Facial Recognition Cameras Do Not Belong in Schools
nyclu.org
nyclu.org
There's a lot of paranoia about new technology, but the biggest threat isn't strictly from the technology itself, but our use of the resulting data and how it is disseminated.
For example fingerprints for lunch payments/library books isn't inherently problematic, it becomes problematic if the fingerprints are stored beyond the student attending the school or sent to others (who could store it indefinitely or misuse it).
That said, i don't really care if you are having a gun in your car or at home, or even carrying one with you if you have sufficient training, it's just for the sake of the argument.
Taking your example, what message does that send to a kid if they need to be fingerprinted just to eat lunch? Sending that message is, IMHO, extremely problematic.
Except that fingerprinting is being marketed to parents as a way to recover lost children [1]. And it's not the child's choice, per se, since they're a minor -- it's the parent's. So parents will probably have a different priority than privacy for their child.
I get what you're saying, in that fingerprints are part of our privacy, and that they can be used against us in certain circumstances.
But, my thinking these days goes to answering the question of whether we should keep fingerprints private, or should they be public?
Anything we touch tends to leave a trail of oil which identifies us, which kind of makes that data public anyway. But nothing stops our friends or neighbors or store owners from dusting the things we touch to get our fingerprints and selling that data on to a third party, other than the hassle of it.
There are industries that collect our personal data and sell it to third parties, but to my knowledge, there is nothing stopping people them from collecting and selling our fingerprints as well.
With the OPM hack [2] (Of which I was a victim of) I tend to think we should use fingerprints less and less anyway, since it would be relatively trivial now to recreate my fingerprints and put them at a scene of a crime.
So either we have more and more regulations around fingerprints to keep fingerprints secure (which the criminals wouldn't follow anyway). Or maybe we should open them for everyone, and restrict how they can be used for identity (in almost no circumstances), and destroy the inherent value in the use of a fingerprint.
[1]: http://www.childidprogram.com/the-id-kit/how-fingerprints-fi...
[2]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-to-do-with-a-milli...
Ironically, it’s worth pointing out that people with guns almost never kill people.
But organizations with surveillance technology do tend to misuse the data.
The probability of being a victim of terror against getting in a traffic accident? No, please don't start warterboarding all bus-drivers...
If you do that, of course they do belong in schools, and they will stay in schools, because the US is a post-privacy state, and is staging itself to be as authoritarian as the Chinese "social credit" system.
What universe are you living in that you think modern American children want to learn? They don't. They didn't want to learn 40 years ago, or any year since. They don't look at public schools as refuge, or as empowerment. They look at it as a requirement, and sometimes a bit like being in jail for 8-14 hours a day.
Kids don't change, but schools and culture can. Look at other parts of the world (and particularly progressive places in the US) for evidence of this.
That's sad. You should spend time with some different kids. The ones I spend time with have an insatiable appetite for learning new things. Each student is passionate about something different, of course.
> They don't look at public schools as refuge, or as empowerment.
That seems mostly orthogonal to the question of whether they want to learn and whether they realize that learning can be empowering.
Woof...
I know when I worked around the US (mostly midwest) at a different school a week, there were always some kids who wanted to learn.
There were always some that didn't.
However, they may not have wanted to learn every single thing that the school taught, but they did want to learn about stuff that could be applied to a future career.
That has nothing to do with whether kids want to learn or not.
I also would like to see where the students spend their self-select time to help improve the layout of the room and collect data on what students do for the 90 minutes of free choice.
Now I can see how everyone would hate both pieces because of other issues and I feel frustrated.
Apple face id reduces the privacy controversy by addressing how they keep things private, device only and secure while improving your life. Bring that upfront and it might go over better.
I can. When you're a for-profit organization. People are expensive.
This is basically late-stage capitalism.
This massively reminds me of the "The machine fired me" [0] post from today morning's HN front page. Or, for what it matters, of the inhumanity that currently goes on in the US, with even toddlers being detained (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tender-age-shelters-tru...).
