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Comment by kbos87 | Hacker News Reader

So much attention is always paid to accuracy when facial recognition comes up. Even if it was 100% accurate, it’s a technology that makes mass surveillance too efficient. Prohibitions need to also extend to the private sector, with the exception of, say, facial recognition for personal use (eg FaceID.)

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>So much attention is always paid to accuracy when facial recognition comes up.

Because many people are ok with mass-survielince as long as long as it's used fairly. The problem they see with this tech isn't that it's going to create the kind of world we don't want to live in but that it unfairly targets minorities and/or the poors more than other people. They don't understand that it can never be fair because the institutions that run it can never be fair because there will always be out-groups because that's how human nature works and they will get disproportionately screwed unless we limit the ability of the majority to screw them.

I have yet to encounter a single person IRL that wants to live in a society where the authorities know their exact location at all times (yeah yeah cell phones are gps trackers, whatever, you can leave them at home but you can't leave your face).

Or other private citizens. What’s stopping someone from creating a mesh of ring cameras and using photos scraped from social profiles to let individuals track one anothers‘ whereabouts in real time?

Technically? Nothing. Legally, this would be huge privacy incursion. In the EU, we have, among other things, (usually constitutional) right to privacy, anti-harassment and anti-stalking laws etc.

Also logistically, it is nearly impossible. The idea falls apart when attempting comprehensive surveillance. There is simply too much noise and too much uncertainty from the low quality, at distance, uneven illumination video. I write FR software, and large installations typically fall apart because the humans are simply too lazy, they delegate too much that should not be delegated, they are lax and frankly incompetent. Outside of developing tech orgs, FR is too complicated for under-educated persons like the police. At minimum, you need to understand probabilities better than a typical consumer.

How does cross-camera object tracking fare? Don't need to recognize someone if you can follow them until you see their face or their car or destination clearly.

I don't see how it matters.

For all I know I'm being tracked in that way by satellite already. It's only when things become operative, of someone harasses you or something ... but then they'd be easily traced and prosecuted.

In short, I'm not sure I care.

I wouldn't have a huge problem with it in particular not if it includes the authorities themselves.

I used to see privacy as empowering but I've changed my opinion more and more to seeing transparency as more important, across multiple dimensions, not just policing.

Whether it's tax avoidance and financial havens, human trafficking scandals, sexual abuse victims being empowered by social media to communicate and hold people accountable, watching the police (very relevant), it seems more and more to me that privacy is mostly a tool for the individually powerful whereas transparency is a tool for collective action and impartiality.

Historically speaking, when the world was small towns and rural, “surveillance” was a fact of life. Everyone knew someone who knew someone else.

The big difference is that surveillance was localized and didn’t follow the person.

If someone did a crime or did something against local mores and got ostracized they could skip town and settle somewhere else to begin anew. Now, of course being the new person in a new place you were under scrutiny, but as long as you followed local practices your old peccadilloes or even crimes didn’t follow you.

being able to skip town and move somewhere else is good if you've refused to fight a duel of honor or sent love letters to someone of the same sex, not so good if you've killed a few people.

True. It had defects; however, I think for serious crimes they’d attempt to catch the person (Wanted postings), but for less serious things they would ostracize them and have them pack their bags.

Not only did this locality allow people to recover from past mistakes, it also limited the power of any one actor. As soon as a town loses faith in a ruler (or other large actor) that ruler loses the ability to locate more radical dissidents in that town. That's how revolutions are possible.

With total surveillance any revolution movement can be efficiently destroyed before it gains any momentum. That removes an important check on any government's (or corporation's) power.

> The big difference is that surveillance was localized and didn’t follow the person

That is a big difference. But the big difference is how one-sided the new surveillance is. In a small town, they knew everything about you, but you also knew everything about them.

Today, parking regulations in my town are enforced by cars that circle around scanning every license plate parked on every street. I could probably find out who has access to that data if it were a priority for me. But what's stopping a private entity from doing the same thing? I'd never know it happened. Cell carriers selling my location data? I could easily have never known about this. Ad tracking companies having a record of most sites I visit? I don't even know who they are other than a few major ones.

Great point. What if all the data were available for everyone to access? Would it feel ok then?

(Not sarcasm)

Sure, but then I’m not sure it would be that valuable to law enforcement (maybe that’s the point).

