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Comment by drak0n1c | Hacker News Reader

In Shenzhen, starting in the last couple years if you jaywalk your face is automatically recognized and the fine is automatically deducted from your bank account. It's extremely accurate due to full access to corroborating location/transit/payment data. This happens within 20 seconds, and even includes expats. Your face was permanently indexed during the passport check.

Such an automated system at first glance may seem like it reduces on-the-ground human flaws and bias, but it actually enables far deeper corruption. Those with administrative control would be able to selectively highlight or concoct any sort of offense to undermine their personal or political opponents.

"Show me the man and I'll show you the crime" - Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's Chief of Secret Police

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FWIW I live close to Shenzhen and have a company there and have never heard of this system actually being applied except through media announcements. I am skeptical it is widely deployed as jaywalking is rife here in nearby cities and in fact believe it is probably largely a proactive media announcement from a solutions provider to local police who is claiming to have better capabilities than they really do. Of course it will happen eventually but in urban areas globally we already carry cellphones and drive cars with number plates, so privacy left the arena some time ago...

Maybe in the short term we will see a push-back of all-weather snow-busting bicycle-riding mesh networkers in Berlin or something, but I think the global trajectory is clear. What we really need is an alternative to commercial cellular.

At 5:30 in this Bloomberg video there's a discussion between expats, some talking about how they were hit by the new system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydPqKhgh9Mg

I'm not doubting a system is deployed and can function sometimes, I'm doubting it's pervasive and generally effective even in Shenzhen. NB. Nanshan district where the guy mentions being done for jaywalking is the headquarters of Tencent.

True - such surveillance is still costly, and not yet omnipresent. Similar to speed cameras at certain intersections in the US. The hope is that it remains just that, an occasional feature that inspires deterrence, and does not escalate into omniscience.

I don't think it's costly. HikVision is one town away in Dongguan, and their foreign market just evaporated due to US sanctions. Cameras here are dirt cheap and many of them come paired with ICs that provide 'AI' as standard now. The only thing different in this case is overall resolution to cover an entire intersection (probably done with multiple cameras) and the face feature extraction code. Example Huawei product https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=id=618652543962 1080p SD card logging and 'AI' (probably event detection/trigger zones) USD$25 ordered at a volume of one.

I can confirm that I was in Zhongshan last year and saw a very big screen in the middle of a crosswalk island, it "named and shamed" jaywalkers, with pictures of the jaywalking and the face on their Chinese ID as well, although eyes are blurred out. Chinese name had one or two characters replaced with an X. Scary stuff.

Hot take: Within 10 years, I think there's going to be similar tech with personal cars, where you'll get automatically fined whenever you drive too fast, drive without seat belt, etc.

Then this information will be shared with insurance providers, and your car or health/life insurance will be automatically adjusted accordingly.

And, because why not, the dispute process is probably be some Kafkaesque ordeal.

They already exist for insurance. Many ads claim to reduce your insurance bill by proving you drive safely. They work by siphoning all the data off the OBD2 port and handing it to the insurance companies.

My country, unfortunately, already has this, though it's not fully automated. Cameras will take pictures whenever they detect someone breaking traffic lights. The license plate is read off, and a ticket is mailed to the car owners's house.

I think someone still looks at the pictures right now for 5 seconds before sending it off, but that won't last for very long.

If exiting injustices are any indication I predict the following:

In democracies that will likely result in speed limits and traffic laws that reflect how people actually drive or reduced penalties or reduced fines to the point where a large enough fraction of the population can pay to play. And then half of HN will hand wring about how we have an 85mph speed limit on the interstate and won't somebody think of the children.

There will be a few rich suburbs (the kind of places where the electorate clutches their pearls at the idea of anyone breaking any law even though they all text and drive in their land rovers and pay their baby-sitters under the table) that figure out they can just do it to outsiders only and create a revenue stream. They'll have a good 5-10yr run in the time it takes the courts to smack them down.

Teslas already have a user-facing camera. They are using them to make sure that if there's an accident, they can pin the blame on the driver (perhaps not looking straight forward, etc), and not their own technology.

Does this work with sunglasses and facemasks?

Facial recognition can work with ordinary facemasks. I don't have a link handy, but I'm sure Google can produce one, given the timeliness of the question.

As to your question, I also wonder about such things as:

* Makeup: https://www.vogue.com/article/anti-surveillance-makeup-cv-da...

* Hair styles: https://cvdazzle.com/

* Clothes: https://www.businessinsider.com/clothes-accessories-that-out...

* Infrared LEDs: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/fooling_face_...

* Image manipulation software: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21353810/facial-recognitio...

And other things.

The first several links all say they make a big difference. Face masks are already known to stop the spread of coronavirus. Apparently, they can also make it much harder for facial-recognition software to identify you, too. (cnn)

It’s true accurate identification in ideal conditions is still possible, but catching random jaywalkers is hardly ideal conditions.

Right, but the newest of the first 4 links are still 6 months old. Six months is an eternity in the world of technology, ya know?

How much is 6 months converted into units of "new JS frameworks," BTW? ;)

> Six months is an eternity in the world of technology, ya know?

That's not even true in research, let alone production-ready deployment at scale.

Just because there might be a paper out that pushes SOTA by a few percentage points, doesn't mean there's a halfway usable product behind it as well.

Facial recognition can work with ordinary facemasks

In theory, in practice it's unlikely to be very reliable outside of controlled situations like passport checks. https://apex.aero/articles/facial-recognition-tech-works-mas...

inb4 'gait recognition is foolproof'.

Facial recognition is one of those "the little things add up" type deals. The tech is still not on par with humans and humans can't reliably recognize each other (unless it's like your sibling or something) without context clues when it's someone they aren't expecting and the person is wearing a mask or has a beard and the lighting is crappy.

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