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Comment by osipov | Hacker News Reader

Just recently IBM announced with a loud PR move that the company is getting out of the face recognition business. Guess what? Wall Street doesn't want to keep subsidizing IBM's subpar face recognition technology when open source and Google solutions are pushing the state of the art.

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Not something to brag about. Facial recognition has very few applications outside of total surveillance. We should not respect those who lend it their time and effort.

I thought the real focus on the bad actors at this point was on gait detection. Works in civil unrest situations where everyone covers their face.

Not the the difference matters that much.

Its not exclusive. Bad actors are working on whatever they are paid to build, by other bad actors with less technical acumen and more money.

Edit: I should add, that most of the actual progress is being made by smart people who think its an interesting problem and are unaware or uncaring of the clear outcome of such tech.

In this case I meant bad actors as in who is funding the research with the idea of increasing surveillance for the purpose of squashing dissent.

>Facial recognition has very few applications outside of total surveillance.

That's not really for you to decide, is it? You're absolutely free to have that opinion of course.

>We should not respect those who lend it their time and effort.

Also your choice of course. Facial recognition is essentially a light integration of powerful underlying technologies. Should 'we' ostracize those working on machine learning, computer vision, network and distributed computing, etc?

If they want to use it to enable surveillance, yes.

You didn't really address the author's point which was that there don't appear to be compelling uses of facial technology beyond mass automated surveillance.

I can't think of other uses and I'd be interested if you can come up with some.

Biometric authentication is one that comes to mind. Facial recognition running locally on my own photo library would also be useful for organizing photos. A cloud-free local-only home automation system that can tell the difference between owners/housemates/guests and customize behavior accordingly would also be nice.

I'm looking into YOLO for this, but it's moreso to verify your selfie == image on document, and we want to avoid sending highly sensitive information to third party providers.

The current service we use, while accurate, costs 50 cents per verification...

Edit: reading through this thread, if the model isn't super massive, we could offer on-browser verification! 27MB is still a hefty download though.

Labeling photos with who's in them, either on social media or in private image albums (creating indexes of people in your photos.)

Arguably this is a front for mass surveillance, or can easily be misused for that, but the ostensible purpose is separate and benign.

Here's one: identifying child soldiers.

[i] https://www.pyimagesearch.com/2020/05/11/an-ethical-applicat...

Some compelling use:

1) assistance to recognizing people (because low vision, because memory fails, because you have a lot of photos...)

2) ensure candidate X is actually candidate X and not a paid person to take the exam in name of candidate X

3) door access control (to replace/in addition to access card)

4) having your own X-Ray (like in Amazon Prime): identify an actor/actress/model

5) having your personal robot addressing you by name

also, having models that can run locally on "cheap enough" devices is also quite interesting that you more or less understand.

Compared to using API in the cloud or purchasing Hikvision cameras.

Just getting into this. Do you recommend any particular "dumb" camera devices with a quality stream?

what's your price range? indoor or outdoor? where do you want to do the inference?

> 2) ensure candidate X is actually candidate X and not a paid person to take the exam in name of candidate X

Can you imagine the bureaucratic nightmare that would be unleashed upon yourself if "the system" decides you aren't who you say you are because of the way you aged, an injury, surgery or a few new freckles?

This already happens sometimes with birth certificates and identity theft, and it's awful for those who have to experience it. I'd hate to have a black box AI inflicting that upon others for inexplicable reasons.

The question is always the same: is every technical/scientific progress desirable ? But it seems that this question isn't asked anymore, "move fast and break things" am I right ?

I'm much more worried about people using your arguments to try and shut down the discussion than people trying to open the debate, because once the mass surveillance/face recognition mass adoption pandora's box is open there won't be any way to go back.

When I see predator drones and FBI stingray planes above every major us cities during protests I already know we're not going in the "let's talk about this before reaching the point no return" direction.

>>> When I see predator drones and FBI stingray planes above every major us cities during protests

Can you provide evidence for this ? Not that I doubt it, but if I want to tell other people that story, I must have evidence to be believed :-)

edit: ah of course, 30 seconds of duckduckgo just provide the info I need : https://thehill.com/homenews/house/501445-democrats-press-dh...

Yes and plenty of other sources:

https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te...

https://www.wired.com/2016/01/california-police-used-stingra...

https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2014/12/06/activists-say-chicag...

Once the tech is out there it's simply a question of "when" will it be used for borderline illegal activities, especially in the US where you have these different entities (fbi, cia, nsa, dea, &c.) basically acting in their own bubble and doing whatever they want until it's leaked and/or gets outrageous enough to get the public attention.

I mean, there were unidentified armed forces marching in US streets last week, if people don't se this as the biggest red flag in recent US history I don't know what they need.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/akzvy8/unidentified-law-e...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/i-was-horrified...

> Facial recognition is essentially a light integration of powerful underlying technologies. Should 'we' ostracize those working on machine learning, computer vision, network and distributed computing, etc?

Couldn't you argue the same way against just about any kind of IED or booby trap? Yet people tend to ostracize those who make them more than they do people who make ball bearings and nails.

Who in Iraq was getting ostracized by their family and friends for making IEDs?

Being able to distinguish between people is pretty foundational to being able to personalize AI applications. If you wanted to make a smart home actually smart and not just full of inconvenient remote controlled appliances, this is pretty necessary.

There are obviously privacy concerns with this example, it’d ideally be fully on-prem.

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