Photos of Kids Are Powering Surveillance Technology
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Obviously this was before all of these types of stories began to emerge, but I like to bring this up as an opposing ethical debate.
Altogether the line of reasoning sounds like the usual hype you put into grant applications. Your line of work is highly strained hydrocarbons, so when you apply to the Department of Energy you say in the distant future you won't synthesize 100 mg, you'll prepare hundreds of tons to put it into a rocket to increase its payload.
It is if you sell FUD.
Bonus points are available for combinations.
Let's do that:
1. Easy to use and effective encryption for all people, even pedophiles and terrorists.
2. Backdoored untrustworthy encryption governments will almost certainly abuse in order to surveil entire populations.
Number 1 sounds like a very reasonable principle to have. Governments and police forces have more than enough tools at their disposal to fight crimes. WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption and my country's police forces routinely catch child molesters that use it. They do not need and should not have a "show me everything there is to know about this guy" button that they don't even need a warrant to press.
Certain things should be inviolable, even to the state, even with a warrant.
Either way, the goal would still be to identify an adult victim of trafficking by the last available picture of them, which was of them as a child.
> In 2001, UPenn released a study conducted in 17 cities across the United States [in which] they estimated as many as 300,000 American youth may be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation at any time. However, the actual number of children involved in prostitution is likely to be much smaller: over 10 years only 827 cases a year had been reported to police departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_...
Estimates differ wildly because many feel actual reports dramatically undercount reality. IMO even one is too many, but exaggerating does more harm than good.
You know I think there's a middle ground between being adamantly opposed to mass surveillance and taking child sex trafficking seriously. I personally know people (plural) that this has happened to and it's pretty irritating to see that issue cavalierly dismissed for argumentative purposes or tech cred points.
And some of them chose a license that required attribution, and now they're outraged that the photos are attributed to them?
Do you say the same of yourself when you sign up for a random online service and blindly check the “Accept TOS” checkbox?
Contracts and licenses are sometimes tricky to unequivocally enforce when one party entered into the contract or granted a license by mistake, unknowingly, etc.
It's a pity, I think if these fears propagate there'll be less CC content.
Hell, I can't believe you're expressing any confusion. This is a pretty simple abuse of trust, apparently attributable to Flickr/Yahoo. It's almost like it's completely normal to not base your emotional reaction on copyright licenses—the outrage is legitimate no matter how legally protected the abuser is.
> By law, most Americans in the database don’t need to be asked for their permission — but the Papas should have been.
> As residents of Illinois, they are protected by one of the strictest state privacy laws on the books: the Biometric Information Privacy Act, a 2008 measure that imposes financial penalties for using an Illinoisan’s fingerprints or face scans without consent. Those who used the database — companies including Google, Amazon, Mitsubishi Electric, Tencent and SenseTime — appear to have been unaware of the law, and as a result may have huge financial liability, according to several lawyers and law professors familiar with the legislation.
IANAL, but I would be surprised if attaching a Creative Commons license to a photo qualified as consent under regulations about use of biometrics.
I wonder of any of the people whose photographs are in the database have moved to the EU and whether that makes any difference.
If you're selling stock photos, you need written consent for everything in the photo--artwork, brands, people. Interestingly, parents can give consent for their kids to be in a photograph, but these same identifiers can be used years later to identify the adults in the photos.
A related question is this: do pre-trained classifiers reveal any personally-identifying information? Or are they only statistics about many, many faces?