New Yorkers want to stop landlords from using facial recognition | Hacker News Reader

New Yorkers want to stop landlords from using facial recognition

gizmodo.com

264 pointsonychomys173 comments

A minor technical nitpick: the article, and the activists it quotes, make the claim that facial recognition discriminates against minorities because it is inaccurate. The state of the art in facial recognition technology has been superhumanly accurate (e.g. telling apart identical twins better than humans can, finding pictures with significant weight or age differences) on all subgroups for several years now, and the racial disparities in accuracy are minuscule relative to the level of noise. It will keep improving: e.g. it is quite plausible we will be able to infer parts of a person’s genotype from ordinary pictures of their face.

I call this a nitpick because “face rec discriminates because it is inaccurate” vs “face rec discriminates because it very accurately reproduces society’s bias” doesn’t make much difference to the activists’ argument; after all, it matters little whether the discrimination arises by bumbling incompetence or by efficient indifference. But I thought I would mention it so that the more technically-minded are not accidentally misled about the technological progress in the area.

When was the last time you saw state of the art being applied to a cheap surveillance camera? These aren't video production studios, these are "landlords", which aren't even people, they are housing corporations who spring for the cheapest shit that lets them maximize income and if you don't like it, for you 10,000 other renters willing to put up with their BS to live in NYC.

Facial recognition is an algorithm applied to ordinary picture and video data, it does not require special or even particularly high-quality cameras. In fact, if the footage is too high-quality it actually has to be downscaled before being analyzed; something like a picture of your face taken with a 720p laptop webcam when sitting at the laptop, or a video of your face from a 1080p Ring doorbell camera as you go to ring the bell, would likely be already big enough to require downscaling first.

If some kind of facial recognition algorithm/model can use worse inputs to "do better than humans" in some task (i.e. try to recognize between twins using a downscaled image from a 720p laptop camera) more often than not focusing in other things different from the face itself or there is some kind of target leakage in the datasets. More often than not those are big reasons why is so difficult to target SOTA paper performance in the real world, be it in face recognition or otherwise.

ML algorithms for FR are not magical and I don't expect them to be always better in all conditions than a human with two eyes (i.e. stereo vision).

I won’t say it’s impossible, but your suggestions do seem unlikely to me. We’re talking about unlabeled data, cropped to just the face, and the state of the art being found in commercial models in the real world rather than in papers competing to pass standard tests in the literature.

(From my direct experience they arguably are pretty close to magical; I think there is just a lot more information in pictures of faces than we thought there was. It’s quite plausible that, since native human machinery was evolved in groups of maximum ~150 distinct faces and was optimized for things like detecting minor emotional cues, our brains are simply throwing a lot of that information out. But that’s not really the point I want to make here; instead, I want to say stuff like “commercial models aren’t trailing research papers; research papers are trailing commercial models”.)

Yep, typically an algorithm with heavily baked in bias. Works great for specific populations, not so much when it needs to recognize every possible facial structure on the planet - something that's a problem in very few places, except that NY is basically #1 on the list of places where you algorithm has to work for every possible face on the planet, and would have to be tamper proof, which by definition it can't be unless we augment it with IR and lidar to make sure there's a human standing in front of it. And then that would have to still work when it's both 100F and -40F. You know what lets people into your building even more efficiently? A key fob.

Addressing this misconception is the whole point of my original comment, actually. Typically the algorithms used work great on all populations and do not have heavily baked in bias (in the technical sense; they do still have bias in the social justice sense of “automating the detection of criminals, who are disproportionally minorities because society’s bias has disproportionately criminalized minorities”). The field has generally moved away from specific algorithms that analyze facial structure and towards much more effective machine-learning-augmented methods (they got Bitter-Lessoned just like other areas of technology did). Facial recognition has literally already been used to great effect in New York for years already, that’s why it is New York that is leading the way in regulating face rec, because they interact with it the most (apart from maybe Australians at Australian airports).

