A Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Why are you jumping to the conclusion that is has to go this way? Very possible that a landlord would be happy to simply have someone log a face and then go back to that person if there was a particular and legal reason to know who the face was. Now sure if they wanted maybe they could google image search the face and find out who it was. But per my other comment there is nothing to prevent a building owner (landlord or otherwise) from installing a camera and filming everyone that enters a building and actually even posting that face on the internet for everyone to see. (Would not go down very well of course but it would be legal as it's a public place). If you want to hang out in front of Shake Shack (arbitrary) with your camera all day and take pictures of everyone who enters and buys a burger or a shake you can do that.
Same reason we put on a seatbelt when we go for a drive.
If NSA employees abuse their surveillance powers and get away with it, then so will random landlords.
> In order to let neighbors who might not have seen the letter know what was potentially coming, five tenants convened in the lobby of one of the two buildings on a late October morning to spread the word. A few days later, those five tenants — like most of the residents at Atlantic, black women — received a notice from property management with pictures of the gathering taken from a security camera; they were told that the lobby was not “a place to solicit, electioneer, hang out or loiter.”
> New York State law, in fact, grants tenants the right to meet peacefully in nearly any location in a building as long as they are not obstructing passageways. Management maintains that tenants were getting in the way even if the pictures did not clearly indicate that.
So they have a database full of addresses together with their digital keys?
What could possibly go wrong...
Locks are for honest people.
You can get a great lock, but what they lock into is usually a very weak link.
Not quite sure what's different with that situation from before, other than slightly cheaper keys.
1) The landlord is _never_ allowed to enter your house 2) In an emergency, the firemen would just break the door.
Most landlords, in my experience, don't invest in the high-end RFID systems that have real security.
Granted, I've only rented out an apartment once, but it was from a big local rental agency and I got three keys despite being the only tenant in a single bedroom apartment. My current studio apartment (although not a rental) also has three keys.
Mine didn't though I'm sure I could have gotten extra ones if I just asked.
I've been tempted on many, many occasions to give the neighbors a dollar to get a duplicate key made so they aren't knocking on the door/window at all hours because they obviously don't have enough keys for the amount of people living there.
This seems like a reasonable policy that other cities with renters might benefit from, if they don't already have something similar.
"Please fax this handwritten form to this foreign phone number and then you can collect the key from this office on the other side of town only at 3pm on a tuesday. Oh - now you've shown up we need ID, and we only accept birth certificates."
For reference: https://sfrb.org/section-3713-keys
If they claim unlawful occupancy, you can invoke the Kim 2.0 amendments of the rent ordinance which basically prevent an SF landlord from denying you the roommates of your choice.
If a landlord denies a roommate under the Kim 2.0 amendments, you can almost certainly get your rent cut in half by petitioning the rent board.
Basically, turning this from an apartment to more of a long term hotel. Is it a fair trade for a rent subsidy? Will it become standard in all rentals?
Assume that the land lord is right and that this will lower his expenses.
I assume he's going to pass that savings to his tenants or just use it to buy more properties?
So to answer your question - maybe? But most likely not. And it's not necessarily evil.
https://www.landlordology.com/implied-covenant-quiet-enjoyme...
It seems this would only stop non-tenets from having access to the facilities. At least without being accompanied by actual tenants.
Facial recognition would violate that.
My guess would be the mentioned privacy is relating to the dwelling itself, that is, the landlord can’t come hang out in your living room or hide cameras in your apartment.
Plenty of apartments have 24/7 concierge at the front door and monitored entrances. That isn’t considered violating privacy even though the concierge can see you come in and out.
Would a computerized system that does the same thing necessarily violate the legal definition of privacy ? I suspect it would be hard to tell at this point.
No doubt cases like this will be tried as people test the bounds of that legal definition.
If you can hire a human to do it and it is fine then I don't think any automated systems would be violating privacy.
Also there is no privacy in public places and you can probably conclude that you are in a public place before you enter. Eg. Their is no privacy at the checkpoint.
That link is not the best. Quiet Enjoyment does cover the tenant's right to have visitors. A landlord cannot interfere with that right, including by blocking access to the unit by unaccompanied visitors who don't have the tenant's face.
I've lived in dozens of non-rent controlled apartments, and it's almost always hell. You always have some douchebag that is above, or below or next to you who can't manage to respect personal boundaries of noise or space or smell. I would have much more enjoyed the experience if there was some level of enforcement.
Congrats, you are now a certified authoritarian.
I would love to be able to run my own software on my iPhone in an unfettered way.
