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Comment by EugeneOZ | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's actually for shopping - authors' names are from country of dictatorship and mass surveillance. I have nothing against that country, or names, don't get me wrong - but I think this software will be used for mass surveillance purposes.

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Please don't post ethnic or national slurs to HN, including ones cloaked in insinuation. It's not legit to cast shade on someone or their work for that reason alone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's a guns don't kill people argument applied to facial recognition tech. China is building mass surveillance with every tool available. It is not a secret or a national slur. It is a fact that they use mass surveillance against Muslim ethnic minorities to justify sending them off to re-education camps.

Shame on you. Authors of AI software have a responsibility to act ethically. Just because it might be used for something harmless doesn't justify something that will be applied in a harmful manner to many with certainty.

On HN, it's not ok to ethnically interpret someone's name, map it to their national or racial origin and cast aspersions on them. People can't do that here no matter how strong their political passions are, and we ban accounts that use HN for nationalistic or racial or ethnic battle.

Speaking of that, your account's submission history clearly shows an agenda of nationalistic battle. That is not what this site is for, so please don't do that, regardless of which nation you're for or against. Also, please keep the language of the online shaming culture off HN, even when addressing moderators.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Calling out China for mass suveillance is racist because everyone in China has the same ethnicity because China purges minorities using surveillance tech because calling out China for mass surveillance is racist...

You got me Dang. Impenetrable logic.

What I wrote seems clear, and this doesn't remotely resemble it.

Individuals are not "China" and deserve the benefit of the doubt regardless of their national origin. That seems like a platitude and I can't quite believe I need to repeat it here.

Zhedong Zheng works at the University of Technology Sydney, Xiaodong Yang works at at NVIDIA Research, Santa Clara, CA. So you are in fact absolutely right, that they work in countries, Australia and the USA, that as members of the five eyes are involved in illegal mass surveillance. But I’m sure you don’t want to imply that anyone in these 2 countries working for any company is writing software solely with the intention of having it used for mass surveillance.

I don't agree with basing motivations on the appearance of people's names, but it's almost for surveillance by definition, no?

Are there non-surveillance use cases for identifying persons of interest across cameras?

Smart doorbells can automatically open doors. Although you end up with weird stuff like this.

https://geekologie.com/2018/09/nest-security-camera-mistakes...

I was just being cheeky.

But I'm sure it would be used that way no matter where the authors are from. It's unfortunate. Those kinds of groups don't often care for "minor details" like ownership, patents, copyright, and the like.

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