About the only thing I don’t take issue with in your post is LIDAR/IR to verify it’s a real human and not a piece of paper with a face printed on it. If you’re using face rec to automate entry, yeah, you need to also validate it’s a real human face.

>Typically the algorithms used work great

I hope you let the word "typically" do some stretching before you used it, because it's doing a lot of heavy lifting there. You have no idea what algo was used by each system. Assuming some landlord is going to install the top of the line equipment using the most advanced software with these algos that "work great on all populations" is just so generous that I want to see take advantage of that generosity.

Facial recognition is at best a parlor game. Yes, it can be super helpful for personal use in sorting through your own private library. If facial rec messes up in that situation, no harm is committed. When someone is denied access to their building, harm is committed. When someone is mis-identified and arrest warrants issued on an innocent person, harm is committed. To even begin to think that facial recognition is bullet proof in all instances is just folly.

Respectfully, I do have a much better idea than most people about what is being deployed and used, as I built some of them.

I am not saying it is bulletproof. I am saying it will reliably pull 10 photos of the same person out of 100,000,000 total photos, for any given person, based off a single new photo it has never seen before. That’s the kind of scale and accuracy we’re talking about here, it’s not parlor games. And that 100M was small fries compared to bigger players - who I am sure were into the billions, with even better precision than we had.

I still don’t understand the multiple objections I see relating to “top of the line equipment” or advanced expensive software. The mental model you should have is something like Copilot or GPT3.5. The landlord is just buying access to a nice UI that makes API calls.

I'm with you all the way on your points so far. I think at this point it will be important to refer to a specific product, one that's available to landlords.

I think in the minds of commenters there is an idealised version of "face recognition", so in a way, everyone is arguing past each other.

Go ahead and buy an el-cheapo webcam and test the facial recognition software that is built-in. I challenge you to be able to reliably use that to recognize a face from a block of cheese.

Sure, the high quality algorithms are out there. But no one actually sells the hardware with that stuff built into it, at least not at a price that any sleazy landlord is going to be paying.

This reasoning (“it needs to be worse to be better”) is indistinguishable from homeopathy.

I meant that it is limited by the size of the input layer. A 2000x2000 pixel image of a face has to be downscaled, because otherwise you’d need 4 million nodes on the input layer and that’s impractical.

For the landlord situation, what's the additional harm here if the facial recognition system is inaccurate for people of a certain skin color?

From the article, the concern here is that the landlords are "trying to find ways to expedite ways of flushing people out of the building". Presumably this tech could make it easy to identify tenants violating their lease agreement. For example, detecting repeat non-residents using keys to enter the building as a sign of illegal subletting.

But if the face rec system incorrectly identifies someone for potential lease violations, the landlord still needs to go through additional human verification and present proof to a judge to start the eviction process. Especially in NYC, the landlord needs to go to court with a lot of evidence to secure an eviction. So it seems like inaccurate facial recognition would be good for the tenants. If the results are inaccurate enough it eventually defeats the whole purpose of the system.

(this is very different from situations like Madison Square Garden's use of face rec, where a someone might be denied entry unilaterally because of misidentification and have no recourse)

Police/security could be called on a resident every time they walk into the hallway of their building, and landlords would tell them "we've put in a support ticket with our facial recognition vendor, we'll let you know their response in 4-6 weeks".

Or residents could be locked out of the building with no way to get in for weeks at a time.

Just facial recognition wouldn't have a point - landlords are going to use this data for something, and that something is likely to interfere with residents quiet enjoyment of their residence.

Sounds like NYC needs to add more housing supply to take the power away from corporate landlords.

Where are these state of the art facial recognition systems deployed? Because as someone with dark skin and a Nest doorbell with facial recognition, I can tell you from experience that Nest still struggles with dark skin.

And if Nest is not deploying state of the art facial recognition then what are the odds that some random landlord is? I'm going to say close to none.

