30k unsuspecting Rose Bowl attendees scooped up in a facial recognition test
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
Sitting in the stands no longer feels like you're watching an incredible game. Instead it feels like you're watching the game live on ESPN(given the level of advertisements) but sitting in the stands.
I'm certainly not the first to point out how commercialized sports have become, but it's disconcerting seeing stadiums try to hook you into staring at an ad for four hours instead of enjoying a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Another example was the flyover: A B2 flew over just before kickoff[0] and I, along with almost everyone else, had never seen one before. An announcement over the loudspeakers asked that everyone hold up a small sign so that the stadium looked like the American flag from above. This was great for viewers at home and horrible for anyone in the stands because all you could see was the back of the sign you and everyone else were holding up.
We seem to have gotten so far away from what sports are about(two teams competing to see who's best) that we've landed on milking as much money out of the fans as they possibly can.
Facial recognition, in this context, seems to be doing the same. Rather than giving fans a fantastic experience, the folks running these games are trying to monetize them instead.
[0] - https://www.oregonlive.com/ducks/2020/01/check-out-this-aeri...
I take issues with your use of the word "we". If you asked them, 95% of people would say this should stop. In the past, economic and political leaders were drawn from the nation as a whole, and had a sense of loyalty and social obligation to their fellow countrymen, even if it meant leaving a few dollars on the table. Globalization and the increasing cultural and ethnic divide between the upper and lower classes in western countries has ended that fealty. May it soon return.
For refrigerators (looking at you GE), they build up dust, and the airflow fan dies because of built up dust. And try getting a replacement if you aren't a GE Certified repair person. Even GE referrals often suck and cannot do the job. Took three repair visits to get a fan replaced.
If anyone has some solid refrigerator suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Preferably with water and ice in-door .
Quite frankly, none exist. Every fridge on the market in a regular kitchen size (smaller than industrial) is an entirely plastic piece of crap with a life expectency of 5-10 years.
It wasn't an issue of money, of searching, or willingness to wait. There just wasn't any alternative.
https://gist.github.com/peteryates/b44b70d19ccd52f62d66cdd4b...
I had a Kenmore Trio which gave up the ghost after 15 years late last year. I had repaired it myself a couple times, but this last time the sealed system failed and that's beyond my skill set and too expensive to pay someone to repair.
I found basically the exact same fridge, manufactured now by Whirlpool, and the price was even within a few hundred dollars of what I paid in 2004. We'll see how long the replacement lasts. A few more bits of it that used to be metal are now plastic, but it also has a few improvements.
(The plastic drawers which slide on plastic rails... what are they thinking? Terrible design.)
I've kept my Fisher-Paykel Dish Drawers working since 2004, as well as my Fisher-Paykel double oven. The DDs have been interesting because FP has made incremental improvements over the years and they've made the parts available to retrofit to my models. Same for the oven, when one of the elements exploded, the replacement was a heavier duty element. I also retrofitted changes they made to the self-clean cycle and thermal limiter switches to prevent those from triggering incorrectly.
Our washing machine also died a year ago after almost 12 years of service. I replaced it with a Maytag HE model, and took the opportunity to redo the entire laundry room and switch from gas to electric dryer. We'll see how long these models last.
Anyway yes, while I basically agree, I've not had any appliance last me less than a decade, so I've done okay. Knock on wood.
My prior Samsung was turrible. Super loud with disconcerting random pops. Absolutely nightmare to clean (my son defrosted some meat and the juice got every where, grrr).
I haven't kept track, but I think Haier bought up GE's appliance division. Irony.
Hell for more than half of the history of the US, half the population wasn't even allowed to vote, much less make it into the Senate.
According to wikipedia, 60% of the African-American senators EVER have been elected in the past 20 years. 40% of the total in the past 10 years. A significant proportion of the total African-Americans to have been in the house of reps are currently serving. Similar statistics for Latinos and Asian-Americans.
Most western nations came from the British system, which literally had people born as noble.
Anyway its infinitely better to focus on actually doing the sports rather than just watching them passively.
