Singapore to test facial recognition on lampposts, stoking privacy fears
reuters.com
reuters.com
Regardless of circumvention possibilities, the ultimate aim of these ubiquitous surveillance systems isn't really reducing crime, but social engineering: create a panopticon, an all-observing system, and the population that knows this will avoid potentially incriminating behavior in the first place. A system designed to make people censor themselves and self-reduce their social degrees of freedom.
Tons of political activists (and of course tons of criminals too) have been caught by way simpler and easier to trick methods.
I wouldn't be so sure. How well can you control your stance or manner of walking for example?
Someone (human) trained to differentiate authors of handwritten text can often still do so even if an author is actively trying to write differently.
I think ML is great for comparing these highly subtle traits.
There are lots of options
Quite "easy". Put a pebble in your shoe, or some scotch tape on your skin. You'll behave differently
> Someone (human) trained to differentiate authors of handwritten text can often still do so even if an author is actively trying to write differently.
That was never proven. Please cite a (good) source or I'll take it to be false
I can't, though I think you could argue about it deductively.
> That was never proven.
I guess you can't provide a source either :)
> Put a pebble in your shoe, or some scotch tape on your skin.
If someone you know well did that, would you be able to differentiate his limp from someone else's? I am sure you could. I think it's intuitive that our "limp" betrays features of our normal behaviour.
But if the system is not able to assign a face to a specific identity, it might immediately mark them as "suspicious". You'd have to bypass the system by really putting on the appearance of a face within the database.
State actors or suitably competent criminals may be able to use fake personas though.
I wanna see someone successfully circumvent scent-based tracking. A dog has a sense of smell a million times more sensitive than a human and can track people over miles, even when a trail is days old. Imagine a network of 100,000 passive scent trackers as sensitive as dog noses, hooked up to the same centralized AI and recognition system.
With a single high-confidence hit, they can localize you. If you're on foot, you're not getting very far in any reasonable time frame.
We don't stand a chance. Sitting ducks, as it were.
You just better hope to God (or the AI, apparently) you're never a target of this system, inadvertently or intentionally, because that race is over, and humans lost.
Dogs don't work very well in urban areas and there's plenty of tricks to throw dogs off your trail.
I'd like to see your tricks for dealing with 100,000 such sensors, one on every street corner.
(also: https://www.canidae.com/blog/2015/10/can-you-throw-off-a-tra...
"In fact, Adam found that it was basically impossible to throw off the scent of a Bloodhound. He crossed a 100 foot wide, waist high river. He changed clothes, poured cologne and coffee on himself, threw smelly fish along the trail and used scent enzyme erasers to try to eliminate his scent.")
May the odds be ever in your favor!
Cheaper than dog noses, but requires a sample of the target odor and some training time. It is conceivable that the "most wanted" could each have thousands of bees trained on their scents, and then those swarms could be divided up onto plastic cassettes, which would each be loaded onto a lamppost. If the targets go near any lamppost, their bee in it tattles its location in real time. The disadvantage is, of course, that you have to go around swapping out old and dead bees for live, fresh ones all the time.
An electronic nose can just report its odor profile, and a central processing server can attempt to match and track targets. All that needs is a bit more bandwidth. But it is likely slower and lacking specificity. You could likely smell explosives or bomb making residues or gunshots or narcotics, but not specifically track Suspect X across the city. That kind of precision would require that people line up at the lamppost to be swabbed, and their swab vaporized and run through a gas chromatograph for a minute or two, which I don't see happening, even in authoritarian Singapore.
Misdirection and decoys. How much use are those sensors if they're all detecting you at the same time?
If they become prevalent enough, I could imagine the development of "scent bombs" that would spew out so much of your odor that the sensors for miles around would all detect "you."
Or just someone that doesnt want to be tracked by everyone..
Like hats, glasses and beards?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=dazzle+paint+face+f...
One issue is disseminating the knowledge needed to defeat such systems. I'm sure the CIA and KGB have manuals and training programs to teach those skills [1], but I'm not sure if the information is publicly available in a readily accessible form (e.g. not spread in small pieces among 100 books).
I'm open to discuss this further though
I know that the word gets thrown around a bunch, but it's a pretty simple idea. There is some controversy about if a state can be a terrorist, but typically we just call it state sponsored terrorism and move on.
2018 definition: someone who makes angry posts on social media.
I'm exaggerating a bit, but it's headed in that direction. If you want to see something truly worrying, look up the handful of idiots trying to promote the notion of "stochastic terrorism". The gist is that non-illegal statements which somehow get interpreted by lone nuts as incitement to violence should be categorized as a form of terrorism. Basically, they're hoping to criminalize angry rhetoric that stops well short of calls to violence. The good news is that they've been flogging this idea for a long time (pre-2016) and it still isn't really gaining ground.
I'm sure the Russians doing the Sailsbury attacks didn't want to be tracked by cameras but they were. If top Russian agents can be then probably most other people can be too. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/salisbury-novich...
>the ultimate aim of these ubiquitous surveillance systems isn't really reducing crime, but social engineering
In the UK we've had fairly ubiquitous surveillance systems for a while. In practice the uses have been reducing crime and doing people for minor traffic offences, including me - they uploaded a nice video of me turning right in spite of a no right turn sign, rather to my surprise. I've noticed no social engineering - maybe that's to come?
"Why are we doing this?" Singapore is an already incredibly safe place with pride in the effectiveness of the rule of law.
The screenshot, as captioned:
> SenseTime surveillance software identifying details about people and vehicles runs as a demonstration at the company's office in Beijing, China, October 11, 2017. REUTERS/Thomas Peter/File Photo
Improve people's lives how?
> plan to use cutting-edge technology to improve people’s lives and has pledged to be sensitive to privacy
All of this is possible without using personally identifiable information.
