Face recognition is being banned, but it’s still everywhere
wired.com
wired.com
Snowden even blew the lid off of it, and nothing changed. That's how you know it's permanent.
That's how you end up with the NSA and CIA being inside every single camera in the country :)
If the camera itself is not bugged, it likely is harvested at another step at some point and nothing's more clear that if NSA wants to see what a camera sees, they are able to tap it if needed. Sure, untapped cameras exist, but it doesn't really make a practical difference. The NSA will still have your information if it wants, and likely already has most of it.
It's likely that for your security camera footage to be accessed you would have to be targeted. It's likely that such targeting would only affect footage in the future or very recent past. But I'd grant that pervasive attackers can probably capture exponentially-decaying single video frames from millions of cameras if they were appropriately motivated, and those single frames could go back quite far.
The real problem here is the existence of such a system creates a kind of panopticon [0], with chilling effects not only on activity and discussion contrarian to the current administration, but also any future administration that may have access to electronic surveillance records. Without knowing how long records are kept, it is quite plausible that a future authoritarian state will misuse past records to target civilians.
Actually, as another commenter mentioned, they probably already are doing it. It would be stupid to think otherwise.
> The people of America seem to be fine with it.
The people don't care that they're being watched. That's the main lesson I took from the snowden leaks. I think most people might even like it because they think it means there will be less crime.
The NSA's warrantless surveillance program (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...) and the CIA's Operation CHAOS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_CHAOS) are two examples of this behavior.
They won't get it. Trust me.
What you propose would require massive changes to essentially any camera that has any part of its view covering an outdoor area, and probably many indoor areas (malls, etc.).
Also, face recognition typically runs on live streams to build indexes, so encrypting storage would not do much. You'd need to implement something like an HDMI-style encryption to control what devices/processors/whatever can connect to a live video stream from a camera to try and control exactly how the streams are processed.
Spitballing. Enforcement: make distribution of CCTV video undisclosed via court order criminal offense.
> Also, that is totally counter to the current (US) laws that basically state you can record video (not audio) of any publicly viewable areas freely.
This is irrelevant, because scale changes nature of things. Single photo of your person is just that. 24 photos per second for every second of your life is a total surveillance. Law was clearly about recording usage that does not amount to surveillance.
> Also, face recognition typically runs on live streams to build indexes, so encrypting storage would not do much.
Encrypt the stream on the camera itself. Storage is cheap.
The same way gun ownership laws have curbed the illegal gun ownership/use problem? Or, do we just keep stacking laws endlessly hoping one of them actually works?
>24 photos per second for every second of your life is a total surveillance.
Sure but we're nowhere near that point, or likely to be at that point. Also, almost nothing records at 24fps, 15fps is more common.
>Encrypt the stream on the camera itself. Storage is cheap.
In most cases and camera and recording/viewing software come from different companies, so you'd still need some kind of key management system.
There are legit arguments to be had about personal freedom here, but it’s plainly untrue regulation intrinsically can’t work. It works for many, many things - and works for gun ownership in basically every other developed nation in the world.
Anywho, sounds like we're jumping through hoops without really understanding the requirements. Like, what is really bad about recording people in public? What is really bad about performing facial recognition?
But I'd go a step further, what is it that we're trying to prevent from happening by making facial recognition illegal? This is the juicy part and the one where the "problem" becomes wishy-washy. We get reasons like: "Prevent stalking by government officials", or "stop widespread surveillance from...[something]". All present their own challenges and implied slippery-slopes, but all have different ways of being solved without necessarily making public recording and facial recognition blanketly illegal.
But here is the interesting bit: I can’t set up a fixed camera to record a public space without permission. And I won’t get that permission. Meaning basically that recording in public spaces is only done by humans, limiting the scope of how widespread it can be. I like this.
It also means, that it’s not allowed to put up a camera on my porch that covers the street in front of my house. I suspect a lot of ring/nest users are in violation.
That’s almost impossible to get permission for. A private citizen can not get permission to film a Street corner. The difficulty in getting permission obviously isn’t written in the legal text, but individuals don’t get permission and businesses only very rarely do.
https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-f...
Seriously, this means every home outdoor security camera is potentially illegal. This can’t be true.
Does everyone do that? Probably not. But that doesn’t change how the law is written.
Really, facial recognition just isn't getting weighed properly judicially.
Instead, we should take the opposite approach: Invest heavily in this tech, and lightly-regulate glaringly bad aspects of it. E.g. For facial recognition, we can put down laws that punish unfair punishment of suspects. Or if we find employers that misappropriate facial recognition developed to record hours worked on the factory floor to punish them for chatting or going to the bathroom too many times, and we don't like that, then we regulate that.
We really went down the wrong path here somewhere, applying a black and white approach to things instead of just riding the in-between strategically and fairly. That's how we move forward as a society instead of legislating ourselves into irrelevance.
If facial recognition is perceived as low accuracy, but can yield some leads for investigators that can be independently corroborated, that seems like a fine use of the technology. If we're worried about the public assuming it's more accurate than it is if used as evidence in trials, we can either pass some laws about its use as trial evidence (which is not the same as using it as a lead), or train defense attorneys and the public (often done through TV...) that it's use in the role of proving guilt is extremely limited because of it's false positive rate.
And that might turn this technology into something that only big company can afford, artificially created a pro-monopoly environment.
The problem is complex.
If the bureaucratic obstacles for using a technology are so high that only very well funded companies can overcome them, then those companies effectively form a cartel with the state in the use and abuse of those technologies.
