Facial Recognition Is the Perfect Tool for Oppression
medium.com
medium.com
The barrier of entry is just too low. If a few pictures of your face are floating online, many people can make a system that will somewhat accurately try to detect your face; the best the regulation can do is to specify that organizations will not use facial recognition even if they trivially could.
I agree with your point though.
Even if it is a lottery, if you lose your penalty is determined by the sliding scale of how reckless you were. That is a major factor in how fast drivers feel is reasonable.
With facial recognition, the farther along we go the frequency of its use will increase. However having the equivalent of a sliding scale of punishment could be useful.
Did the police department use facial recognition to try and identify who broke into a store? O.K.
Did the police department use facial recognition to preemptively surveil a high crime rate area and identify and keep track of everyone that goes to that area? Warning.
Did the police department use facial recognition to identify minorities and keep track of their activity across the city? The police department is banned from using facial recognition in the future and if caught again will face punishment on a case by case basis.
If "facial recognition" were banned, organizations would just start ignoring the face and proceed with other characteristics. The world of biometrics is huge, and the whole reason facial recognition is the biometric people pick on is because it is the easiest for laypeople to grasp.
This is article is nearly obsolete fear propaganda. We're getting wise to this crap, as the fear card is being played far too often, it's become the boy who cried wolf.
* All existing laws should protect children, and protect people from discrimination. It should prevent the disclosure of health records. (So no AR apps that let you see who has what disease)
* The main concern is tracking people's location and movements and taking photographs and tagging people on social media sites.
* Some potential benefits are reducing crime and a "call parents" app that lets you call the parents of a misbehaving child without actually identifying the child to the person who has the app.
Well, stealing candy from a baby, or robbing an old woman is not hard to do either; anyone could do it, with even less skill than "a decent CS undergraduate student". Yet, it is illegal to do so and there will definitely be consequences to any such attempt.
In other words- something doesn't need to be hard to do, in order for it to be illegal, neither are there fewer consequences for performing illegal acts that are easy, rather than hard.
Those very same governments are also the main problem with censorship, and of course, their agents (police, politicians, ...) have proven time and time again that they can't be trusted with a stick [1], and don't follow the law.
And this is ignoring the fact that governments frequently see themselves as exempted for the law. In many cases, they build this into the laws in the first place.
So what exactly are you proposing we do ? If governments use this, who really cares who else is abusing it ?
In western countries with civilized police and legal systems this is not tolerated.
In any case, I don't understand what you propose we do. Governments can fail to uphold their own laws. Should we do away with all laws? And then- what? A life of total lawlessness is better than one where laws are sometimes broken by government?
Speaking anecdotally from when I worked in a theater, somewhere around one in five people either can't watch 3D movies (motion sickness or similar) or simply don't benefit (no depth perception). Parties of four or more would almost always go to a 2D showing, because of the likelihood that somebody would veto 3D.
Edit: Typo and better explanation of the « trick »
There should be options for people with disabilities of course, and AFAIK 2D movies still exists and are not going to die anytime soon. But what are you debating for ? Do you want a global ban on 3D because it can not be enjoyed by everyone ?
I must also kindly reject your example. You can ski without legs. Ski slopes are actually a very good counter example: everybody who can pay a lift can go.
It’s a different question that I do not addressed, but I do not believe a ban will work. It’s better to regulate and put checks and balances in place. At least IMHO.
I (obviously) don't watch 3D movies too often. When the technology first came out, it was really bad and gave me not-quite-headaches, not-quite-nausea when wearing glasses. It's better now but I don't get nearly the effect that the movie makers are going for and some of the more blatant effects (like things jumping out of the screen) end up looking weird and off-putting -- like getting half an image and stuff.
So do I. Give your local movie theater a call and ask if they have 2d glasses. My local theater does and it's a godsent. (it's basically just 3d glasses except with the left lens twice)
Isn't it better to find how you can defend against something (face recognition in this example) instead of convincing the people to "ban it"?
I mean, let's ban all wars, ban low income and ban evil. What sort of thinking is this?
On the flip side, you have the "good guy problem" that we normal "good" people will happily give up our rights in order to help catch bad guys.
But really... it's not a MAC address or an IP address. It's your face. What "defense" is there to facial recognition software? Even if you stay off of facebook, your friends and family will still post photos of you there and reference you and talk about you. "No man is an island" has never been more apparent.
An automated system that scans friends galleries to find my face in their galleries maybe would be helpful. Then I would see who uses my face in what context, so I can react; maybe send a polite request to remove me from the picture, set it as private, or simply remove the picture from the gallery?
Or maybe an approach based on spreading disinformation would be enough, so I could produce fake photos of my face with other randomly chosen faces from all over the internet, so that face-gathering systems will store fake relations between me and some random people?
There are lots of methods we can use to defend ourselves.
The "ban something" approach works only for parties that are willing to cooperate. But it's not the cooperative parties that we should be afraid of, it's the uncooperative ones.
