Comment by throwaway47292 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway47292 | Hacker News Reader

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Sadly, I think we are beyond opt-out with any facial recognition.

I recently showed[1] to my daughter (10) as teaching her python, how easy it is to build some basic facial recognition using modern libraries and models.

I had it running with one of her pictures, and i just asked her to come in front of the computer for a second to check something out, and she was completely shocked when the video put her name below her face, and my name below my face. She was shocked, a bit curious, and a bit revolted.

On the next day when I took her to school, I just showed the amount of cameras on the way, and in the mall. At first she thought that its not an issue, as every camera only sees locally around it, so they cant connect her journey, but then she realised someone can own many cameras.

I think we need to invest much more into adversarial machine learning[2] and possibly form some sort of organization to fund it. (I hope it will be called move-78 as Lee Sedol's hand of god move against alpha go)

[1]: https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxbazQ6wJlU

> she realised someone can own many cameras

Or that the cameras are insecure, effectively public, and a motivated person or state could do the same.

haha i didnt tell her that yet, she is only 10 :D

It's debatable how effective this is but CV Dazzle may just become a trend for youth. I'd support that but I'd expect to start seeing schools and commercial areas ban such practices.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/makeu...

thanks for the link! i immediately tried it https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

its a screenshot of detecting me despite the paint, and i tried whole bunch of colors and etc to trick it that my eyes are not where they are, and it did not work, I think it was easier in 2014, seems you really need to hide your eyes now, and its gonna be quite annoying for bald people like me haha

anyway, i updated the book as well, with the link

thanks!

This article was precovid

Covid masking with sunglasses and a cap make someone effectively anonymous.

Masks are a big finger to the NSA.

keep in mind mask alone is not enough

https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

and glasses + mask as well

https://github.com/jackdoe/programming-for-kids/blob/master/...

and this is https://github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition completely out of the box, no tuning or anything, just copy pasted the example

You really need huge sample sets for this stuff to apply in the real world. We started using fingerprints because of how hard it can be to tell people apart.

Start talking 100 million faces + public cameras and it’s difficult. Where AI really stands out it having a specific face and looking for that in days of video footage. But, even then you want to train for false positives.

It's not debatable. It's ineffective.

I saw other reports of people who wear full face scarves or stickers of noses and eyes, are there better techniques that work?

Pretty incredible for 10 year old to make such projects and to then apply to the world around her! You must be so proud :)

you have no idea :)

> I think we need to invest much more into adversarial machine learning

That just becomes an ever-escalating arms race. We need to invest in political and social systems that regulate the use of technology, not imagine that we'll overcome the dystopian use of technology by applying yet more technology.

Don't you people read the classics? Neal Stephenson seems to write books 10 years ahead of time that predict all technologies (crypto, metaverse, etc).

"Reamde" has multiple cool ideas (the miasma, basically our dystopian internet information sphere we live in today), but one of them is people walking down the street with glasses that have some kind of light device that shines on your face to confuse facial recognition.

Why? Every time people make new technology to subvert the government, they must raise their tyranny in order to regain control.

Encryption, for example. It denies the government information, evidence. There's nothing it can do about that. So will it criminalize encryption itself? Will it presume guilt if you refuse to decrypt? Will it ban free computers that run software not signed by the government?

After enough iterations, we'll either end up with an uncontrollable population wielding ubiquitous subversive technology, or an omnipotent totalitarian state that defeats any attempt at subversion before they can develop.

I hope for everyone's sake that the governments will discover their own limits before either outcome.

we should do both

as political changes are incredibly slow, in the meantime we need to make it harder to collect

you know very well no data will be deleted, in the modern 'data is money' mode of operation

its not even on purpose, its just hard to delete from petabytes of hadoop garbage

Ironically YCom just just backed this [1] and it is facial recognition in schools [2].

[1]: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/safer-management

[2]: https://www.safermgmt.com/

hahaha i cant help but to laugh in despair

look what we have built

this is the internet we made

for our children

Not just the internet. This is the world we have made for our children. It is highly distressing.

I just feel somehow personally responsible for the way things went with the internet and surveillance capitalism.

I remember in early 2000s how I used to download some programs[1] to pay me to watch ads. I didn't pay content creators anything, didnt donate, I didnt have money, but I could've spared some.

I just didn't do anything to stop it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_to_surf

We are not individually responsible, but we are collectively. The latter isn’t productive.

I'm conflicted about your comment, I'm glad that you are teaching important things to your child at very young age and at the same time I'm sad that the child will now worry about the things which we didn't had to when we were kids.

Love the name move-78.

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