I make exceptions from time to time, but only for more or less marginal sports without big bucks. If folks do it mainly because they love it, then count me in. Climbing seemed for a long time doing just fine, but its also changing, and with introduction on olympics I may start skipping that one too.
All those that spend money on this are partially guilty... vote with your wallet and your time (which for ad business is money at the end).
It isn't just sports. It's everything. I've read several articles posted here on HN where someone makes a cool piece of hardware and they can't get funding until they come up with a subscription model to charge customers every 30 days. Look at app stores, Apple had meetings with devs a few years ago to get them on board with a subscription model for apps. Now it is the developer preferred model. Even (chain) restaurant food has been optimized for cost and not flavor.
Imagine in hitler had access to this tech and simply purchased a database of "Likely Jewish" facial data?
Seems more likely than not that it was done at recent protests, no?
edit: I'm not suggesting that you're skipping out on the toll. They may be taking a photo at the same time as the attempt to scan the RFID sticker. And then sending a ticket to the scanned plate number if it fails to scan a RFID.
Do you genuinely believe those drones flying over every major city taking high resolution photos of everyone within 30 miles are there for fun?
Short term: camera resolution on the average cell phone is often better than an array onboard a satellite, so the MVP is a native app that window seat passengers use to record in-flight. Because we know the flight route before takeoff and GPS works in Airplane mode, we load in target coordinates and ping the user to begin recording when flying over a target coordinate. They receive free in-flight wifi for their effort, but we also use the wifi connection to stream the video feed. That gets us more exposure to the 77,000 daily flights across the U.S. each day (also boosts general awareness: "Why are you recording out the window?")
Long term: we're developing a hardware solution much more powerful than a cell phone camera with a 6-camera array and many more sensors, including an infrared dome for near-field cloud penetration and onboard preprocessor for compressing the stream before sending it back down to earth. The form factor is akin to a headphone case (I actually used a Bose headphone case for the prototype) and is mounted to the window within the cabin, mitigating the need for FAA (but not FCC) approval. There are some teaser images on our Instagram if you're curious - @notasatellite.
Plus video quality is usually pretty crappy and you'd need heaps of post-processing to stabilize the video/remove dirt spots on the window, etc. I find it difficult to believe that this would work well with random people filming with their smartphones out a plane window.
There are still a ton of variables that affect image quality. Type of aircraft, weather conditions, altitude, camera, seat position (sitting forward of the wing is slightly more advantageous because the inference engine doesn't have to correct for the exhaust blur in the aft), angle of view, residual engine vibration/dampening, time of day, flap/aileron position, the list goes on. Part of the go-to-market strategy involves making sure the hardware product and the inference engine handles a number of those limitations. Neither satellite nor aerial imagery is perfect, but you have a vastly higher chance with ~80,000 flights/day vs. the 300 commercial imaging satellites in orbit, with automatic cost savings in the millions that we can pass on to our customers.
Not-so-subtle marketing pitch--you can see a bunch of real-life examples on our socials @notasatellite.
- container volume in and out of ports (which are usually in industrial zones right next to airports)
- daily crop harvest rates from the midwest states
- a small undergrad research team in Oregon is analyzing the mist and water turbidity of Willamette Falls to determine flow rate and the impact to salmon runs
- estimating the amount of oil moving in and out of Cushing, Oklahoma by measuring the shadow cast on tanks over 3,500 times per day
- wildfire detection and monitoring on non-daylight flights
There are a bunch of other demos and use cases on our social accounts as well--we're @notasatellite on all the platforms.
On the anthropology side, it might also be useful for looking at statistical information about populations/settlements that's difficult to collect other ways due to either the remoteness of the area and the frequency of other data sources. Things like nomadic migration patterns or land use in areas like Siberia / Mongolia, Myanmar, or northern Canada.
Our goal is to even the playing field when it comes to accessing spatial data and I feel that's adequately reflected in the core feature of our mapping software; whether you're a forensic analyst at Interpol or the neighbor kid looking up BMX trails, you'll always be looking at the most up-to-date map data. Paid customers receive features of course, but what appears on the map is the same regardless of whether or not you're paying.
