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Comment by ddrt | Hacker News Reader

I shudder for the future.

Yolo does bounding box detection on faces. Classifying those faces is something else's job.

Xolo does feature vector extraction on face regions. Extracting those regions from larger images is something else’s job.

Zolo does feature vector similarity analysis on facial feature vectors. Extracting those vectors is something else’s job.

Oh look, now every authoritarian government has free access to never before seen levels of data harvesting. But nobody has to feel any guilt because they only contributed a third of the machine. Hooray!

The future is coming, and the tech that can enable authoritarian behavior will come no matter what we do as they're just tools. It's been here and around us in ever-increasing forms for decades and yet we haven't necessarily devolved into a big brother state.

What we should be worrying is actual usages of grand scale citizen-control and monitoring projects that are enabled by technology. Think China, not UK or US.

> and yet we haven't necessarily devolved into a big brother state.

Well this is damn close. It just needs an executive apparatus which is where drones surely come in handy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...

And yet, a $0.50 facemask will completely destroy the surveillance.

Nah, gait based subject recognition might come in the future.

Maybe wear high heels?

Gait based recognition is way overrated, plus it's a lot harder to sell to a jury.

Already in use in places like China. And we know the US govt has secret courts to authorize wiretaps. We’re on the brink.

Why use hypothetical stuff as an argument?

We have to worry about it in the US and the UK too. I mean, monitoring is already widespread in the US, UK, Canada, etc. Filtering, and therefore control, was almost reality in the UK last year, albeit limited to pornography. But it's a slippery slope in both cases.

If open source models aren't developed, and even if they are, governments are going to develop their own. At least this way everyone else is on equal footing and not at a strict disadvantage. This tech could be used to identify police when they are in riot gear and cover their identification, for instance.

No, it couldn’t. We can’t see their face. We could maybe do it with gait analysis. But I haven’t seen public models for that (a good thing!)

Well, you often can see police officers' faces through their visors, just as you can sometimes recognize people through fabric masks. Police don't wear gas masks all the time, only when they're about to or immediately after deploying gas.

The police I saw at Seattle protests did indeed wear de-identification equipment even when not actively deploying chemical weapons against the civilians. I have photos.

You can't classify faces if you haven't found them. Building the face detector enables the face classifier.

What enables the face detector? Where does it end?

Face detection is a critical and difficult part of face classification, it's not like we're decrying the invention of the transistor. It's more like working for a bullet manufacturer and hoping they'll be used for hunting deer. It ends wherever you set your ethical boundaries, and it's certainly not black and white, but I'd say the man who builds fireworks from gun powder has an easier time than the one who puts it in steel casings.

Picasa is still the best software for that.

Is it? Is there some kind of comparison with metrics? In my own use I found it to be pretty good, but I have no idea what else is out there.

I have used Digikam because I thought it was 4 years newer but it was a complete and utter disaster. Huge problems (slow) when using it with a lot of pictures, face detection all over the place and a shitty interface to tag people.

Picasa on the other hand has no problems with huge libraries and the tagging interface is actually fun to use.

Downside to Picasa is that the initial indexing is very slow, as it only uses 1 core.

Also (both Digikam and Picasa do this) software needs to write metadata into the JPG file. No sidecar allowed.

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