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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

I get why human rights orgs would want to speak against this technology, from a Western philosophy and law perspective.

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.

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"Wanted criminals" in China's case might be someone who posted criticism of ruling party, mentioned Tiananmen Square protests, support Tibet independence, belongs to certain religious group etc. Of course, western countries are not much better, but it just highlights the fact that we, as society, should fight mass-surveillance as it will be used for thought control. The power is simply too great and alluring to be trusted to any entity.

>It also tells officers whether the possible perps are on the run from the law, the address of the hotel where they are staying and information related to their internet usage.

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.

This kind of tech has already come to Western ports of entry. Why else would Snap, Inc. have millions of dollars worth of contracts with Customs and Border Protection (alongside dozens of other contracts with DHS, DoD, etc).

https://www.fpds.gov/ezsearch/fpdsportal?indexName=awardfull...

The SNAP Inc. in question is actually http://www.snapinc.net, an enterprise consultancy.

I personally do not believe the tech is as `high-tech` they say as it is. Its not easy to get someone's bio information just from a small camera. Edit: Think some of this might be BS fluff stuff.

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.

FaceID samples are generated from a very small camera.

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

And now have that work without depth data, increase the population size from one person to 1+ billion, apply to moving video, aim for high precision and high recall, keep it battery friendly as you distribute to all police, somehow get the classifier of 1B unique people onto all these embedded devices, keep it up to date as people age, etc....

Hardly trivial.

I don’t disagree that doing image classification at scale with the parameters you’re describing is non-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.

First, faceid is a depth camera not a photo camera. It’s also quite high resolution.

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 don’t think a totalitarian regime is too concerned about false positives... nobody would ever refuse a short stay at the local police station

Wouldn't they do something like take all wanteds from each local precinct, up to 10000 from each village, top 10000 from local township, top 10000 from local county, top 10000 from local prefecture, etc...?

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.

The article mentions that the glasses are connected to a smartphone like device. That can handle the battery and computing, all you need on the glasses portion is the camera. You don't load all the data onto the device, you just ping back to a central database (that way you also get to track every location that someone shows up at). To keep things up to date you simply pull the latest images of the person from a commercial partner who will identify and photograph them much more frequently than the government.

>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.

Try performing computer vision on your smart phone running non-stop, and tell me how long it lasts :)

When I look on my phone after a day of barely looking at it, I'm wondering what it's doing in its free time.

Do you believe that the will of the Chinese Government is representative of the will of the Chinese citizenry?

Yes and no.

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.

That is probably due to a culture of fear

Because overt conscientious objectors will have their social credit scores lowered. Do you not see the oppression? Does this not parallel the Soviet Union?

The people you ask will likely give very different answers to a stranger than to someone they know well.

> Theoretically, if the system is not corrupted

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.

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