No, I do agree that Nest’s face rec (and face detection too, for that matter) is pretty awful. I don’t have first-hand knowledge of what Google is actually deploying but I suspect they’re performing so poorly because they’re training the recognition on just the home’s dataset; it is sort of like each home training it’s own LLM just on text written by that home’s inhabitants, while GPT4 gets unlimited resources to train on hundreds of gigabytes of text from all over the web. But it is still a bit of a mystery why Google is allowing Nest’s facial recognition to remain so weak.

Actually, if Nest is representative of what most consumers experience when interacting with facial recognition, then I understand why there’s this common perception that facial recognition is buggy and unreliable. I’m drawing on my experience working on commercial models.

Are there any light-skinned people set up on your doorbell for comparison? Would help to eliminate other possibilities like low light, or the algorithm being generally bad.

Yes, in fact. I have people in my extended family who are fair skinned (i.e. white) and have visited my home. The Nest was almost immediately able to accurately identity them even in sub-optimal lighting conditions. Even though it struggles to identity me except in the most optimal lighting conditions. Despite the fact that it "sees" me a lot more.

It was one of the first things I noticed when I got the doorbell. The difference was stark and obvious.

Yes, and "digital cameras will never compete with film," ammirite?

I heard this a lot twenty years ago, and even a little ten years ago.

Sure and state-of-the-art cars will hit the brake before running into another car.

Doesn't mean the car behind you at the red light will brake. Just like the fact that a model can tell twins apart doesn't mean the model the cops used can tell you apart from the actual criminal. Or that a Landlord will have tested the model at all or required it to meet some standard of twin detection.

My usage of “state of the art” was misleading, I apologize. To be more precise I should say “most of the companies offering services in this area are this good and getting better”. This is not like batteries or carbon nanotubes where research is way ahead of production; it is more like LLMs where commercial offerings are significantly ahead of published research offerings.

Can you give some examples of real world successes of this?

Because your (several) comments defending this technology boil down to ‘trust me bro, I’ve seen it in the lab’.

If I’ve given the impression that I am defending the technology against anything other than claims about its accuracy, I apologize. The fact that I used to work on this technology and now I instead talk about how it harms minorities should give you some idea of how likely I am to defend this technology.

Basically you should just imagine there was a media cycle about the dangers of unregulated trains that go 50mph, do not have any brakes, and need to be regulated because they’re running pedestrians over. And you should read my comments like I’m a pedantic trainwatcher saying “actually these trains go 400mph, can stop on a dime, and need to be regulated because they’re running pedestrians over. Source: I used to be a train driver”.

Why do you think they're "defending this technology" when their comment explicitly highlights how this doesn't go against the activist's core point, only a nitpick of a specific argument about "technical progress"?

I have no faith that landlords will be using the state of the art. Especially when the not-state-of-the-art version supports (in a plausibly deniable way) the biases of the landlords. Make no mistake: landlords are absolutely not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts to make their buildings safer.

> The state of the art in facial recognition technology has been superhumanly accurate (e.g. telling apart identical twins better than humans can, finding pictures with significant weight or age differences) on all subgroups for several years now, and the racial disparities in accuracy are minuscule relative to the level of noise.

That may be true of state of the art models that have been demonstrated under some conditions; it continues not to be true, frequently, of models actually adopted in major products, even new ones, in the actual deployment conditions (e.g., the recently adopted CBP One app that US asylum seekers are required to use for appointment scheduling and other purposes, and which requires facial recognition, and disproportionately fails for dark skinned users, who are not uncommon in the population required to use the app.)

Is the state of the art facial recognition technology deployed in real world, scenarios, though? It's one thing to use it in a lab setting with a person sitting still the perfect distance away from the camera, and quite another to operate on hundreds of people at once from a distant ceiling. Not to mention cost (i.e. the landlords don't actually care about accuracy that much, would they really pay a premium?)

To nitpick :) : SOTA is nice but there is often a wide gap between validation dataset and real world usage accuracy. Additionnaly accuracy percentage are often misleading something over 99% sounds great until it's applied thousands of times and you end up with dozens of failure and if those failure are not gracefully handled it can quickly become a nightmare.

And I highly doubt that a "penny-pinching landlord" will install anything close to Sota.

