France reveals hidden swimming pools with AI, taxes them | Hacker News Reader

France reveals hidden swimming pools with AI, taxes them

arstechnica.com

60 pointsmikece38 comments

This is not "AI". The pool can be identified with basic image processing and I hope this is what has been done. It would have been crazy otherwise. I was doing such "AI" in 2000 to automatically process topographic images using a matrox graphic card. No need to use a deep layer NN at all.

You object to the use of the term AI but then go ahead and use another definition for the term which is equally as arbitrary.

No hate. Just saying. Nobody has a clear definition of what constitutes AI vs ML vs "statistical/algorithmic optimisation" these days.

My own approach is to restrict the use of the term "AI" to cases where a tangible "agent" is involved, which is capable of taking "actions" within its embedded context in the broader sense, and whose "intelligence" is somehow relevant to solving the problem at hand (rather than, say, simply an algorithm fed inputs and making predictions on a computer)

Everything is AI and UX now. It gives you a good estimation of the quality of this SW.

It's been happening for ten years.

https://boingboing.net/2010/05/04/satellite-photos-cat.html

Greece had only a few hundred pools registered, and yet somehow satellite photos found almost 20k.

This was right when Greece was in the worst of their financial crisis.

The new thing here seems to be using "AI" to do it, which should scale better over manual inspection of photos.

And to take immediate actions. As they claim somewhere to have already recovered 10 M€ in taxes, having only scanned parts of the french territory. And how clever to make this campaign now, who is sad about those caught after this summer drought where water was missing everywhere.

Maybe you can paint adversarial patterns on the bottom of your pool, like those shirts that fool people detectors (https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.11099)

This probably wouldn't actually work in practice to avoid the tax - it sounds like the detection might not even be that complicated: "by looking for blue rectangles, for instance", but it would make for a nifty demo!

I’ve been waiting for my power company to use this technology to find solar panels. According to my power company documents, if I generate any power on premise, I’m required to pay a solar tie in fee. Depending upon how you want to read that, a solar power garden light would require me to pay the tie in fee. I’d like to add a solar powered AC (air conditioner not grid tied) to reduce my AC driven power costs. According to the docs, I’d have to pay a tie in fee. Part of me wants to deploy it, but fear some overly enthusiastic intern using this AI technology to find my solar panels, and then fine me for the entire time the panels have been deployed.

Let’s face it, it’s about cheap money. They’ll send you a letter asking for money. You’ll send them a letter telling them to fuck themselves. They’re not going to burn cash pursuing AI voodoo.

We built this for a solar renewable energy trader. It works fine.

Sounds like privacy laws need to be updated such that any overhead imagery analysis by a private company requires permission of the property owners, or a warrant if it's government agency, even if the images are taken from space.

Interesting that they're automating this now with AI - our council had their staff literally scan houses one by one on Google Earth images when the latest imagery came out to see if there were any new outbuildings/pools/etc. compared to the last imagery date.

Odd when you have something like 4-500,000 people living here, but I guess someone's paycheck had to be justified somehow :P

I don't understand why having a pool means your taxes go up immediately - though I've never understood the concept of a property tax anyways.

If you can afford to heat and service the pool you can be hit up for more money

> though I've never understood the concept of a property tax anyways.

Essentially, it's a payment back to society in exchange for monopolising a piece of something that can be useful to society but (to a good approximation) can't be manufactured[1] and doesn't depreciate[2]: planetary surface area.

One off value-added taxes don't capture this well as they become "cheaper" the longer you hold the land[3].

Put it another, somewhat hyperbolic, way, it's a HODLing tax, applied to the only known physical space in the universe in which humans can exist.

[1]: a few polders and airports not withstanding.

[2]: climate change might both create and destroy some land utility, though, which will upset quite a bit of "value" predicated on non-military the utility.

[3]: this inhibits land transactions which has effects like chilling workforce mobility

hahaha yeah I would take anything Capgemini has been around with a huge load of salt.

> The French government taxes real estate based on its rental value, which increases when owners build additions or improvements such as swimming pools.

What if you haven't rented your property for a long time, or ever? Either the article is missing some information or that tax is kind of bizarre.

The assessed value is the theoretical value based on the current market, whether rental or sale. My guess that is that by basing the value on the rental market, property taxes remaining more in line with the functional value of the property as opposed to purely its investment value.