Following orders, eh?
> I can't fathom a situation where we want to automate what should be human interactions.
I can, it's called fascism. Break the individual responsibility of a human down and you can get them to do anything. There is a reason why in firing squads some members always have blank magazines [1] and why in the lethal injection sites a random of the required buttons for delivery will not work[2]. The individual member can try to evade responsibility by thinking "it was my button/gun that had the blanks" (apparently called "Diffusion of responsibility").
I recommend everyone able to do so a visit to Europe and one of the concentration camps the Nazis built. No matter which one, there are more than enough sites to remind us of what humans can do.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17350645 (thanks to @larkeith for pointing it out)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_by_firing_squad#Blan...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_injection#Procedure_in_...
/s
Compared with certain death, either due to hunger or being forced to fight for drug cartels or in pointless wars, fleeing without a safe plan is the lesser evil.
Really? You'd rather call the taxi company and make an appointment with a person than use Uber? You'd rather ask a librarian to do your google searches for you?
Citation needed. You're neglecting the fact that there are millions of under-interacted kids in the world. Providing a cheap source of interaction for them could be extremely valuable. Just saying "their parents/teachers/whoever should do it" does absolutely nothing to solve the problem. Building them a robot does.
> "should be human interactions" is a meaningless standard
What irony! The entire concept is that there is a place for real human judgments and not just rigid programs/rules!
What "should be human interactions" is not meaningless. It means: there should be humans judging what should be left to human judgment. It's an assertion that there ARE things that shouldn't be just standards we blindly follow.
It wasn't saying any human interaction automatically matters. Tasks where a human would just follow rigid protocol are ones that should be automated…
You mean...humans like the humans who decided to buy this software? Presumably you don't just mean 'humans'. You mean the 'right' humans. But which humans are those? Who decides which ones the right humans are? It's just a circular argument that reduces to "humans should do human stuff", unless you want to actually articulate a standard, but you have definitely not done that yet.
Bad presumption. The argument is about the difference between humans versus computer programs. Whichever case, I want the 'right' ones (i.e. the best ones doing good not evil), so the 'right' ones isn't the differentiation here.
Whatever the argument is, there's an argument that having real people instead of programs matters for some things. And the standard we can use is something like "the things where they aren't interchangeable" at least (although others may have other qualities to emphasize). So, a person who literally just does the exact same thing a program can do can be replaced by the program. For example, data entry. A person who cannot be duplicated nearly exactly by a program is where we want to be careful about considering keeping the human position around. For example, teachers.
I heard a quip that computers are passing the Turing Test more these days… but not just because they are getting more sophisticated — human beings are failing the test more (are acting more like computer programs). The point being that "human interactions" in the argument here implies humans engaged in natural human thought and intuitions and communication and not just following protocol so rigidly that they effectively are just carrying out program instructions.
I agree. But my point is that most people who talk about these things don't do a very good job in thinking about which things should and should not be automated. They basically just look at whatever has been automated (which they love being automated, now that it has been) and say "Automating that stuff was great!", and look at the things that haven't been automated and say "Automating that stuff is bad! It is essential to the human experience!".
> For example, data entry. A person who cannot be duplicated nearly exactly by a program is where we want to be careful about considering keeping the human position around. For example, teachers.
Why? Why would automating teachers be bad? I'll give you two separate arguments why this would not be a bad thing:
1. Access: Teachers require human labor, which is in finite supply. This means that not every child on earth has access to teachers, and sometimes if they do, the teachers they do have access to are spread incredibly thin, making them effectively useless. Automating teaching has the potential to massively expand access to the extremely underprivileged. Teachers also operate on a set schedule. If the class starts at 8pm, and you have a job that requires you to be at work at that time, well, tough luck for you. If you automate teaching, this problem goes away.