The state of the art in facial recognition technology has been superhumanly accurate

That's SOA and in controlled circumstances you're talking about.

Not real-life FR using cheap cameras, with bad lighting, against shitty lookup databases (with built-in biases). Which is what's at issue, here.

Your apologetic does make for excellent ad copy & pitch deck material, however.

In practice I suspect we’ll see many more misidentifications like the one that happened recently https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/27/california-p...

Have you considered that the activists might be okay with surveillance if the surveillance is fair? That is, if it's not misidentifying people and adds a sense of security and auditability, maybe they would be okay, just as they themselves might install Nest/Ring in their own abode?

Now, I agree that if the argument is "surveillance is inaccurate" then some landlords and landladies might come back and say, "ours is more accurate than trained crowds of professional forensic experts" and it's possible the activists would not want that and just don't want any surveillance, or maybe they are looking for accuracy and the elimination of misattribution.

I have considered that, empirically speaking I’ve seen a few activists do exactly that, and I am definitely not going around believing that activists are all some kind of anti-all-surveillance, defund-the-cops, legalize-crime parody. But also empirically speaking, I have seen that highly accurate systems with no racial bias still disproportionately impact minorities (often because they are employed by institutions like law enforcement or landlords that have racial bias themselves).

I really just think that if activists see two stats like “provably 99.999…% accurate” and “provably impacts minorities more” at the same time, most of them are still going to care about the impact than the accuracy - and I don’t think that caring about the impact is in any way intellectually dishonest, it’s quite moral really.

> The state of the art in facial recognition technology has been superhumanly accurate

On a clear pictures, maybe. On a regular blurry surveillance footage from a gas station camera on a day with bad weather and poor lighting, absolutely not.

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/racial-discriminatio...

While I'm sure some algorithm is provably unbiased, it's a little naive to imagine landlords (you know about the landlord special? Load bearing paint and the likes?) caring about what they are running.

I played with AWS rekog, I agree that it is remarkable, but even with a 98 threshold you get occasionally some false positives (but rare), and often some false negatives (I didn't count but I'd say of the magnitude of 0.1-0.5%). That would mean that several days in the year you can't get in because the system mis identifies you.

It’s also an extremely weak argument to say that FR is inaccurate. It’s contingent on an engineering problem that will be solved. Algorithms will get better, HD cameras will become cheaper and more ubiquitous. We are rushing head first into a future where every public and semi-public interaction is recorded and analyzed by functionally omniscient systems, and the temporary inaccuracy of that analysis does nothing to argue against that future.

And then I ask myself, is that really a bad thing? I am far more likely to be the victim of a crime than the perpetrator of one or the victim of inaccurate accusation. The places I’ve lived with pervasive surveillance were also some of the safest, and those who argue against this “oppressive” surveillance rarely are forced to balance that with the actual oppression of crime, or the second-order consequence of the lack of security cameras (that low level crimes will probably go unpunished).

I should also add that going back to a time where surveillance doesn’t exist is not an option. Everyone is walking around with a security camera in their pocket. Very soon those videos will be able to be run through facial recognition tech as well.

> We are rushing head first into a future where every public and semi-public interaction is recorded and analyzed by functionally omniscient systems, and the temporary inaccuracy of that analysis does nothing to argue against that future.

I agree. We need to be fighting the panopticon. The more accurate it is, the more objectionable it is.

Just so everyone knows this is an account that just bullshits elaborately. Everything the account says is just for argument sake.

He explains his point convincingly well.

You should make your point in reply if you disagree with OP, because slandering OP is not changing my pov to yours here.

I'd say the fact that they write-off repeated examples of existing systems that are deployed commercially failing, and then also haven't responded with any real world examples of systems that are "nearly foolproof" as a pretty good indicator of arguing a hypothetical.

No he doesn't. His entire comment history is exactly what he's done here. Decently written but empty and contrarian for the sake of it. Engaging with this person is a waste of time, I was merely providing a public service to others that similarly value their time.

