EU considers temporary ban on facial recognition in public spaces

> I guess I should start working for an open source company.

Open source can also be mostly building things that are pointless or already exist.

Finding an entirely new foundational problem and solving that by designing a generic, reusable solution is incredibly hard. Only very few people luck out and succeed in doing that.

The vast majority of modern technology are mainly improvements on past solutions. And the process is entirely darwinistic: only those improvements that come with the least amount of friction will be adopted by a large enough number of users.

The same is true for science. Few people get to crack truly foundational problems. Most people work on different ideas and approaches that refine existing solutions, until the scientific community converges around a new incumbent solution or idea. Then the cycle begins again when a new idea or solution enters the domain. Rallying our collective brain power towards a few or even a single idea or solution will slow that feedback cycle.

So, working on a variation of an existing thing isn't necessarily bad. Your execution may be better then the incumbent solution and uproot the status quo.

There are also other reasons why working on an existing problem may yield benefits:

You learn more about the process. For instance, a simple todo application isn't interesting in itself. But going through the process of building one and finding out how to do that efficiently: that's where you'll find value. Those experiences and lessons you take to the next project which may be your own or part of a bigger mission or vision.

If you work with other people, you are practicing your communication skills and your people skills. Both are hugely valuable as well. The most impact you can have isn't necessarily through writing code on your own, but by coaching and supporting others; clearing impediments and clarifying problems by reframing them.

If you cling on to the notion that building something entirely new is the only relevant measure of success, you set yourself up for failure.

> done not to provide genuine improvement, but done for amusement and promotion of the author

I'd argue that if done for amusement, it's rather self-fulfilment than dick waving. Spinning the metaphor, some of us are not open-sourcing their project to put their external organs in other's face, but rather publish "just in case" someone may be interested in bootstrapping another project from here.

> Large amounts of open source projects which seem to ego-driven (i.e. done not to provide genuine improvement, but done for amusement and promotion of the author).

While that kind of thing does happen, many of the participants in older active projects seem to be driven by a genuine desire to improve things for our fellow people.

What are the right reasons for these things, then?

I speak at conferences so that I can say I speak at conferences so that I can earn more so that I can afford to pay for my kids to go to university. Does that make me a dick?

The desire to excel and the desire for glory are two different things.

I'm not on board with those who say the desire for glory is automatically a bad thing, though (although I admit that it is something that I don't really understand).

Spec are sometimes useful. Mutual military build ups are not.

One would prefer to have innovation without killing millions. Electronic calculators are a thing before that. It’s a natural progression, WWII just made it a little bit faster, at the cost of about a hundred million souls.

At least in the Netherlands there’s the same loophole as in the US: the police can give a camera to a private party, point it to the street and get access to the feed.

But state owned institutions can not be fined under the GDPR, which makes it tough to enforce it against government entities.

> You 're probably not happy with this reply because you have framed the question as "concrete and unjustified harm", which strongly implies either financial as physical harm. But there is concrete and significant harm that can come to persons that is not financial or physical and that is nonetheless recognised by law. For example, Article 4 of the European Human Rights Convention makes slavery and servitude illegal without any precondition that violence is exerted, or the person is otherwise harmed physically or in any other way than being in servitude, i.e. the harm is recognised as being caused by the condition of servitude itself.

How does one become enslaved without the threat of physical or financial harm?

> The problem isn't data (i.e. lack of "privacy"). The problem is abuse of this data

A.k.a. the “Guns don’t kill people” argument.

'your data is used in your best interest' -- coming soon to a dystopian sci-fi.

But what of the billions of already existing non-compliance recording devices, plus the ability to easily roll your own without including an emitter?

Even if it was successfully implemented it wouldn't actually at all tell you whether you're being recorded or not. Then what's the point?

Identification can be either fuzzed or resold to aggregators and become effectively useless.

There's precendent for the emission signal in Do Not Track, but I don't think the result is what you want.

You don't get to put that genie back in the bottle. If you normalize tracking, by giving it even tacit approval, then any "tacked on" privacy laws or regulations simply become a cost of doing business.

The GDPR has serious teeth - by there are still a large number of companies that flaunt the regulations. Like OATH.

Anything the user says to try and opt-out will be used as nothing more than an identifier to continue to track them.

We've already seen all this play out in the websphere. We do not want this to happen the same way in the real world.

Not really, no. If it's in a shop, it'll be operated by the shop. If it's in a supermarket car park, it'll be operated by the supermarket. If it's in a public park, pedestrianised street, or government building, it'll be state-operated.

> Blindly trusting one's government ain't a good recipe for long term freedom and happiness.

Of course I'm not advocating blindly trusting the government, but we generally do trust the government until it reveals otherwise.

After all, CCTVs are really just a tradeoff; they are for citizens safety, and accessing it is very restricted for privacy reasons.

> this is sort of one-way road [snip]

> Sooner or later somebody craving for absolute power and control will start abusing it, be it in intelligence or government (or both).

I'm not sure if it really is; democracy is there for a reason. (We have impeached our president in 2017 for various reasons - which for many people in our country, was a living example that sometimes politics work after all :-))

This is a complete non sequitur. The problem at hand is the security overreach of monitoring _everyone_.