Your stakeholders have all been burned before either personally or by other vendors and you will have to somehow built trust against those mental barriers.
I personally treat any company who can access my information as if they are willing to undermine their previous statements, have non-public contracts which sell/trade my information with disreputable companies, can pivot in a moment of desperation to do everything they previously promised not to do, may be M&Aed in such a way that all previous contracts are significantly modified, could have terrible security controls of their data, or may not actually delete all copies of data when they say they do.
The mental barrier is difficult to overcome, and you can't win them all. Distill the message too much with "We make money by selling data" and you'll never see a customer, but the opposite is true as well; "The startup doth protest too much, methinks"
Assuming 30m intervals and a 1m GSD I can know when someone is or isn't home based on whether or not a car is in their driveway. For people living in the vicinity of an airport where the GSD and intervals would presumably be much higher I could track individuals to and from their home or office from the comfort of a coffee shop.
Either of the above capabilities has ramifications for things like:
- stalking and harassment (no need to follow someone physically)
- home invasion and theft (can determine when someone is out of the house)
- targeting of dissidents (can track who showed up at a meeting)
- kidnapping and rendition (can know when someone is isolated without committing physical surveillance resources)
Those are just a few of the things I can come up with off the top of my head.
Even if you limit your tools to governments and businesses what prevents illegitimate organizations from using shell companies [2] or other means for establishing legitimate accounts to your services, and what prevents individuals within legitimate organizations from accessing the tools for personal means? [3]
Calling this a "PR issue" grossly understates the potential damage a technology like this can cause in the wrong hands.
[1] "Aerial Imagery Based on Commercial Flights as Remote Sensing Platform" 03/2020 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339988238_Aerial_Im...
[2] https://money.cnn.com/2015/12/09/news/shell-companies-crime/...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveil-lance-watchdo...
*edited for formatting
I'm more or less a team of one at the moment and the original instinct when I had the idea was along the lines of "If I'm having to address privacy concerns, I must be doing something right", implying some degree of public interest in the product. There's now quantifiable interest and the waitlist hasn't stopped growing. Comments like yours make me realize I need a rock-solid set of first principles before enlisting outside help. The eternal optimist sees infinite use cases and it's easy to discard the bad and the ugly ones for the good, but the ramifications you've listed will kill the product before it even truly starts.
I'd love to chat more about this side of product development and throw some questions your way if you've got some time to spare (chris@notasatellite.com), but thank you again for the thoughtful response and reading material.
People voluntarily post their minute-frequency gps location, workplace, political and religious leanings, sexual preferences, views on current events, and an exhaustive list of friends, family, coworkers, and other associates. Not to mention hundreds, if not thousands, of geo-tagged pictures of themselves over the years, along with a list of the other people in the frame, as well as a written discussion of the events photographed.
A friend is a detective who essentially looks for and forms relationships with people with security cameras, especially cameras that can be linked to a reference time source (like a red light camera)
The cost of things like LPR and soon facial recognition is so low (and going lower) that you’re going to have many federated networks tracking movements of cars and people.
The red light camera is taking video footage with a trusted and calibrated time stamp.
If you see an object appear in frame in both the red light camera and another camera, you can use this moment to establish a timestamp for the other camera.
So perhaps you see a subject walking in the red light camera (establishing time), but another camera lets you observe details about that subject.
This basically happened with lower-tech stuff; one of the ways that the Holocaust was facilitated was by conducting detailed censuses of the population, courtesy of IBM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
During the NFL Playoffs they couldn't show crowd shots because there were enough empty seats that it was noticeable. I saw empty seats at the super bowl.
I saw highlight on ESPN of an NBA game before the lock down, and it looked like a high School basketball game because of the number of empty seats.
Considering every player in the NBA, MLB, NFL, and NHL are all part of the 1% I'm done contributing to the rich.
I'll go see minor league baseball games, they are much more fun anyway.