> the same programs failed to identify darker-skinned women up to one-third of the time.
A one-third failure rate means that on average, for every three times you try to return home, you are likely to have the system fail to identify you at least once. Being locked out, as a resident, one-third of the number of times you return home, will get very irritating very quickly.
And for the really unlucky, they may seldom have the system recognize them, so they end up locked out a majority of the time.
A 33% recognition failure rate is simply too high to consider door locks to ones home as a good use of facial recognition.
Edit: Take a look at this video, it illustrates the problem quite well with a soap dispenser as an example: https://twitter.com/nke_ise/status/897756900753891328
In particular, when using empirical testing to decide if the system is sufficiently reliable, accidentally using an unhelpful sample of faces.
Or even earlier, when selecting the camera and lighting technologies to use.
In color film photography they chose the CYM spectral sensitivities to best represent US white women in heavy make-up under stage lights. It was the 1920/30s afterall. The spectral sensitivities haven't changed much since then as a result (an example of the Lock-In effect in full swing). CCD and CMOS camera dopants are chosen to represent the spectral sensitivities that are similar to film, though physics does come charging in on those.
To be honest, yes, it's hard to photograph darker skinned people without sufficient full-spectrum light. Darker skin absorbs more radiation at the solar-peak frequency (~550nm, the light green of most plants), as the melanin is evolved to do. That said, if your film/sensor can see far outside of the solar peak, then you'll pick up darker skinned people better. Old-timey tin-type photographs could see well into the UV (notice how there never are any clouds in pictures taken way back when) and darker skinned people showed up just fine in those old photographs as a result.
Fun-Fact: the front facing camera on most mobile-phones does not have and IR filter on it, specifically to help with these issues of darker skin. Next time you are near a handle-less toilet with an IR sensor, you can use the front facing camera to see the little IR LEDs beeping to see if you are there. You can also use the front-facing camera to see security lights and what not, typically those are IR ones too.
UV light could also be used, but it is more damaging over time, and thus lower frequency IR light is preferred.
Also could easily be a result of biased or limited training data.
Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content?
Because there’s a ton of “one size fits all” products which don’t fit the ends of the bell curve, and reflect the choice of manufacturer to not serve all body types.
I think it’s a poor choice for a door lock, but I’m not sure I a priori think it’s unacceptable for a product to not work for some (~10%) portion of the population — especially when it reflects an engineering reality (skin reflectivity; feature sharpness), and not choice.
Because society as a whole hasn't spent hundreds of years literally enslaving short people before deciding that strict moral and legal standards are necessary to prevent it from happening again.
Actually, they have done exactly that. For many centuries before appropriate nutrition became essentially ubiquitous, there was indeed a highly-significant correlation between height and social class - and the lowest class often faced near-slavery conditions in surprisingly recent times, especially outside Western Europe. Of course, you're right that "strict moral and legal standards" are rather lacking on the issue. I'm not sure that we would agree on whether that's a desirable state of affairs.
If my employer specifies a uniform, it's their obligation to provide one to 100% of their employees, not the 90% covered by the cheap "one size fits all" company they prefer to use.
If my landlord specifies a locking system, it's their obligation to provide one that unlocks 100% of the time for everyone who rents there.
There's also an issue of scale: an apartment is a fairly major decision with a lot of other factors, that affects a huge chunk of your life. Being locked out by a small, easily changed decision on the landlord's part is unreasonable. Conversely, if you can't wear a "one size fits all" product, there's plenty of other options out there, and you're not potentially creating segregated neighborhoods, locking black people out of living near good jobs, etc..
Only if such clothes are reasonably commercially available — otherwise, they have a bonda fine business reason to discriminate in hiring, and may do so.
I think you’d find you also had a really hard time for suing if they just didn’t hire you on the basis of the uniforms they had not fitting.
So you seem factually incorrect about the height case.
> if you can't wear a "one size fits all" product, there's plenty of other options out there, and you're not potentially creating segregated neighborhoods, locking black people out of living near good jobs, etc..
This is again mistaken.
If you’re at the ends of the bell curve for height, you can’t reliably find work clothes through normal channels, and are thus unable to reliably signal your qualification for a white collar job.
The lack of height appropriate clothing impacts the ability of very tall or very short people to “dress for success”, and hence harms their chances of attaining the best jobs.
Your comments merely reflect your cis-height privilege and implicit heightism.
Further, it speaks to your implicit racism, because you view melanin as somehow biologically more meaningful than height.
