Undeclared pools in France uncovered by AI technology
bbc.com
bbc.com
Well, let's not be over optimistic. The PM in charge of the project on the taxe administration side is probably happy that his project is going well. However, different branches of the state are already doing that with tree line and tree coverage change for farmers subsidies. That project is not going well because of the large amount of false positives.
Trying to spot undeclared house extension will very likely follow the same path because the problem is infinitely more difficult, the data ("cadastre") is messy and Capgemini is absolutely not capable of handling that complexity by lack of skills and experience.
It would be pretty easy to just detect new extensions by looking at historical satellite images, and then manually check if they had approval.
I mean sure its France where they think a little different about privacy, but you can make sure that once the quality is good enough, someone will put your naked butt on the internet, because they found them while doing "routine work"-
And no, neither google earth or bing or apple have detailed enough picture quality to identify anything. on purpose. That will not however be true for the drone your local gov uses.
Im not trying to create a state of naked people either, but the point still stand that if you need this tech to find a couple of pools, you might as well put cameras everywhere.
I have absolutely no problem with a guy in a plane pointing at pools and taking notes and knocking on peoples doors.
What I do have a problem with is unnecessary surveillance of the innocent.
so in your opinion police patrolling the streets are an "unnecessary surveillance of the innocent"?
because disclosed pools are already known to the State. Technically is not surveillance if they already know that you have a pool and they actually find a pool there (what a surprise!)
The street is a public place, but my yard is not.
Furthermore the police does not check in once every X hours with me personally, but yes if they would, i would consider that an annoiance =)
your yard is not yours.
it's at your disposal.
the soil your yard is built on is a State property.
If they have probable cause, they can enter and check whatever they want to.
They can also look at it from outside, without your permission.
> Furthermore the police does not check in once every X hours with me personally
this is a once in a lifetime check
As a german when I hear about bad privacy my first thought is always of the UK ;)
However there still is a reasonable expectency of privacy in the real world here.
However it tends to be individual privacy. A grainy picture of a pool processed without judgement by an algorithm feels a lot like panorama rights to me. The software sees the same thing I can see on Google Maps.
I believe your definition of easy is a bit faulty.
Google is involved in the project. This almost certainly uses google earth’s data
Yes, there are aerial photos since the 50s, no, it's not possible for humans to scan all of them, not in a life time.
> 10 people in a neigbourhood that have "saved" 300 bucks a year.
That's not the point.
The points are:
- social justice, if I pay you have to pay. If you don't pay taxes to IRS what happens? I bet they use a lot more than AI to find people who eludes them...
- undisclosed pools (and other undisclosed properties) are a proxy for other illegal activities. For example in Italy villas of sentenced criminals are usually hidden. This way the State could find them and confiscate them.
Anyway in Italy they have already discovered more than 20 thousand undisclosed pools. And the job is not done yet.
EDIT: I work in an insurance company, we use similar techniques to identify buildings in satellite images and compare them to same pictures after a flood or a fire, to estimate damages.
It could be done by human eyes, It would take years.
This way clients are reimbursed swiftly and can start rebuilding what has been damaged.
Edit: typos
I completely disagree (many rich people think the same way you do, this is not a novel argument, it is as old as taxes themselves), but the point was not on taxes, but on justice.
Meaning that if you pay a tax because - like it or not - you have to pay for it, I should pay it too, if we are in the same situation.
That's what I meant for "social justice", the obligation towards the community to fulfill your duties the same way other members of the community do.
The “community” has very little say in what happens with this money and even if they do, I don’t think it’s always justified because a large group thinks it is.
And finally I think that taxes mostly limit social mobility by putting a cap on what you can do with the money you’ve earned (yourself). I don’t think other people are entitled to such a proportion of my income.
I moved from Europe to a place with significantly lower taxes, I have a lot more to put on the side every month and can take part of it for retiring and part of it to invest in new ideas. Back home I was covering costs + a little consumption and the rest went to the state which realistically didn’t provide for much (social security only helps once you’ve fully landed on the street, universities were pretty mediocre so I studied in the US partially funded by parents and partially through teaching, need private insurance for health care unless you want to wait for ages to get treatment, etc. - so I paid for a lot of things that I couldn’t benefit from). Government functions much better too and filing my taxes took minutes without any external help, so I’m less distracted. And overall I have a way better quality of life and I’m much happier.
The more those who are good at evading taxes get away with it, the more burden the poor and middle class must shoulder.
Also without an army of tax consultants and lawyers it’s easy to not be aware of everything you need or don’t need to pay, and most likely you’ll end up overpaying. At the same time richer people will have opportunities to legally reduce their tax bill that ordinary people don’t have.
Unlike for instance in Germany, I’m not paying for my boss to have a lower tax rate than I do.
“The French Newspaper Le Parisien calculated that an average pool measured at 322 square feet is taxed 200 Euros per year.”
I think the middle class should be able to afford a 8x4m pool outside of big cities. Especially since other large expenditures like overpriced cars aren’t that big of a deal in France.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/31/google-ai-helps-france-tax-ove...
The cost of building a pool in France is widely given as being between €15,000 and €50,000. This is for the pool, and you need to add on the cost of the surrounds, whether this is a paved area or wooden deck.
Then there are maintenance costs, electricity costs, cleaning costs etc.
> taxed 200 Euros per year
that's an estimate based on the lower possible height (50cm and lower) because the images don't give you a sense of how deep the pool is.
The annual tax is proportional to the height.
Now imagine you don't pay taxes and want to move from New York to San Francisco.