You would love to have a system that scanned the world's photos and notified you automatically about people commenting on you. You don't necessarily want the government to have that same system.
Furthermore, how do you rectify disagreements over that trust? I may trust a multinational corporation (especially if I own stock in it and can vote on its directors), but you may trust your government, and our neighbor may not trust anyone.
Both of those questions need to be "solved" (if such a thing is even possible), but that's (obviously) a lot easier said than done.
So I would rather allow anyone to have access to face recognition software, than to allow using it only for illegal use. Because nobody can prevent it from being used illegally.
This is the nirvana fallacy. We don't expect people not to drink and drive ever again, but we still ban it.
And like drinking and driving, not only can we ban something, but we can find how we can defend against it (such as education and making it easier to get taxis home). So, the question:
> Isn't it better to find how you can defend against something
can be easily answered with: "Why not both?"
> What sort of thinking is this?
Reasonable, logical thinking that has succeeded in the past.
Does this mean it's the correct solution here? I don't know. But this isn't illogical by any means.
The same thing goes for any crime. Most people will not mug you, but a few will. So what? Should we not make mugging illegal, because there will always be some muggers around? Or do we just forget about policing such behaviour and instead "find ways to defend against it"?
I mean I guess you could argue for the latter approach, but then you need to explain where the buck stops- do we have any laws banning harmful behaviour, or is it every man and woman for themselves? Or something in between?
If you’re worried about privacy then maybe you should take the tracking device out of your pocket.
The concept of using the power of the state to limit the power of the state seems flawed to me. Especially an oppressive state.
in this age, physical location isn't that important
text recognition, lets the oppressor know who is thinking what, and who they're trying to communicate it with
or makes nearly all communication impossible
Everyone else seems to think that information is important. What's your address?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
For instance, slavery was long on the way out of the US by the time of the Civil War. As we kept expanding west-ward, the new states had exactly zero economic incentive to turn people into livestock. The South could get away with political shenanigans only as long as it could maintain its voting bloc. Expansion made that impossible, and the only solution became a war.
If the war hadn't happened though, we would have seen a managed transition. Legislation tailored at reining in slavery would have slowly made the practice increasingly untenable and the economic aspect would have gotten managed out over time. In fact, it was already happening.
To generalize, oppression seeks out a local maximum, eventually society finds a higher peak, and the oppression only lasts as long as it takes for the rest of society to build a wide enough bridge so that people on the lower hill can just walk over to the bigger hill. Or, you know, a war.
Are you saying we shouldn't worry because that oppression will fail in another 50-100 years? Let's just make sure the end of that oppression is well managed ?
The author of the piece is calling for a ban on facial recognition tech. At what level should this ban be placed? Just the US? The Anglo world? Anglo-Europe? Worldwide? China seems to be leading the push here, and they don't seem to be all that interested in human rights arguments originating from the West.
I know that nobody here really wants to deal with China's focus on collectivism over individualism, but it really does deserve a discussion. China has been grappling with the task of governing its immense population for thousands of years. How do you draw the line between governance and oppression?
Even if we restrict our ban to the Anglo world or just the US, A ban on facial recognition tech can have the same kind of effect that banning psychedelics did back in the 70s. A ban means that we can't run social experiments. When we can't run social experiments, we can't actually know the effects.
To implement a ban, a war must be fought. Even if it doesn't result in physical violence, you're still telling a lot of people they can't have what they want. If facial recognition tech results in oppression, we need to understand how.
Your point seems to be that "all things end" but that's true of anything. It took hundreds of years and massive two world wars for Britain to be weak enough to give up its self image of being an empire and emancipate its other colonies.
Edit: Answered my own question, to some extent. Relative to even recent human history, gay marriage has gotten along pretty well. Not bloodlessly but nothing like the 1960's lynching of rights workers.
It's where you start thinking "this needs to be solved, right now," that leads to senseless, irrational violence. Hang back, spend some time understanding the problem, its economics, its politics. Take action to remove the worst excesses and slowly dig the problem out in detail. There's way more historical examples of well-meaning zealotry causing more problems than it solves than there are examples of zealotry preventing bigger problems from coming to pass.
The article is a masterpiece of misdirection because we are very aware that the written word in the form of explainer articles for the uninformed IS ACTUALLY THE PERFECT TOOL FOR OPPRESSION. Unless you're one of the emotionally manipulated, you realize we live in a new age where the ignorant and intellectually lazy are "farmed and harvested" for their ignorant votes, to control the laws and economies of entire nation states. This article is one such ignorance embedding article putting fear into people's heads so they can be controlled.
Second option, can a camera sensor be damaged by laser pointer?
I have no hope for legal restrictions, it will always be defeated by 'security' arguments.
"Oh, that guy? Don't trade with that guy; he's an asshole." ;)
Now we're just scaling it up with fast-communicating hardware.
You will see this in history when say a lawyer or whoever else from that time got recorded in history, moves to a new town to escape a bad rep., often unfairly cast due to personal dispute.