Or at least less visible light. I wonder how skin pigmentation affects imaging with infrared light?
Also, face recognition technologies are better than described in the comments; you can take a photo of a random person from the street and successfully find their social network account with publicly available sites. Compared to this, recognising just several hundred faces looks like an easy task.
One in three is beyond ridiculous.
My last contract I worked developing a biometric system to extract a consistent "headshot" from all the various mugshots from arrest records in the US, and I worked with the Kairos system to extract pixel coordinate data from the images.
The API calls gave me a lot more then just pixel information, and one of the data points was skin color and it was correct like 98% of the time.
Now, of course, it's possible that posed mugshots deliver a much more consistent image quality then surveillance cams would, but 33% seems suspiciously high to me.
I don't want every white person getting into mine, and I can't imagine they would be fine with every black person getting into theirs.
And even 2% rate would get old very fast. That is once a week...
We could just not allow these systems.
I wish I had this for my house.
On the other hand, it is hard to disagree with this article. Getting photographed everyday or perhaps several times in a single day could quickly start feeling like a huge violation of privacy. All the security cameras in this building make things even worse because with an access to your facial data and your identity, they can now easily track everywhere you go inside your building. And then NYPD could theoretically subcontract a firm that interfaces with this building to track its occupants through the neighborhood with similar accuracy.
I really don't like where things are headed.
If you in the public spaces of a city, it's likely you are photographed thousands of times a day.
(They swear they have a privacy policy but frankly, I just don't believe them).
[0] https://theintercept.com/2018/09/08/linknyc-free-wifi-kiosks...
This is an additional problem on top of the obvious problems with mass surveillance. You have to trust the Observer to have an appropriate intent. You have to trust that they can secure the data. You have to trust that they will not hire a malicious person Who will misuse their access to the data. You have to trust that they won't be sold to a company that will revoke all of the above considerations.
This is far too much to trust, and none of it is in the control of the observed.
Relatedly, does a landlord have the right to know when you are in your home? Because that's a side effect of this (which could already be possible by monitoring things like electrical usage). Asking in both legal and ethical senses (which I expect are different).
So the landlord likely already knows which fob's have entered the building at any given time. Presuming that most of the fobs are with their rightful owners, then the landlord knows mostly who is in the building at any given time.
The end result of the landlord knowing when you are in your home does not change that.
[1] Same principle that allows you to photograph the police out in public or really anyone else.
In your case, the landlord does indeed have a very hard to search record of your comings and goings, in mine it's an up to the second report.
If you have a camera that has any publicly available (not just public, also private-but-unfenced) place in it's FoV, you must register with your local data protection office and fullfill all the requirements (you must prove, how you use, make available, securely store and dispose any recordings).
If you don't have any publicly available space in your FoV, you must have a written permission from all the co-owners (e.g. in an apartment house).
So basically it is only easy if you are sole owner of the property and only you (and your family) are using it. Anywhere with a shared space, it is an issue. For a landlord, that would get no-go quickly.
I didn't investigate this further beyond my use-case (many co-owners, asking them to agree to anything is like cat herding). Given the protection the renters are getting, I wouldn't be surprised if such a permission would be difficult to get, and the common areas would be considered publicly available.
However, I'd wager courts would side with tenants that their right to privacy and ability to distribute a key are more important than the landlord's ability to fight subleasing this way.
Who has this power? At the moment only lawless spy agencies and politicians who control them.
It may be better to legislate for all this data to be open to all rather than trying to legislate it out of existence. Laws likely won't work due to power imbalances meaning it is used by the state with impunity anyway, as is the case at least to a limited extent now - the limits on the likes of GCHQ are technical, not legal, as they have demonstrated recently.
Perhaps a truly private life is now impossible, but if it is we should make sure that is the case for those in power as well as the little people who scurry about beneath their gaze.
And all of the people working in these institutions. We know that they are willing to blatantly abuse these surveillance systems for personal stuff and they get away with it.
I can't imagine that it would be better for every person on the planet to have access to my face scans at my apartment than just my landlord.
This has only ever directly affected me once, in a stupid argument with my apartment administration over a $250 fire exit sign, but it was enough to make me aware of how much power the person holding the footage has. Extrapolating to victims with less soft power and more at stake is not a comforting proposition.
Unfortunately abusive parties will be the ones most interested in collecting your data in the first place.