Well man, you know what? You did not pay for this road, so for you it's... let's see... 17,433.25 dollars. Paid in advance, thanks.
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You're from a lower social class, you go to work using public, ehm, sorry, collective transport (it is a private service), because you can't afford to own a car and the gas is so expensive!
And those roads tariffs! they don't care how much you earn, they are the same to everyone, for you as for the richest man in the Country.
Every month you have to pay 400 dollars to the collective transport company, they need to raise the money for building and maintaining the infrastructure and to pay their employees.
You have been thinking about asking for a salary raise, but you've overheard management say "people coming to work with collective transport are often late, thank god there are good workers using cars, those are the ones we should promote"
So you're now thinking about getting into debts to buy a car and gamble or play it safe and accept your salary.
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Would you prefer it?
Would it favour social mobility?
> I moved from Europe to a place with significantly lower taxes, I have a lot more to put on the side every month
No shit Sherlock!!!
You know what else helped me to put a lot more on the side every month?
Accepting job offers that paid more than the one I had!
Incredible, isn't it?
Try being born there in the same conditions your family was when you were born and then you can compare the two situations.
Anyway what was your Country in Europe?
Because if your family could afford to pay your studies in USA, in Europe you could have lived as a king with that kind of money.
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OF COURSE if you only think about yourself, being surrounded by people that pay for you while you enjoy the money you earn it's wunderbar!
Not caring about other people's well being, that also is a big relief.
But it has nothing to do with justice, let alone being part of a larger community, called society, that's simply "Homo homini lupus"
Needless to say, the government never paid either of those things. The days in a year were taken away. Not with a new contract. Not with new negotiations. It was just a new law (not even a voted-on law, just a ministerial note).
He lost about 2 years of pension outright this way, and his pension was never inflation-adjusted (first they delayed the adjustments, then they "skipped some", then they canceled it). That means that after this year, 6 years into his pension, he is now on the minimum possible pension. This is explicitly what the government promised would never happen.
Of course, he never gets to take back the decades of work he put in to not get in this situation. Worse than that, the government has actually invited him to come back because there's a teacher shortage ...
So now he gets exactly the same pension as someone who never worked a day in their life. Which the government is currently promising will never happen.
Please explain to me why I would pay taxes to a state that has even less intention to abide by the deal they're presenting than it did when my dad signed those contracts and worked 40+ years as a teacher? And if I go somewhere else and pay NO taxes at all, ever, to the state, I can come back when I'm 65 and get exactly the same pension.
Social justice, REALITY:
1) we'll lie to you so you work for us
2) we are the government, so we use the law to change the meaning of your contract AFTER you put in the work
3) we'll lie about what we're doing every step of the way
4) and after that ... and people refuse to work for us, they'll "invite" you back to DO MORE WORK ...
5) IF he still had more than the minimum pension, doing this "voluntary" extra work would be the only way he could maintain an above-minimum pension. This is still not fixing the situation.
6) I'm willing to bet step 6 is making the pension drop below the minimum unless he goes back to work. If you calculate what it would take to get enough teachers, it's roughly double what they're paying now. There is no chance in hell the government will do that, so they'll lie and cheat somewhere else, and this seems to me an obvious thing to do (and is "being talked about")
You can keep your social justice, thanks. I'll be somewhere else. Clearly following the rules of social justice pays EXACTLY the same as ... not doing anything at all (plus they don't "invite" you back after 65 to do more work, nor do they cut your pension below minimum ...)
Your statement is comparable to calling it ridiculous that we have roads "just so an ice cream truck can sell ice cones to neighbourhood kids during the summer". That's obviously not the main use case for roads.
We have a (small, legal) pool. One year we bought that inflatable green alligator pool toy which was so popular -- one of these https://the-hollywood-gossip-res.cloudinary.com/iu/s--WNibF2...
There was a time you could see our pool alligator on google earth.
Here in germany you can even have your house blurred out on google maps if you submit a request.
It can also be used to spot building extensions etc. And it also gives a hint on other cheating and crime, for example if the household is on benefits, pays no tax and all of a sudden a pool pops up in the garden. It might still be legit, but at least an investigation can be done.
Sure it might be seen a bit over the top, but what are the alternatives? If people do not declare when it is taxable, then things might need to be enforced. Sure these taxes could be removed, but at the same time it might be fair to tax people who can afford building a pool. Probably better than increasing tax on work.
Tax evasion massively erodes people's trust in institutions. If it's prevalent enough, cheating becomes the default option, and things fall apart quickly.
and why should I pay for it and not you?
If water consumption is a problem tax it progressivly.
the fact is that if your pool is undisclosed, you haven't requested the necessary authorizations (what you actually pay for), which means it is not deemed safe.
Pools are taxed directly when they are considered a luxury item in a house that have all the features (there's a list) of a luxury residence.
It's already a progressive tax, it couldn't be any different here, progressivity of taxation is written in our Constitution.
Knowing Capgemini, they have probably charged them €15m for a very subpar solution.
Those types of pools aren't the ones AI is being tasked to find of course. Why would AI even try to uncover the nefarious activities of its owners?
Anyway, here's to another governmental (planning, tax department) success! Hurrah!
In france there are tons of places where it’s illegal to build pools, but if no one notices for 10 years, you’re officially off the hook, so a lot of people try their luck.
The firemen too like to have swimming pools around in dry areas as water reserves. So even if someone finds out about your pool, you may still get away with a fine.
It’s all a bit weird
How else would you do it?
Iterate through the pixels and check for certain blue values? And maybe a small greyish border area? How is that fancy enough?
(I remember helping ecology students with beginners programming, which was what they did, only that they had to check for green)