Hacker News Reader

Comment by abhinai | Hacker News Reader

As a computer engineer, I get excited to see latest technology being applied to our every day lives. I can't wait to see a facial recognition system in action somewhere.

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.

View on HN

I now view this outcome as inevitable. Such systems are already being trialled on the streets of london. However our privacy is not just about face recog - we leave myriad digital traces thousands of times a day (payments, phone, search, maps, likes, car plates, emails, phone calls, store cameras) which can already be used to trace out our lives in excruciating detail. Just one of these factors gives a lot of colour; together they deliver a very detailed profile of every facet of our lives.

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.

>Who has this power? At the moment only lawless spy agencies and politicians who control them.

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.

You're missing that regular people will also soon be recording everything around their persons, homes and vehicles.

Cameras cost nothing already and will be deployed everywhere, all the time.

Doesn't that make it preferable to give access to all? The other alternative means those who can access to all that footage in aggregate have huge power over those who only have access to a few cameras.

Everyone should have access to all my personal cameras?

> It may be better to legislate for all this data to be open to all rather than trying to legislate it out of existence.

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.

Surveillance will always be subject to authority-flavored selective availability and interpretation unless the collected information is freely available to all legitimately interested parties.

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.

> unless the collected information is freely available to all legitimately interested parties.

Unfortunately abusive parties will be the ones most interested in collecting your data in the first place.

Complete transparency for everything is better than only some entities having all the power. Obviously, we’re not going to be able to achieve privacy, so the only other option is to have everything be transparent.

Actually, this outcome is far from inevitable - it all depends on the society and the political will. The problem with loss of privacy is that it can influence the voting body, and thus political outcomes. In the arms of power-that-be, it is not difficult to imagine an outcome where this technology is used to protect the ruling party from losing their power. In other words: 1984.

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.

It’s already here, just exclusively in the hands of the state at present.

100% agree.

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).

The article mentions this is to replace a "key-fob". "Key-fob" implies some kind of RF read of the fob, and a potential computer behind the scenes checking if fob serial X is authorized entry at this time.

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 fob is not read on exit, so no. You can make inferences from frequency of entry, but you can't tell the difference between someone who is away all weekend vs. holed up in their apartment all weekend.

Not necessarily. All the fobs can share the same serial and/or the data content in them can be an exact copy.

Keeping your name on the lease and then subleasing it under the table is one of the classic scams when rent control is involved. I can understand where the landlord would want to know who is actually using it.

This is a problem everywhere in the world, not just with rent controlled apartments. (Of course, those are a lot more lucrative.)

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.

Nothing to prevent owner of a building (landlord or other person/entity) from installing a camera and taking a picture of everyone entering the building (outside the door). [1] Inside (legally) maybe the same no expectation or privacy in the lobby of a public building.

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.

At least in EU, that's much more complicated.

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.

Are renters considered co-owners? Even if they are, can't you collect that permission in the lease?

No, renters are not considered co-owners.

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.

Yes, but surely that is miles away from a system that automatically recognizes and then logs that info to a database. right?

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.

> Getting photographed everyday or perhaps several times in a single day could quickly start feeling like a huge violation of privacy.

If you in the public spaces of a city, it's likely you are photographed thousands of times a day.

But you do not imagine that people will compile a profile of all your random photos where you are just background. (maybe google does, but that would be extremely creepy too)

Right. We do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public for a given location but we do have an expectation of privacy in public in the aggregate (the alternative is called stalking).

The LinkNYC monoliths have cameras[0]. If they're not already selling or planning to sell this data for exactly this kind of aggregation, I would be very surprised.

(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...

Even if they had a privacy policy, if the data leaked, that policy would be irrelevant.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com