> The government also hopes to use other sensors on the lamp posts to monitor air quality and water levels, count electric scooters in public places, and collect footfall data to aid urban and transport planning, GovTech said.
Should a European citizen visit Singapore, would this be GDPR compliant?
I’m sure Singapore doesn’t care. The truth about Singapore is that it pretty much is a police state, which has pretty extensive restrictions on individual freedoms. But... they do actually deliver on the supposed benefits of organising a society in that manner. Singapore is safe, clean and orderly. I wouldn’t say that’s the best way to run a country, but Singapore does mostly make it work.
And by lifestyle choices I mean being gay, smoking weed, or being Malay.
I would quite literally live in any Chinese city before chosing Singapore. At least China would be cheaper.
My ex is Singaporean and I (white American) was denied work permit, so I researched it intently. We were considering marriage until we saw the thousands of Malays who were unsuccessful despite marriage.
Really hidden and heartbreaking. And that's just one example of Han Chinese racism
The US isn't the most awesome country in the world but marrying a foreigner at least conveys them basic rights like residency and work permit. I mean, residency! What is a marriage without residency?
When I think of what the USA does in terms of preventing migration, I say to myself, "wow, it probably can't be much worse than this". But then I think of Singapore, and realize I'm wrong-- wow, it can be worse than this!
At least in the USA and indeed many countries all over the world, marriage = right to reside. But not in Singapore.
If you are Malay, then the government sees you as a threat to the "delicate harmonious balance of races" in Singapore, and they will do a lot to prevent you from permanently residing and working.
EDIT: upon consulting Wikipedia, it would appear that Hakka is a subset of Han, and that Singaporeans are considered Han despite ancestral migrations. It's a lot like ethnic Irish living in Ireland vs ethnic Irish living in America
I would quite literally live in any Asian country before choosing any Western country.
But hey, each to their own right?
Alcohol and tobacco are banned in Singapore?!
There is too much “whataboutism” going on here. Criticism of Singapore’s pseudo-police-state doesn’t mean that the US doesn’t have a crippling racism problem, or that the UK’s surveillance state is okay.
Or we could recognize people's personal freedoms and understand that sacrificing them to achieve a dystopic police state is not worth it.
I vehemently disagree with people like you that public order and compliance is such an important end that all means to get there are justified.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Singapore was a link I thought to be at least tangentially related.
My position has always been and will always be against anyone that wants almost total control over what other people can do. Authoritarianism is never worth it.
You also said in the reply that you'd prefer to live in any Asian country before any Western country.
I think my interpretation was fair given the context.
It wasn't about the legality of drugs, though the draconian criminal justice system surrounding it was more of my point.
Edit: Removed sentence fragment I forgot to delete.
I’m against drugs outright. Weed included. The laws are strict in Asia. Not just singapore. However singapore has stated that if the overwhelming scientific conclusion is that weed is ok. Then they are open for allowing it in Singapore for Medical purposes. However since there is still a lot of conflicting science (despite there being positive benefits to weed) singapore wants it to remain banned. Alcohol consumption is only a real issue with foreigners in Singapore. It’s taxed so high here no one drinks other than foreigners.
(About to board a plane so have to stop)
You'd choose North Korea over Sweden?
No you won't. However bad you imagine Singapore's police state to be, China's is several order of magnitudes worse. Singapore doesn't block most Western social network, media and file sharing sites. Singapore doesn't ban memes from social networks because they make their leader look bad. Singapore doesn't demand foreign internet companies to host content locally so that the government can crackdown on said content if it doesn't agree with them. Singapore doesn't kidnap dissidents from neighbouring countries, or put entire minority races into concentration camps.
And major Chinese cities aren't cheaper either. Surprise - if you want Western standard of living, then you have to pay Western prices.
But, I didn't go to Harbin for a squeaky clean experience. I went there for its grime and cheapness, and I felt the surveillance was tolerable for the price.
Singapore is like a Chinese Miami. For the price, I'd just go to Miami or Brisbane.
Compared to other countries, in the region, but even in the west, very little.
>and lifestyle choices are severely punished by jail, death, loss of career and loss of residency.
Well, the US used to send you to prison for some marijuana just a few years ago. Some states still do. It's also quite punishable still in countries like Sweden. And all the others used to be problems not that long ago (maybe not being Malay, but "walking while black" still is). So it's not like Singapore is this nightmare outlier place.
Of course it does. 0% crime rate is impossible. The point is that Singapore is measurably far safer than most other places in the world.
>And by lifestyle choices I mean being gay, smoking weed, or being Malay.
There’s plenty of reasons to criticise Singapore, but you don’t seem to be familiar with them. If you want to have a lifestyle where you smoke weed, then Singapore is certainly not the right place to live. But being gay or Malay is not a threat to your freedom, life, career or residency.
Also, if you’re looking for cheap living, then Singapore’s a terrible place to start. It’s very expensive to live there, but I don’t see how that has anything to do with their laws or how they enforce them.
Has the GDPR self-pleasuring circle gone too far now?
After sites blocking themselves (lol) now we have that questioning. People are just out of their minds.
Yes, the GDPR doesn't apply based on citizenship, it applies to people in the Union (even if they're foreign).
I would also pay kids that tend to like kicking lampposts.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sbhagava/papers/face-rec-ccs16.pdf
"In this work, we show how to perform invisibility attacks while attempting to maintain plausible deniability through the use of facial accessories. We defer the examination of the physical realizability of these attacks to future work."
"In this paper, we demonstrated techniques for generating accessories in the form of eyeglass frames that, when printed and worn, can effectively fool state-of-the-art face-recognition systems."
We live in an increasingly cyberpunk future; I wonder how many other predictions will turn true soon.
(sorry could not resist)