If I am not under investigation I shouldn't be monitored end of discussion.

If I am under investigation, then if my case has not reviewed by a third party (judiciary power/judge) then I also shouldn't be monitored.

It's basic human nature. Without checks and balances those who can abuse, will abuse. It doesn't matter which side they are on.

Are the police actually difficult to track? They wear uniforms and drive around with flashing lights and sirens.

When this actually becomes a widespread problem we can revisit the ban. Indeed, if mass-surveillance becomes so cheap that ordinary citizens can deploy it it makes sense for police & governments to also have access to it. Until then, don't.

Agreed, but there are differences between the GDPR per members country, for example, in the Netherlands we are not free to use data derived from people that specifically said their data would be usable for science (data like tumor gene expression values). You need to ask for consent again. Or if you can't, you need to prove you can't and then you need to publish everything you derive from the data. This is different in the UK.

>this is not really democracy

Literally every single part of the EU apparatus is democratic. Every single bit.

The European Council consists of the Heads of Government of the EU states. If your Head of Government isn't democratically elected then you're already fucked and the EU isn't making anything worse.

The European Commission is chosen by the European Council, so derives its mandate from that.

The European Parliament is literally elected.

The Council of the European Union is basically 'all the agricultural ministers' or 'all the finance ministers' or 'all the defence ministers' etc. Obviously these people all have democratic mandates in their home countries, thus the body as a whole has a democratic mandate.

By no means in any way is there any possible justification for describing the EU has undemocratic. It's actually much MORE democratic than many of its members.

Yes, in the Netherlands all major ISPs block most Pirate Bay proxies. Hooray for TOR.

Your point is correct and fair based on then way I wrote the comment but it wasn’t my intention to mislead. I need to learn how to ragetype better.

I do think it’s super interesting that the additional gambling site bans happened reasonably quiet last week.

I say reasonably as I play poker, and care if poker is banned, but agree banning gambling is a net positive. Even then I didn’t hear about the ban until 4 days after it happened.

Link doesn't work, which makes a purely link based reply useless.

Let's agree to disagree, I still consider Google a repeat offender, nothing has changed. The amount I found reported goes under cost of business and not deterring fines anyway.

Merged now. Thanks!

UK ranks much worse than most countries in the world wrt privacy. ironic considering their traditional values

Yeah, sorry to not be specific. I meant the private use without the (assumed, possibly only theoretical) public body oversight.

That Victoria greeter situation sounds terrifying

Nobody — almost nobody — is a moustache-twirling villain who wants to eliminate privacy for its own sake. I doubt many people voted for a 10% devaluation of the pound either, yet since then I’ve seen different people looking at the same graph saying “it’s gone back up” and “going down is good”.

But…

…one of the big bug-bears of the newspaper and politicians whom I associate with Brexit is how the Human Rights Act stops the British criminal justice system from doing whatever it wants, including violating the privacy of anyone suspected of Being A Wrong’n.

I know Human Rights Act/European Convention on Human Rights/European Court of Human Rights are different things from the EU. I bet you know that too. Do your neighbours know it? Do they even know what the HRA says or do they say something about Abu Hamza?

Everyone I’ve seen who supports Brexit sees the EU as somewhere between “greedy and incompetent” on the low end and “the unholy spawn of Hitler and Stalin” on the high end (paraphrasing). I am aware that could be Nut Picking on my part, so I’m open minded about how wrong I could be about how other people think.

Here's Dearlove on Brexit: https://briefingsforbrexit.com/jeremy-corbyn-and-national-se... ; he's retired, which allows him to speak on the subject.

The security services are supposed to be both secret and impartial, which makes it difficult to directly find out what they want, but campaigning against ECHR has been a common theme of Home Secretaries for years and Brexit is a necessary precondition for leaving ECHR.

And of course, what people wanted from Brexit and what they're going to get are two almost completely unrelated things.

You're suggesting that shop owners use a Howitzer to shoot flies.

Using such technology for this purpose is a massive overkill and prone to abuse.

I already resent some of the tracking techniques used by shops today (i.e abusing my cell phone for their tracking). I hope that some enterprising citizens (I see organizations like the CCC) publish lists of shops employing such technology.

Because I, for one, wil make damn sure that they don't get my business. Not! one! penny!

>Shop owners may want to use it for marketing

Please no. I find it annoying enough that I can't click on random youtube links for fear of being bombarded with viral trash for the next few weeks. I really don't want to be bombarded by ads just because I looked into a window display for a bit too long.

By "shop owners may want to use it for marketing" you mean large companies that would love to build complete behavior profiles and then sell them?

Edit: Even if this is somehow restricted to small ago owners I don't think they have the right to have my identity because I setup into their shop. I do think a reasonable exception could be carved out to allow monitoring for a specific list of individuals who have been banned from the premises.

> Shop owners may want to use it for marketing

That's the exact case most of us want it banned for.

Doesn't sound like a legitimate usecase. Sorry.

>But if you do have reason to worry about this, investing in this technology might help a bit with spotting spies.

This seems really doubtful. If anything the wide availability of commercial surveillance data would be a treasure trove for intelligence agencies to sift through.

Yep, that’s exactly my fear. If we collectively think of it as banned then we will have no societal defense for it.