Yes, I think that would basically be OK.

Even if "all the data" were accessible by all citizens, there would still be a massive asymmetry present in the government's ability to process that data into useful information.

Government and corporation. The FAANG companies clearly have enough processing power to churn an entire nation's big data streams.

Although, if one's goal were a town or even an individual city, I bet enough infrastructure to sift the data is buildable or rentable by individuals or small groups of individuals.

It becomes an interesting world when non-profits can afford big data resources.

I think that's our best option for avoiding oppression. Case in point, video of George Floyd. If we had widespread public (by the public) surveillance, I think people would feel safer. If someone is "disappeared," hopefully there'd be evidence that the ACLU could pursue.

The "extraordinary rendition" program the CIA was using to disappear terror suspects into places they could be tortured was discovered in part by airplane-spotting hobbyists. Because planes are extremely hard to hide, and there are people who watch airports to see what takes off and lands for fun.

When they pooled their data, they were the first group to notice the military had started running flights to and from locations they didn't normally fly, and it didn't take much investigative journalism after that to discover those planes were carrying people.

Do you have any sources for people who are interested in reading more on that?

Extraordinary rendition is a good search phrase.

Realistically, people would build tooling — either free, ad supported, or SaaS-based — that lets the average person synthesize publicly available data. Just making the data available allows motivated individuals / groups to do a lot of the work upfront, and then share the fruits of that work with everyone else, either for free or for a fee.

You see this already today with data from census bureau, FRED databases, COVID tracking tools, think tanks, etc.

David Brin went down the rabbit hole of asymmetric surveillance in is novel Earth. He also explored the idea more in the non-fiction book The Transparent Society. In both he imagines a world were privacy is essentially illegal. This levels the field between mega-corps/governments and individuals: instead of the false sense of privacy we have now everyone has equal access to everything.

I think it’s a big problem because many people do crime because they are poor or don’t have a solid family unit. Once they get into the system we don’t provide resources to rehab them but basically train them to become criminals. Or when they get out even if they satisfy what society asks of them, we make it really hard to recover with a felony on their record. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/magazine/felon-attorney-c...

It's true, but I think we paint an overly-rosy picture of what that was like.

Outsiders were shunned for a reason. Because one didn't know if they had left their previous town because they were too antisocial to coexist.

Especially, even if one were to assume the current government were a perfectly democratic one who would use technical abilities only for good, who can guarantee this for a government 8 years down the line?

To be honest I had expected the GOP to come up with ... let's say substandard candidates, but Trump is on a level no one would ever have thought possible. And there are people way, way more authoritarian than him in this party.

Yeah. No more hoping for a cyberpunk future where people survive in the cracks. If surveillance tech grows, we'll get a society with nowhere to hide at all.

Everyone will walk around with hoods and glasses to cover their distinguishing characteristics (eye-nose-mouth measurements, ears, etc.).

And shims in their shoes to hide their gait, and enclosed in plastic to hide their scent from artificial noses and to prevent shedding DNA, and they'll sneak around the sewers to hide from satellites, and carrying lead weights to hide their mass from for sensors, and foil suits to hide from mm-wave devices in doorways, and fake irises to hide the iris pattern viewed in non-visible frequencies, ...?

Hoods and glasses only work if everyone is doing it. In certain parts of my town you can tell the drug runners by their "uniform", primarily pulled down hoodies and a hand down their trousers.

==Hoods and glasses only work if everyone is doing it. In certain parts of my town you can tell the drug runners by their "uniform", primarily pulled down hoodies and a hand down their trousers.==

I'm not sure I follow your logic. Your experience seems to prove the point that pulling a hoodie down helps conceal your identity, I assume that is why the drug dealers do it.

The focus of the article is facial recognition, which is commercially available today. Your examples all require some type of initial identification to know where to check for someone's mass, scent, DNA, etc.

This is the cyberpunk future. Finding bodymods and shirts or stuff that hides you from the algorithm is the new pasttime.

Hiding your face is already illegal in the uk.

I agree that the government shouldn't be able to deploy this tech. We should have some expectation of freedom and pseudonymity in public. However, everyone always forgets that it is trivial to track your (almost) exact physical location at all times with our constant mobile phone use. We don't seem to mind this much at all.

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