The French property tax is not bizarre as much as absurd, obtuse and obsolete. The index hasn't even been updated since 1970, which means that it's completely disconnected with real-life rental values. Every single addition or improvement costs you something (an equivalent of 4 sqm is added to your official surface area simply for having running water, 3 sqm per heated room, etc), though it must be noted that you can't even properly simulate the impact of any improvement. I just received mine and my flat's rental value is computed based on input data I don't have access to as being roughly one fourth of current market prices. On the flip side, I'm paying the equivalent of 43.118% of its theoretical rental value this year (on top of income tax, obviously). The system is honestly completely messed up. A reform is apparently coming in 2026, and though it seems that it will be quite fair, it's mostly an excuse to increase taxes by an another 15% on average :(

it's apparently proving very difficult to reform as there would be as many losers as winners, and the losers hold more political clout (people with property in hot markets).

Referring back to the article, from what I'm seeing pools aren't even taxed that much. In most places, you're seemingly paying some €80 per year in additional real estate taxes for a standard 4 × 10 m pool. Probably much more interesting for the tax office is that if you're cheating on something as visible yet fundamentally cheap as a pool, you're probably not being very honest about your other taxes either…

Time for homeowners to invest in green tarps.

or camo tiles mimicking a basketball court.

In this case a basketball court might actually increase the property value enough that your taxes would still go up

> invest in green tarps

Not sure how this works under French law. But in the U.S., doing something that so blatantly shows intent would jump penalties to felony tax fraud.

The problem is that you need to prove intent. That's hard to do when pool covers are a thing (for non-tax evasion purposes), and it's not entirely implausible for you to buy a non-blue pool cover. Same applies to other countermeasures, like using different colored tiles so the pool doesn't show up as blue. Did the accused do it to evade taxes, or did he do it because he didn't like the color blue? Good luck convincing a court of that beyond reasonable doubt.

Surely it’s the fact that water is blue that’s causing the pools to be seen as blue not the tile used.

Water is clear though.

If someone gives you blue water, it's either gatorade or seriously not safe to drink.

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

> pure water has a slight blue color

I find it funny how reluctant most are to accept the color that particular substance. Ask a kid to draw a swimming pool, or the ocean, or earth. They'll usually draw it blue. No need to overthink this one.

In pop-sci articles, water is blue "because it reflects the sky".

Certainly the ocean near me is grey on grey days. I have no idea what swimming pools with a neutral grey bottom would look like from above on such days.

I think, the suggestion to use irregular pool shapes with non-blue painting (mentioned somewhere else) would fare better, but only slightly.

Radar satellite imagery like the one coming from Sentinel can see surface water (like seen in all the orbit shots of the flooding areas), so could be used as an even better source of information to find even partially obscured or "misshaped" pools.

Plus, with the tarps you can't use the pool anymore. After all, it's not like you can see the satellites passing overhead

>After all, it's not like you can see the satellites passing overhead

The orbit of nearly every satellite is tracked and known. Even US spy satellites are tracked[1]. Planes can do better, but unless you charter your own plane chances are you'll get photos from a weekday, which isn't exactly prime time for pool use. You can work around that by chartering your own plane, but that'll heavily eat into potential returns.

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

This is an area where you don't need perfection to get most of the benefits. The number of people who are going to have military-level opsec religiously covering the pool except when no satellites are overhead is rather small — imagine having friends over and shouting “everyone out of the pool, we can go back in 47 minutes!”.

They report €10M from over 20,000 pools so you're talking an average of €500 — if you can afford to have a pool at all, are you really going to declare to your neighbors, friends, and family that you're willing to give up so much benefit from having it just to save that small a sum? Even if the tax officials don't have an anonymous tip line, that seems like a good way to cement your reputation as a bitter cheapskate.

> Plus, with the tarps you can't use the pool anymore. After all, it's not like you can see the satellites passing overhead

Legend has it that rogue states/combatants would track US satellites using software and freely available data, and when they know one is going to fly overhead, they'd cover whatever they don't want photographed.

From rogue states to rogue swimmers...

"Papa, can I swim?", "In 13 minutes ma princesse, then we'll be safe."

Exactly! When OP posted about the tarps, I was imagining him covering/uncovering the pool 18 times per day, laptop at hand, watching for "Next Pass".

Or, you know, just pay the taxes you're supposed to pay, instead of freeloading off your neighbors.

If you think the tax is wrong, work to get it changed.

If you honestly think you can get revenue generating tax changed, I have a bridge to sell you.

If you’re well enough to afford a pool, just pay the tax that goes with it, seriously…

> Capgemini

> opened up 10 million euros in additional tax revenue

Do you recon they have a break-even?

France, #1 on TaxTech :-)

And they manage to involve 3 different taxes and plenty of rules, thresholds, and 2 decimal point percentages when you declare that you have built a swimming pool.

Same if you build a shed.

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