If citizens had stronger protections against the application of the third-party doctrine in the US, we might have less to fear. Currently though, the greatest oppressor of personal freedoms through technology is the United States Government. They can and will use "guidelines and potential liabilities" to weaponize new technology while making it next to impossible to counter the threat.
This is not a market problem at all, I don't see why you'd use market-brain constructs like monopoly to engage with it.
One provider or thousands, the problem is the social dynamics and the power structures, not a product-consumer relationship.
That's not the argument I took away from that. Poster includes a summation, "it's complex" and is noting that simply adding regulation that only increases costs of compliance may just enable the formation of a tent seeking monopoly and does not necessarily result in a better outcome for citizens. The poster could advocate for a ban (or not advocate for anything) rather than deregulation as implied.
The laws can be as strict as you like, but its like introducing a law saying you cant watch nude cartoons at home. Even if you somehow eliminated all the existing ones, its just a pen and paper away.
There are plenty of things that are easy to do but have strict legal frameworks around them. Quick examples include copyright laws, use of force/violence and driving rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
As such, we can not, say, catch not-so-publically-known but well-connected public officials where they should not be.
But when it comes to databases, individuals have access to ridiculously large databases too. With Facebook and Google you can peek into the private life of most people, even the police does it because there is more data there than in their own files. And I am just talking about ordinary access. Not what Facebook and Google can do as a company.
Add a bit of social engineering and crowdsourcing and no one is safe if enough people want to find them. There have been some pretty impressive "doxing" in the past.
And staying off social media is pretty hard if you want to live a normal life. You may not have a Facebook account but your friends do, you may find your picture on your company website, maybe even in a local newspaper. And officials are no different, if they want to live normally, they are going to be exposed.
I wonder how many of those 1000 were incorrectly bounced back
But speaking of selection, there is no perfect process in any system involving humans, so whether it's a flawed facial recognition algorithm, or a biased, tired, overworked human doing it, having a manual review step and post-hoc analysis is pretty useful.
[1] https://sites.duke.edu/lawfire/2021/04/12/understanding-u-s-...
In my mind they should have been banned like biological weapons. And the US could take leadership
1. They require tons of pressure to detonate; it’s adjusted for a tank, not ordinary car, and
2. They don’t end up in unexpected places - they are placed on the roads, and thus are easy to find and detonate.
A very quick search also proves that deaths from anti-vehicle mines number at thousands each year. Even on the very UN website [1] we read:
> The Secretary-General calls on all countries to also regulate the use of anti-vehicle landmines. Such weapons continue to cause many casualties, often civilian. They restrict the movement of people and humanitarian aid, make land unsuitable for cultivation, and deny citizens access to water, food, care and trade.
I believe we can safely assume that anti-vehicle landmines DO pose a deadly threat to civilians.
London is often called the CCTV capital of the world, and for good reason. The city is home to hundreds of thousands of CCTV cameras, and the average Londoner is caught on CCTV 300 times a day.
https://www.cctv.co.uk/how-many-cctv-cameras-are-there-in-lo...
Facial recognition software is being integrated now into this network. No one seems to mind at all. It seems that the same is in most of the rest of the world.
With remote working being mainstream going forward I'm certainly going to consider somewhere with more sunshine and less harsh winters...
But you did say it was illegal. Seems to me there are exceptions if that picture is to be trusted.e
That's only because China does not release much information publicly about their surveillance systems, but many parts of China are most likely far more surveilled than London.
When you walked through the main lobby, your face appeared on a screen for the inside doorman so he could grant you access to the elevator lobby. It also showed your name, apartment number, and lease end date.
That was over a decade ago. I can't imagine what new tech must look like.
[1] https://identityweek.net/josep-tarradellas-barcelona-el-prat...
(I know the profiling works even whit only the eye section yet you get the gist)
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[0]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/how-avera...
Solving bullshit manufactured crimes such as drug-related ones scales better, doesn't even require a victim to complain and provides seemingly-decent political clout and a veneer of "we're doing something, see?".
What's the last time you heard about stolen bikes or phones being recovered on the BBC? Personally, never. But drug-related stuff is common.
There are the ring of steel cameras, but that area hasn't been widened recently. TFL cameras are possibly linked into some security service, and there's a fair few of them, but they're mainly pointed at roads.
What is the end goal with banning face recognition? I think this is all about asymmetry of information.
Both encryption and face recognition software rely on math and programming simple enough that a single person can make a functional one in less than a year from scratch. However, if using existing open source frameworks anyone can put it together either in a few days, though collecting a face database takes slightly longer, though in most cases anyone with an existing app of some kind can very easily collect the data largely automatically. Arguably I would not trust an encryption framework put together like that, but when it comes to face recognition I would.
So the question of if governments will be able to prevent non-sanctioned face recognition systems from the public sphere is rather similar to the question of if they are able to prevent the use of non-sanctioned encryption.
How is that going these days?
On the way in, they scanned my face at the immigration counter.
On the way out, you go through a locked turnstile that scans your face and won't open until it recognizes you.
It took about 2 seconds for the doors to open. Pretty amazing and creepy at the same time.
You add up to five faces, prioritized, and it focuses to them if it recognizes in the crowd of people.
My A7-III has it. Since it uses Eye-AF and Face-AF pipelines (it generates a face model from the photo you take for that feature only), it needs AI autofocus stack inside the camera. A7-C should have it, maybe latest APS-C lines (6600 for example) have it.
Sony's AF tech is insane. Point to a person with sunglasses, and it marks the eye instantaneously. What the actual sorcery?
My wife has a hundred pairs of heels of varying heights and widths. Good luck with that.