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Comment by throwaway713 | Hacker News Reader

I have no problem if a company performs facial recognition on me as long as I give them permission and it is used for specific purposes. Why should the government interfere with my ability to decide how images of my face are used?

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Why should a company be allowed to perform wide scale facial recognition, analysis, and use as its training data the images of people who never consented to that use just so that it can determine whether the face it has in front of it is your face that you gave them consent to use?

Why are people uploading photos of others who never gave their consent to have their image online in the first place?

Disrespect? Ignorance? They're huge fans of surveillance capitalism? The more GDPR rules and further privacy regulations such as this help prevent this practice, the better.

Consent should not be assumed and should be revokable if ever given. Yes means yes -- everything else means no.

That's a good question. Maybe we should focus on prosecuting everyone who publishes photos of others without their consent? Or not. But that's a question that's completely unrelated to the question of consenting to facial recognition.

because companies are lying to you about how your data is being used

Then make lying about it illegal, not the technology itself.

So have the government explain the risks of sharing personal data with corporations and then punish companies after the fact rather than preemptively.

I don’t understand why I shouldn’t be able to make an adult decision about taking risks with my own personal data.

Just like with a lot of things we have rules against, it's not just your personal data. Encoded in photos of you is data about your family, too. And in public, your surroundings, people nearby you, your location history, etc is all in the realm of these photo systems. There is more data in your photo than just you - this is a societal safety issue.

Allowing a free-for-all in all new tech that has clearly defined privacy issues at scale can cause a lot of runaway problems. A society who tries their best to reduce harm caused by bad actors using wild new technology that has huge privacy implications is a reasonable society to me.

Automated detection of your face matters to the rest of society, too. It's not just your privacy that is affected, it is other people's too.

A society that issues blanket bans on new technologies instead of specific problem behaviors is one that ends up falling behind

How can a company know that you have given them consent before they perform the facial recognition?

You sign a contract, TOS, ect?

In a public space?

If you can't get the permission, then you don't have it - so yes, they can't simply use it on unsuspecting people in a public space.

Is the mechanism of consent relevant here?

How can it not be? We are talking about public spaces here.

Do the facial recognition, then throw out that data if it turns out the face in question isn't in the whitelist of consenting users.

Computers aren't like humans. They have the ability to permanently and irreversibly forget certain information, and they always do exactly what they're programmed to. A local, on-device facial recognition programmed to immediately discard information on unrecognized faces has exactly zero privacy impact. (See also: smart speakers listening for a hotword.)

False positives.

(See also: smart speakers listening for a hotword.)

Which is, ironically, a problem that is solvable by improving the accuracy of voice/facial recognition technology.

Ironically how? Facial recognition isn't banned. Research isn't banned.

Another problem is that the risk of abuse is too great, even if the accuracy was flawless.

I find it ironic because that's one particular privacy problem where better facial recognition technology is the solution, not the cause.

If the accuracy were flawless then there would be zero false positives, and the aforementioned issue wouldn't exist at all.

You can't seriously believe that better facial recognition technology will result in better privacy - in any imaginable future. We live in a universe where Facebook and Google exist and people in adtech can justify their actions. Yet perfect facial recognition will lead to better privacy?

Oh, and it is hardly the only issue.

You're taking my statement out of context. Better facial recognition would fix the one particular privacy issue that you brought up. (False positives.) I've said nothing about adtech, Google, Facebook, or any of the other topics you're just now bringing into this discussion.

Fair enough, I just don't find that solving one edge-case at the same time as creating countless new major issues is particularly helpful.

> A local, on-device facial recognition programmed to immediately discard information on unrecognized faces has exactly zero privacy impact. (See also: smart speakers listening for a hotword.)

This just isn't true, though. Hotword detection fails frequently for me with Siri, Google Home, and Alexa. I haven't tried the others. They all pick up unrelated sounds and record them as if the hotword was spoken when it definitely was not. Not even a similar sounding set of words.

There are absolutely privacy implications for technology that does automated scanning and recognition of its environment. They are buggy, as all programs are, and they are hackable, as all programs are.

Being both potentially buggy, potentially hackable, and constantly alert and running algorithms on their environment is absolutely a valid and real privacy concern.

Who do you work for?

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