I am pretty sure the Superbowl was sold out. People just didn't show up or were stuck in traffic. I believe this will be true for any NFL playoff games.
> Sports attendance is way down
Citations needed. Other than baseball, I highly doubt this is true for any sports in the US. Unless it's a team like Phoenix Suns.
"In the United States, a right to privacy has not ever been used by courts to restrict photography of people in public places. Not even once."
"I would not want my photograph being surrepticiously collected and used by an entity/organization for an indefinite period of time, stored in an indeterminate number of locations, and with unknown goals that may be related to mass surveillance; therefore, I will not perform that same action against others"
And based on others HN comments, even if it's not the majority opinion, it is not an exceptional opinion.
I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case.
That being said, that's essentially a "voluntary initiative" by these organizations implemented because they choose to follow these ethics guidelines. These ethics rules aren't universal or legally mandated for everyone so if a private company wants to do some unethical research with its own funds, if they don't want to publish the research but just use and sell it, then that company is not legally required or forced to follow any ethical restrictions. Within the limits of law, they can be as unethical as their owners are.
The solution to lack of ethics is legal restrictions and enforcement of them. A few USA states have limitations on facial recognition. In EU, GDPR would apply for a situation like this.
This makes it inconvenient to explore the web at large.
The banners should be opt-in not opt-out, but this is against many of the website owner's current interests - including many news sites. So, I've stopped visiting them.
Unless your talking about the 'X' to close the tab at which point, yes it is
You can also go into the uBO settings in the Filter Lists tab and enable some of the 'Annoyances' filters. Some of them block social media like/follow buttons but others will take care of popups.
From a quick google search VSBLTY's market cap seems to be under 20M, revenues under 1M. So 20M is much more than "cost of doing business".
Really? Are you sure you're not confusing it with profits?
Isn't 10% of revenue considered a decent profit margin? If a fine eats up half of that, it sounds pretty major (and reasonable) to me!
Definitely revenue. The point of the GDPR is to have some teeth when dealing with companies that are large enough to shrug off lesser fines.
Also note that it's 4% of worldwide revenue for the whole group of connected companies, not just 4% of their EU subsidiary revenue.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te...
People should only be entitled to privacy in their own homes/current dwelling. That's it (with a few exceptions). People should not be entitled to privacy in public.
I get that privacy zealots have to take extreme stances in order to counter-balance anti-privacy trends, but in real life, a world where absolute perfect privacy is the 24/7 default (public and private), is a world devoid of meaningful interactions between humans and also a world where criminals flourish.
Rights are granted through legislative processes. What is not a right today may be a right tomorrow.
The "right to absolute privacy in all places at all times" is also not a natural right
Is anybody asking for that? I haven't seen that anywhere. Can you provide a link?
There's a difference between "natural rights" (rights that are not dependent on the laws or customs of any particular culture or government) and what you describe. The type of right you describe is capricious and whimsical.
GP was complaining that airport travelers don't have privacy. So it seems like people are asking for it.
Can you name some places you believe right to privacy should not apply?
Do you think these rights come from god or something ? There are no rights that are independent to time, law, culture or government.
Both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...) and EU Convention of Human Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...) include privacy as one of the unalienable human rights.
[0] It's socially encouraged, even. In case anyone has forgotten over the past several months.
So you are saying private investigator is an illegal occupation?
If the US federal government tracks facial recognition in all stores and public spaces in all states, well that is large scale.
Also "own property" is utterly fallacious. I'm pretty sure my face is my property. It feels like you're just grasping at various reductionist straws here.
Say we invent technology that allows you to dump memories from your brain to png images or mp4.
Now say I look at you and later dump my memory of your face to a png and upload it to my own personal image analysis pipeline. Have I violated your privacy? What if I share it with others? Am I not allowed to share my own memories?
If I’m photographing a street in NYC and you’re in it, you have no right to complain. You’re in public, that’s how this goes.
Now if follow you around NYC for a week and only photograph streets you’re on, you do have a right to complain. Now that’s stalking, something you can get a restraining order over.