I like to think that this is the reason behind EU's GDPR and other privacy initiatives. Ironically, I think people of continental EU remember better what the loss of privacy meant in WWII, much more so than the rest of the world. It is telling that England (while it certainly had lots of casualties) was not invaded, so maybe this is why they put up with all the cameras? It certainly is not a place I would want to live in, or near. It creeps me out.
Cameras cost nothing already and will be deployed everywhere, all the time.
One of the many sorts of ubiquitous lease provisions that landlords are more than happy to turn a blind eye to for "desirable" market-rate tenants who pay on time each month, but will vigorously enforce against others.
Honestly, I agree it is would be kind of messed up for someone to have the fortune of winning a below-market luxury apartment and turn that around and illegally rent it out for a massive markup on Airbnb.
Having subleased to a legitimate person before, it's already annoying/stressful enough to be a sublandlord since you are taking on a lot of credit risk as is. If I'm in a position where I'm going to shadily rent out my below market apartment I'm not going to rent it out to someone that a normal landlord otherwise wouldn't pick.
I'm talking about a subtenant retaliating against a prime tenant who kicked them out. Getting the prime tenant evicted is easy. On average, they're easier to find and collect from. Suing to take over the lease is hard, but collecting from the landlord is easy.
But it's arbitrage. The market rate is $4000 but the current tenant is paying $1000 and subletting for $3500. The inconvenience is worth $500/month, and you can't just go directly to the landlord to cut a better deal because the apartment is already "occupied" by the tenant paying $1000 who the landlord can't remove.
Cramming extra family/friends into an apartment who aren't officially on the lease (e.g. the adult son who's lost a job or is on parole, or the parents who can't afford assisted living and are helping raise the grandkids) is actually far more common among low-income, rent-stabilized, and minority tenants. Stopping short-term Airbnb leases isn't particularly controversial; it's going after the medium/long-term unauthorized tenants that really has a disproportionate impact on the underprivileged.
I would have a problem with unknown, unvetted, random AirBnb users coming in an out where the host doesn’t really know anything about the person and won’t be there.
It's a lottery either way. Either there's a problem with lotteries in general or a problem with what kind of person is allowed to win them.
Is it a problem that could be solved with regular cameras? Is it a problem that costs more than this system? Are the potential problems brought on by this system worth incurring to attempt to solve the other problem?
The motivation suggested by the article doesn't really make sense to me. Why would high income individuals want this?
>In any event, the letter went on to say that while some tenants complied when a security guard asked residents to disperse, at least one did not: “Ms. Johnnie Mae Robinson stated this was her building and she will stay there. Let me make something clear, this is not your building, you are a resident of our building.”
Law says tenants can hang around in lobbies all they want. Whoever the landlord is, is an asshole, and I wouldn't trust their motives further than I can throw my own head.
I can tell you that when landlords have a financial incentive to get rid of a tenant (as is very often the case in rent-stabilized housing), they can and will do anything in their power to do so, including every possible form of harassment.
A system that allows landlords to track their tenants' activities with a computer, lock out whoever they want individually, whenever they want, is not a good idea.
The balance of power is already crushingly in the landlords' favor.
I doubt he works.
Perhaps in general, you'd like people to support themselves with work, rather than rent-seeking. I agree. But surely that view should produce at least as strong a criticism of the landlord as of the tenant?
Huh?
kaycebasques does not give any opinion on the landlord either way. Unless their comment was substantially edited, you're making a lot of assumptions about kaycebasques' views.
“Liberty means prohibiting biometric data bases or any other type of human designation. There is no difference in principle between sophisticated biological marking and tattooing an ID number; both turn our identities into the property of a third party. In both, we lose our freedom. Simply put: We have one God above us, and we should not be enslaved to another person or mechanism.”
It would be a problem for food deliveries though.
What's shady look like?
Now that with better enforcement, it will spark new conversation about if those rules need to be challenged. Also, not all the rules are bad, sometimes they are simply regulating one kind of behaviour (I.e. airbnb) in favor of another (long term rental).
Or is he 1/4 ghost - a genetic chameleon?
Is there a scientific discovery to be made here, or is it just a bug?
Unusually, the power went out at about 00:15. I got home at 00:30, and saw them in the courtyard. They'd taken the rubbish out, but couldn't get back into any part of the building with their RFID fob.
I have a fob plus actual keys.
Seems like the solution is to give up on unenforceable laws, or get comfortable with surveillance. The status quo of rules and laws that are not really enforced is more like an option than a contract. And I have a feeling that the excersize of those options asymmetrically hurts certain people.
Still, my own landlord aside, the enforceability of contracts that require intimate knowledge of my day to day life seem to rely on surveillance or over reporting.