2. Personalization, optimization, and equity. Human teachers can tailor their lessons a little bit to the individual, but high quality AI instruction promises to expand that greatly. Also, not all human teachers are good. Figuring out which ones are and are not good takes a lot of time, and wastes thousands of hours of child development, and sometimes doesn't happen at all. If we had artificial instructors, they would be the same for everyone. We would be able to optimize their methodology, and ensure they are teaching at a minimum standard of quality - however we want to define that. This also opens up massive opportunity for improving equity among races, classes and whatever other social divisions you want to impose. Now, that isn't a given, AI has the potential to encode our own biases. But unlike in human instruction, we actually have the opportunity to correct those biases if we're careful in designing the AI - we have no such opportunity for human instructors.
The problem, I think, is that when people think about AI replacing teachers, they think about all their favorite experiences with human teachers, and how those might be lost. And that may well be true. But what about all of the negative ones? What about all the kids who's teachers were lazy or having a bad day that day? AI doesn't have bad days. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't dislike children because they're queer. It doesn't get frustrated by insolence. It teaches at the same standard of quality every day.
So yes, maybe some of the great human experiences may be lost. But so too will the negative ones. And it's really not obvious which side of that equation is more important. But that's sort of the point: it's not obvious.
I mean, everything I'm saying is based entirely on taking a charitable interpretation of someone else's comment. Instead of asserting that a comment is just a useless circular logic, I'm saying that we can make sense of it better.
An assertion like "should be human interactions" is an assertion that there exist things that will never be better automated (at least compared to the higher-quality examples of human interactions). I'm disagreeing with your argument that such an assertion needs to specify which interactions those are. It's merely stating that it's a non-zero list and leaving the determination to others at a future time.
It points out that there are many things which are automatable, but that the capability to automate things cannot be the decision driver of whether things should be automated.
At one end of the scale, ATMs replacing some bank tellers seems to have been widely accepted as OK. In the middle, self serve supermarket checkouts (here in .au at least) are saving staff costs for the supermarkets with the side effect of pushing shoplifting prevention and enforcement costs off to the local police instead of supermarket staff, which is not such a great automation outcome (unless you're the manager who got the bonus for reducing headcount costs at the supermarket). At the end alluded to in the discussion of this article, I think it's pretty clear that attempts to automate discipline of children is an abhorrent idea.
Not the OP, but yes, I actually do that, I mean, I've avoided installing an extra app that would track my every move (the Uber app) and I prefer calling the taxi company on the phone. I also very frequently take random taxis from street corners or the like.
"Are you kidding? Too many people write things down, it causes forgetfulness." - Socrates
I don't see what value a 2 minute conversation with a human who is essentially following a script and pressing the same buttons on their end that you could have pushed on yours has. Despite the audio portion of the human's voice, this is still an extremely shallow form of human interaction. You are better off saving the time and having a more meaningful connection with someone else later.
I find this attitude extremely alienating, at least in my case. I've been through several dark periods in my life and having constant human interactions even for "menial things" was one of the things that has kept me above the water, so to speak. I also don't associate human interactions (even with strangers) to making "transactions" or the like, that, to a person like me, looks like treating people as means instead of ends in themselves (I'm a kantian when it comes to morals, or at least I try to). We cannot keep a compact and well-functioning society if we start seeing talking with other people as "menial things" or "transactions".
> as far as CC details, we have fraud protection
In my country (in Eastern-Europe) CC fraud protection is a joke. Even if that weren't the case, I don't want a 3rd party to have access to my finances if I can avoid it.
Also, yes! I would ask a librarian to search for me! Librarians are AWESOME and can find things in places you didn't think to look. Everyone should ask a librarian in addition to doing their own Google search.
I felt unsafe every damn day in high school, and it certainly wasn't because some facial recognition tech was watching my every move.
But whatever, keep trusting those kids to eventually behave. Personally, I just hope karma got them in the end.
I was homeless for nearly six years. I got off the street last September.
I currently live in a dirt cheap SRO. I have lived in high crime neighborhoods and was last in Fresno while homeless (where murder and arson were routinely in the news).
