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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

I am so glad many cities and even Cantons in Switzerland have decided that such a thing should not be permitted. [1] Such a distopian future is not something people want anywhere.

I assume it is still legal in NYC to wear clothing or head gear that would make face recognition difficult if not impossible?

[1] https://www.gesichtserkennung-stoppen.ch/news/grosse-erfolge

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I didn't check if this research is still pursued or abandoned due to the rise of face recognition and other metric learning/re-identification technologies, but a few years ago a number of faculty at ETH Zurich were quite heavily involved in researching CCTV-based person tracking, which would work even against people taking measures against face or gait recognition algorithms if they weren't able to leave the CCTV-covered area. It was insinuated that various external state agencies, not all Switzerland-based, were specifically funding this research.

So, while the citizens might not want it, faculty seem perfectly happy to keep developing such technology for other clients.

Link to the research?

Some of the theoretical work is available with keywords like 'multi-object tracking' or 'multi-object detection' and also applied to tasks such as pedestrian tracking for autonomous vehicles, but there was also a bunch of applied work building and evaluating such CCTV systems which I can't find any links to now, sorry.

The normalization of face-masks in public have been amazing for aiding anonymity.

too bad one can be identified also from the way they walks [0]

[0]https://www.cnet.com/science/china-surveillance-tech-ids-peo...

I don't think there's a nationwide database of walking gate fingerprints facilitated by your local DMVs.

Not if they apply https://github.com/topics/gait-analysis &

https://github.com/topics/gait-recognition

https://securitytoday.com/articles/2018/11/12/new-surveillan...

https://recfaces.com/articles/what-is-gait-recognition

If they (can) do so ATM (at large scale and in real time) is another matter, but only a question of time, IMO.

Not sure how effective it would be in reality, but in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother they work around gait analysis by putting some pebbles in their shoes.

As a temporary means of distraction, maybe. But it wouldn't really change the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinematics, ratio of joint to limb length, and so on. You'd just sway a little bit different, but not that much.

Then there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-area_motion_imagery AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorgon_Stare , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARGUS-IS , the digital signature of your gadgets in the EM-spectrum, where their sudden 'disapperance' might raise flags, leading to 'replay' of the region for further analysis.

But there is always hope in rising incompetence of ever growing institutions and organisations, hollowed out from the insides by the parasites they attract.

Yeah a lot of people think funding innovative new walking styles is why they exist, but they ministry of silly walks has other more sinister purposes as well.

https://youtu.be/eCLp7zodUiI

Crime is one of the most important voting issues. Republicans had a resurgence in NYC because of it.

Alternatively one could say Democrats lost ground for being too soft on it.

Seriously though, your comment makes it sound like Republicans benefit from high crime. No one benefits from high crime.

Or rather they weren't soft enough. Republicans are just cruel and unjust because that usually benefits those in the in-group. Democrats compromise so much they are left with the worst of both worlds.

They couldn't decriminalize drugs enough or enable world class social welfare programs when they did get majority control over legislature. But voters are ultimately to blame, they want their cake and to it too.

> But voters are ultimately to blame, they want their cake and to it too.

As a voter, you're given the choice between terrible and truly awful. No matter which you choose, it's your fault?

Frankly, when I buy a new kind of underarm deodorant and later I stink, I feel I'm more to blame than I am for my political vote and any lack-of-outcome. And I'm inundated with deodorant choices - it's harder to pick.

I remember when New York wanted to lynch the Central Park five. Reason and idealism seems to vanish when people feel threatened.

People engaging in petty "affront to the authority of the state" types of crimes benefit because in an environment where you have plenty of real crime to go around there's no need for cops to initiate the kind of police interactions that end up with Eric Garner getting choked out or a bullet in a man who has a bench warrant for failure to pay some BS.

I don’t think republicans want this. I think all they want is the criminals already identified or caught to actually be prosecuted and not released back on the streets.

They are politicians, they want to look tough on crime no matter the cost. They make the laws. War on drugs is their creation, half the criminals are created by them. Rudi got popular because stop-and-frisk in NYC, for no legitimate reason cops would stop random people and frisk them. This social classist hostility where crime is what the fund-raising class it is and the solution is hostility against "those people" who are the least likely to be in their party is their MO.

Republican voters want whatever “get tough on crime” aligns with. “Repeal bail reform Derp Derp”

The “freedom” stuff is bullshit and narrowly scoped.

Just wear a cap, shades, and a covid mask.

Illegal + doesn't work against modern solutions incorporating e.g. gait analysis.

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