Someone obviously can afford to live near where they work or the prices would come down. If companies couldn’t attract workers because of the high cost of living they would locate to cheaper places or be forced to pay more.
The answer is not government regulations.
Public service workers like teachers, policemen, garbage collectors, etc. All of those jobs are in demand all across the U.S. If they can’t find jobs in San Francisco (just as an example), they will go to a part of the country where they can find a job. Let the cities compete for them by offering a better salary vs cost of living equation. Once San Francisco can’t get enough qualified people, they will have to pay them more and the taxpayers will have to pay more in taxes - instead of putting it all on landlords.
For private employees, they will have to pay enough to attract workers to either entice workers to work for them, or the potential business owners will see that the numbers don’t make sense and set their business up somewhere else.
If the citizens of San Francisco can’t get the jobs or have the services they want, they will move somewhere else and as the demand for housing decreases, the prices will go down.
If you can’t profitably make a business work at the prices that people are willing to pay, you would start your business elsewhere. If business can’t afford to hire people because the cost of living is too high, they will start locating elsewhere. The people and the jobs will move.
Why does everyone have to live in San Francisco. Companies are already “rural sourcing” to cheaper parts of the United States where the cost of living is lower. There is no reason that software development and the startup ecosystem in particular has to be on the west coast.
It is interesting that while Chinese government wants to be able to control its citizens' lives using surveillance, capitalists and businesses have similar wishes. They want to be the dictators at least within their property.
If anything it's the poors' cleverness that is threatening. If you read through the website of the management company mentioned here, they brag that they have been a force in shaping rent stabilized housing policy. They likely set those policies up to ensure a steady rate of return from the state, in return for stabilized rent for tenants.
Now consider that in the context of the corrupt, borderline criminal history of the NYC real estate development industry, who've not wasted any opportunity to cheat on taxes by undervaluing their assets, among other financial crimes.
Only the wealthy are allowed to play games with finance.
To memorize not only each resident's name and face, but also those of their occasional out-of-town guests, is quite a feat.
It's not like the facial recognition is resulting in any privacy loss for those that legally live there. The government already knows their permanent address.
Except knowing exactly when they come and go. And depending on how the camera works, how they're dressed, what they're carrying, how they got there, who they said goodbye to on the sidewalk, etc., etc.
Where in the article did it state that people's activities were being tracked? Let alone inferring what they are carrying, how they are dressed. The latter things are the stuff of science fiction. I talked with a guy working on posture recognition for the military. It's hard for cameras to figure out when a guy is holding a rifle, let alone make highly subjective judgements like "how did this person travel to the building?" and "is this person well-dressed?".
How about this part, that verbatim says that's what the landlord used the currently-installed cameras for?
> In order to let neighbors who might not have seen the letter know what was potentially coming, five tenants convened in the lobby of one of the two buildings on a late October morning to spread the word. A few days later, those five tenants — like most of the residents at Atlantic, black women — received a notice from property management with pictures of the gathering taken from a security camera; they were told that the lobby was not “a place to solicit, electioneer, hang out or loiter.”
Here's a thought: maybe if facial recognition was used, all of the people in the halls would be recognized as tenants and wouldn't have been bothered by management? Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
Why are we bending over so hard to take management's side? This is the management that acted counter to the law and counter to what the security camera was showing:
> New York State law, in fact, grants tenants the right to meet peacefully in nearly any location in a building as long as they are not obstructing passageways. Management maintains that tenants were getting in the way even if the pictures did not clearly indicate that.
“Makes sense for publicly subsidized housing (which is what rent control is, in essence). In the US, rent control is when the government controls the amounts charged for rented housing - it’s not “publicly subsidized”.
“It’s not like the facial recognition is resulting in any privacy loss...” Ouy, where to even start. Of course it is. Every time you’re tracked is a loss of privacy.
This statement is true, every time you're tracked it's a loss of privacy.
That said, you're making an unsubstantiated leap to go from facial recognition to tracking people. Where in the article does it say that people's entry and exit is logged? Where does it say that people's clothing, whether or not they are carrying objects, etc. are being tracked? Unless you can substantiate the claim that facial recognition is being used as a means of tracking people, your comment is not relevant.
From what the article writes, it looks keyed entry systems is being replaced by facial recognition. Unless we have evidence to the contrary, it looks to me that facial recognition is being used exclusively as a key for authentication. This doesn't seem any more tyrannical to me than Apple pushing facial recognition as the default mode of unlocking its latest iPhones.