Think about all the horrendous evils rendered upon the citizenry of early nations and empires in the distant past. No advanced technology there. Just a twisted view of right and wrong.
What this tells us is that regardless of what technology is available, a good government will do good, and an evil government will do evil. That really goes for any entity. You name it.
Good intentions are not enough.
If, however, every innocent person were tracked, and crimes were generated based on observations ( like souped up red-light cameras for every imaginable crime ), and charges were created automatically ( and algorithmically ), that would suck. Or, it would make us realize most laws suck and we'd remove them.
Idk why everyone is talking about this in such impartial terms, this is a totalitarian state that has no concept of civil liberties. The idea that this is going to be used just for mere criminals is a pipe dream.
Unless you classify criminals as those who disagree with the CPC. This is going to be used to repress the population, without a doubt.
This government is like the son or daughter of that government. And this government has realized many free market principles (and certainly many other lessons). It's not the same, nor totally different.
Either way, I have to talk about it impartially, as if I were contemplating its use in the states.
The same people crushing people with tanks got promotions and are now running the government.
Like...you're so far off from reality idk what to say :(
Tech has users and it's important to consider who is using it. And those same people in positions of power now are the ones who actively murdered their own citizens in 1989. Idk why everyone is ignoring the elephant in the room, this is more than glasses and you cannot and should not separate the two.
If there is one thing to be learned from the former communist states + whatever China currently is, it's how little "free market principles" have to do with things like human rights, civil liberties or democracy.
China 'holding at least 120,000 Uighurs in re-education camps' https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-12000...
Authoritarian regimes shroud their darkest features in euphemism. So it is with China’s “residential surveillance at a designated location.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/in-china-the-brut...
Huang Shike was arrested in 2016 in Xinjiang province, three months after he formed a discussion group about Muslim worship on the messaging app WeChat, according to the official website China Judgments Online https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-jails-muslim-huang-shike-...
I feel like at best it might be 50%. At which point, it's horrible for society to be rolling the dice on every person in prison, if they should be there or not.
I would refer you to the Innocence Project [0] for a useful exposition of wrongful convictions, and error rates therein.
This technology puts a human face to technological surveillance, there has to be some minimum psychological cost for everyone there which may outweigh the claimed benefits.
The question becomes: Who is being rounded up, and why? This seems more important than the specific technology used.
I happen to live in a neighborhood where the very presence of a police officer would attract notice.
Downvoting it doesn't make it not true. See this article for example:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...
So, yes, every person is tracked.
I saw Facebook misidentifying siblings of different gender with a year difference in age. The bone structure of their faces is similar, all the rest is different.
(Neal Stephenson, Diamond Age)
In the future, people of the internet are unable to write about new technology without resorting to increasingly tiresome, lazy and spurious references to a popular British Twilight Zone remake.
Yes, in many cases the uses of tech in China are disturbing (like the supposedly planned social credit system).
But this case? It's the job of the police to find people. Facial recognition helps it (although, I suspect, it won't be as flawless as advertised). How is it functionally different from the recognition tech in airports? Because the cops look scarier?
The problem is when access to private data goes beyond the need, probabilistically people will abuse it, especially people with an authoritarian slant that are tripping on the power.
The police can access files online anyway, it's just a matter of convenience. Most likely, the online databases are now accessible on mobiles.