"Eyes on the street" is how you prevent such things. Human monitors who can serve as witnesses are a deterrent to crime in a way that cameras are not. Furthermore, adult supervision and the right policies can help troubled kids learn how more pro social behavior.
I'm talking about prevention, not sweeping it under the rug and ignoring it.
Agree! Could you imagine having millions or billions of records of students learning the same set of concepts? Big data pedagogy, here we come!
> Kids skipping class, kids beating up other kids, even someone walking in with a weapon
Oh... Disagree :-(
Schools are places of learning, not prisons. Technology in schools should enable learning, not surveillance.
How are the parents not reacting to this? How is there no law protecting the privacy of workers and children? Why is this not in the front page of a major newspaper?
Please do something about this. By the time those technologies trickle down to smaller countries there's very little we can do to counter the external pressure to implement similar "solutions".
Schools are exactly where you want this tech - to keep kids, parents & teacher in and the rest of the public out. Leveraging face tech for that is 100% OK.
...you just can't have that data leak out in any way. i.e. utilize it for access control & true security only.
Well, is that really what schools are supposed to be?
It seems like schools have an institutional identity which is indistinguishable from a prison or military base.
I'm not sure that I want schools to be hermetically sealed from the rest of society. I think I prefer that they be much more open and intermingled with their communities.
Guess that's the reality in a country with roughly one school shooting a week. As usual for US politics, the fix doesn't even go anywhere near the sources (a lack of gun control).
> I think I prefer that they be much more open and intermingled with their communities.
Hmm. Honestly I'm not sure how this could be done in a productive way, and that with threats like shooters and pedophiles not even being in scope. Having random quacks peddle kids and their parents with crap like "alternative medicine", anti-vaxx ideology, creationist theory or religious fundamentalism of any kind (no matter if Scientology, hardcore evangelicals or salafist/other radical Islamists) is already a huge problem, no need to further enlarge it. And unlike with guns it's more difficult here to fight the actual problem given the fundamental human right to free speech.
If you think that children don't belong as a part of society as whole, what society do you have anymore?
You believe that children should only be exposed to government indoctrination, and no other human communication? That's... radical.
For "other human communication" there's time after school. As for "government indoctrination", yes, I am aware of the potential consequences especially when government is taken over by religious nutjobs... but on the other hand, seeing the damage that stuff like teaching kids "creationism" in schools already causes, I don't want religious extremists any nearer to kids than they already are.
The lack of gun control is not the source. The source is people having a desire to kill children in the first place.
We can address the specific manifestation of that problem (by enacting tighter controls on how guns may be acquired - something for which I'm very much in favor), but these people can and will find other ways to kill on a large scale (homemade explosives, for example) unless we actually address the mental health issues that are the actual sources.
It's so inhumane to say, "oh well, as long as they don't have guns, everything is swell."
http://www.acolumbinesite.com/diary.php
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1173808-elliot-rodge...
http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/2009/08/pondering-po...
Ideally no. In the real world definitely. It serves as a safe space for kids & everything else is secondary.
I've actually been on the receiving side of this: Returned to my Alma mater high school & security wouldn't let me in because I couldn't provide a substantial reason for being there. (I just wanted to walk around my old school)
Fair enough - if I was a parent of a kid that's exactly what I'd want: a reasonably high hurdle to keep strangers away from largely unsupervised kids.
Facial recognition doesn't do /any/ of that.
Teachers have always been able to tell when students are skipping school, that's what roll calls are for. They work just fine, wayward students just don't care and skip school anyway. If you want to ensure your kids stay at school, maybe we should take the money spent on facial recognition systems and spend it on training our current teachers and paying teachers enough that the best in our society start seeing teaching as a viable career.
As for keeping the public out, we've had a purpose-built tool for this for millennia, it's called a gate. CCTV at the gates is every bit as effective as facial recognition in the halls. If people are going to ignore the implied warning of a gate with optional CCTV, adding facial recognition in the halls won't help. Such people will just lie about being a tradesman or public servant or whatever. Either they'll be convincing or they won't. Most of us would recognize a stranger in our office, the same is true for teachers and other staff in schools. They already know this person is a stranger, they don't need a facial recognition system to tell them that. If you're worried about incursions from the public, the money would be better spent on training teachers for that situation or if you must, hiring good old fashioned security guards.
