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Comment by ozgurozkan | Hacker News Reader

Don’t Worry!!! Face recog startup founder here. Amazon’s tech only allows them to monitor a specific people list in real time. So search period should be limited. Otherwise it’s so expensive to do that. It only tracks for specific target list on real time cameras or photos. When it comes to searching on archives Amazon is so expensive to do it. As Reminisce Inc we are a photo delivery company. We have a face search tech ( similar to face recog but different, ours is exponentially faster than existing ones). Our tech is the only solution that allows us to search for specific list in archives. However we use our tech only to deliver souvenir photography to event attendees. We will not sell it to government. You can check for your photos in our db here it gives you the result in 15 seconds https://www.reminis.app

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> Don’t Worry!!! Face recog startup founder here. Amazon’s tech only allows them to monitor a specific people list in real time.

Don't worry because I'm presumably not on that list? But what if I am somehow? And what about the people who are? Who sticks up for their interests?

I know I'm basically replying to a spam comment here but this logic just doesn't make sense. It's basically the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument all over again.

> However we use our tech only to deliver souvenir photography to event attendees. We will not sell it to government.

Do you have a warrant canary or similar in place?

How hard is it to defeat the "live face" thing and get your system to search for someone else using a photo or something? Could I use a video of someone I want to track?

I'm just playing devil's advocate here. Your service and tech looks awesome if you continue to provide it ethically, it just seems like there are a bunch of ways that services of this kind could be exploited.

We are based in Turkey for now. Our database is full of public event photos. Surveillance in Istanbul is not good enough to make a good face recog search. We are too fresh and young for a warrant canary.

There is too many face spoofing prevention techniques. We are actively testing one right now.(Currently on A/B test) Especially after iPhone X which brings depth camera someone should replicate your face in 3D to make a face spoof. More info about face spoofing techniques: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.09868.pdf

> We are too fresh and young for a warrant canary.

Turkey doesn't have the best track record on this, if you don't have a canary might as well assume you are already cooperating

Kudos for the principled stance. Hope you can maintain that in the face of investor pressure.

Are you saying it's prohibitively expensive to archive footage to later recog against (storage), or is the recog itself the expensive part (compute)?

That data is not regulated. Basically an open book. Try again.

The first thing we tell to investors is we are not building a security or surveillance product and we don't have a vision like that.

Storing and indexing (computation but not search) is expensive on AWS. Practically 1000 face metadata is not more than 4MB's of data in practice. 4MB face data is 1$ on AWS. Just one surveillance camera output archive + real time recognition costs 400$ / month according to my calculation.

Search part can be extremely fast with postgres in a special setting. It's kinda instant.

.... what? This reads a lot more like an advertisement than a comment about the story, with a bit of sarcasm?

I just wanted to show a different application area. The leads I will get from here probably will not bring any sales before 5 years lol.

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