Facial recognition feels much more like the latter than the former.
I agree that with modern technology it would be difficult to guarantee or enforce absolute privacy in public spaces--everyone has a camera on them at all times these days! That said, I think the EU got it right with ideas like the right to be forgotten.
Knowing you were at a protest or frequented some store can be problematic depending on how that data is used and correlated. Knowing these things is also dangerous if this data sticks around for a long time--who's to say the political climate a few years from now will be anything like today?
Being able to look up every indiscretion somebody ever made can be a tactic for discrediting people or strong-arming them to do what you want. Cherry picking historical data about a person can make them look any way you want them to when presented to an audience of the public or your peers in court.
The thing I can't figure out is how we can find some middle ground in an ecosystem where not everybody will be acting in good faith. It's a real source of concern that deserves consideration.
Does RTBF extend to post-mortem privacy as well? I think RTBF should expire once a person has died at the very least. i.e. people like Harvey Weinstein might use RTBF to scrub their public image, but I want to know all the details after he has died. Otherwise you effectively have a permanent history-scrubbing tool, which is never good.
It's nice for an individual to be able to start from a clean slate. It's not so great for society at large when such people abuse the system to do harm to others.
“Natural rights” are nothing more than a fancy way of dressing up one’s subjective preference for the way things ought to be as a universal truth, saying “X is not a natural right” already includes the same meaning as adding “nor should it be”.
That's an extremely naive take on the question. Technology knows no bound by itself, left uncheck it'll "progress" forever. If we continue like that, and granted it is technically possible, we'll end up in a Minority report style policing. If people don't rise against this bullshit there will be no coming back.
AFAIk we had perfectly fine social interactions without facial recognition cameras at every corner or every streets, and giving up your privacy to fight "crime" is a ridiculous thing to do, it's the "think of the children" level of argumentation.
Also, ask yourself who benefits from these things. They don't do that to make you safe or reduce crime, especially in the US, when you look at the history of these kind of laws you always find out that it was profiting private companies all along. I wouldn't be surprised if all of these are pushed by something like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...
https://ccrjustice.org/home/blog/2020/05/08/alec-s-corporate...
Wouldn't that be a good thing? The world of Minority Report had a effective murder rate of 0%.
> Also, ask yourself who benefits from these things. They don't do that to make you safe or reduce crime, especially in the US, when you look at the history of these kind of laws you always find out that it was profiting private companies all along.
Ok, but if I run a business, why shouldn't I be able to monitor who comes in my store and auto-flag repeat shoplifting offenders?
There are many anti shoplifting methods that won't slowly creep into knowing my location and thoughts 24/7 and potentially be used against me when _thought of Thursday June 11 2020_ or _person met on Thursday June 11_ is deemed retro actively illegal in 2037.
The question isn't to know if it would be a good thing in a perfect world, but how easy and how far can you push it the other way and make it something completely nefarious. To me the pros are far out-weighted by the cons on this one.
Entertainment is subjective and I doubt you stare a blank wall all day so we could make fun of how you spend your time.
The football stadium is like the colosseum down here. It brings a lot of revenue to the towns and something to do.
Sports helps keeps kids out of trouble as well.
Citation needed.
From the article:
>Three fans who attended the Rose Bowl game and spoke to OneZero said they didn’t remember seeing any notice that they were being surveilled.
It's unlikely that anyone knew enough to be able to make an informed decision.
Sadly, legally, "privacy" is something you're not generally entitled to when outside in public (in the US AFAIK).
1) They didn't know about the surveillance. To quote from the article:
> “I actually had no idea they were using that type of tech at the game nor was I informed that I would be recorded or analyzed by such tech,” said California resident Benjamin Mercke. “Actually, that’s incredibly concerning to me.”
2) Any entertainment can be reduced to being considered pointless. I don't think it's a big stretch to accept that people are entertained by different things. I personally find concerts / music festivals unbelievably boring, but it's obvious that people love them, so I have no opinion on whether it's "worth it" to them.