But this is where civil society and principles like democracy, liberty and privacy step in to temper the worst impulses and greed.
Unfortunately that tempering mechanism is currently nonoperational and anybody with a tag of 'business' with zero interest other than profits can sell any malicious technology and lobby for it. Everything has consequences, and unintended consequences, most of these principles are lessons learned over hundreds of years and it will be tragic to let petty self interest continue to dilute and diminish them.
Also, How does identifying a shooter via a camera prevent them from discharging their weapon? Are you going to install the cameras on a secure wall at a 1000-feet radius around the school? Attach an automated or drone gun-turret to the camera, _Portal_-style?
Recognize them and do what? Once they're already in a school with weapons there's not a lot that a facial recognition camera adds to the security story over a regular camera (which even Columbine had in 1999).
That's not to mention that equally as often the shooter is still a student at the school.
If it was all confined to local systems and access was limited to a few authorized persons it may make parents a lot more comfortable and give them solid data for parenting.
Security staff
> When sex offenders are in the area
Security staff
> Identifying drug dealers that target school children. Identifying arsonists, vandals, kids triggering emergency systems. It might even be used to track bullying, tardiness, and absenteeism which is less workload on understaffed teachers.
All of these can be solved by not understaffing teachers.
> If it was all confined to local systems and access was limited to a few authorized persons it may make parents a lot more comfortable and give them solid data for parenting.
What kind of solid data and how exactly would it influence this data-driven parenting? Are we talking A/B testing home packed lunches or getting a god-view of their kids friend circle? I also dream of a world in which I can collect metrics about my kids and their whereabouts to correlate them with how much allowance they get and whether I put gluten in their food or not. Because I didn't have kids, I birthed services/products which need to be optimized for peak performance!
I can also think of a good use case. Prepare the future generation for constant surveillance and indoctrinate people in schools that privacy is dead and buried.
Sure, they might learn to recognize some faces, but if you have even 100 students in a small school, there could be at least 200 parents between bio/non-biological parents.
As far as sex offenders, how do you expect a random security officer to know a random individual's face? It just isn't possible. Either way they might need to take a photo of the person to see if they can be found on any threatening lists.
Or just don't build expensive complicated abusable technologies for problems that almost entirely non-issues.
Wait. So not only does the school have to buy these expensive camera systems, but the parents also have to give up their privacy rights by feeding their facial information into a database (a very well maintained one I'm sure /s).
All for a system that has a significant false-positive/negative rate and might increase security slightly.
That's not to mention the corner cases. Last year I picked up my niece from school because my sister was busy. Should everyone in the child's extended family have to go into the database?
What about changes in the child's circumstances (e.g. divorce). Many Amber alerts are one parent kidnapping their own child as part of a custody dispute. Should the system track visitation rights too?
Finally, who's going to be held accountable when any of this complexity fails and some random parent is arrested because "the system" thought they were only allowed to see Suzy on Tuesdays but it's Thursday. My guess is no one.
Somehow we, as a society, have come to accept that it's ok for tons of innocent people to suffer humiliation and degradation at the hands of the state if it increases our safety (or even just our perception of safety) by 0.01%.
Easy. Fear and social pressure.
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
– Hermann Goering
I wasn't aware that a random adult can wonder around inside the school without someone asking him/her what's up, especially with the 'see something say something' and 'stranger danger' culture which has haunted America for the past decades. I am aware though that the US has built a well maintained blacklist of unpersons (sex offender registry) which can be consulted when checking for ID by.. hold on, this is very innovative.. security staff!
However, there may be people on the outskirts of the school looking in. I know when I was in all levels of school there were fences and areas where anybody could just loiter and hang out, and not necessarily look particularly suspicious.