> Landlords, under this bill, would be banned from collecting biometric data on anyone unless they have “expressly consented” in writing or through a mobile app.

Even if it probably started from good intentions, this sounds more like CYA when the biometrics and surveillance data gets leaked given it's not really consent when they'll just refuse to rent to anyone who doesn't agree to the data collection.

> ... in writing or through a mobile app.

Great, so now tenant is required to have the app to pay rent. But to use the app to pay rent, you have to agree to the ToS which includes expressly consenting to having your bio data scooped up.

I am already mildly aggravated about app only menu at some restaurants ( and promptly leave if I can't get basic service from the waiter ), but there is something to be said about requiring app for an actual necessity ( eating at a restaurant isn't a necessity ), where one can't simply walk away.

They'll just refuse to rent to anyone who doesn't agree to the data collection.

Fortunately they won't "just" be allowed to do that.

Tenant law is quite robust in NYC, and most likely such requirements (or even asking about them) will be prohibited as well.

Yeah, unfortunately, the agreement will make its rounds into boilerplate leases soon enough.

GDPR is nice in this regard: Consent isn't enough. The consent must be freely given (aka no stipulation saying you can't rent without accepting), informed (aka you should be told all your rights and what's included in your consent, just not a general "by signing the rental agreement you're accepting us collecting your data"), and they can't even collect the data unless they have a legitimate use for it (which again someone could challenge, the landlord doesn't need to know when I come&go to do their job).

All of that might not be enough. Renters might still find they are in a weak position to negotiate a contract details like that, if they even comprehend the full meaning and consequences. Landlords will figure out the "Legitimate use" legalese and paste it in each contract, and it is in the nature of data collection that mose abuse goes unnoticed.

Casual surveillance and the landlord-renter power dynamic are things that should be established at the society-level.

That’s not how “freely given consent” works.

Freely given means that consent is given in a way that it does not affect any other aspect of the transaction. There is no negotiation to be made. I would imagine that a competent legal system would never allow it to be attached to a separate contract since it then becomes consideration as part of a separate transaction.

> Landlords will figure out the "Legitimate use" legalese and paste it in each contract

I have no doubt that they will.

However, ultimately they will end up on this list https://www.enforcementtracker.com/ (or they were in the US and so it was irrelevant).

> and it is in the nature of data collection that mose abuse goes unnoticed.

Unnoticed by the average person maybe but people honestly think GDPR has had no _absolutely zero_ effect as well; doesn't make them correct.

> (aka no stipulation saying you can't rent without accepting)

Is this specifically for landlords, or are companies forced to serve you even if you reject data collection?

Also, will this actually be enforced in practice? Websites with n > 1 million users are one thing, but landlords / apartment management companies with a few hundred units are going to be tough to go after one by one.

It's all organizations. Data collection cannot be a stipulation to receive full service. It must be completely optional and opt-in.

That's why the reject all button exists right?

You just make a "required need" and installing a biometric access to the building might be enough to trigger that.

Plus the nice, fancy buildings will require it as a de rigueur add-on.

"we only let in the best, and we offer top security, so that means retinal scans and facial recognition"

> they can't even collect the data unless they have a legitimate use for it

They can collect any and all data if you give free and informed consent. They do not need consent to collect data with a legitimate interest, but they do need to inform you of it.

No, actually not. GDPR also has rules related to "data minimisation", aka you shouldn't collect data you don't need.

Got a source for that?

GDPR article 5.1c https://gdpr-text.com/read/article-5/#related_gdpr-a-05_1c

This article and data minimisation don't mean you can't collect information, they just say you can't collect more than what you need for the specific purpose. If the specific purpose is ad targeting via a bunch of data from tracking and you have a lawful basis (ie. consent) for it, there is no problem, as far as you're really using (and need to use) that data for ad targeting.

if the rental application, looks like im installing windows, im renting elswhere.

How does this jack up prices and force people out?

The article mentions petty lease violations, but if a tenant is committing "petty" lease violations, then there are lease violations. Neighbors in my building regularly left trash in the hallway. It was gross and fits the bill for a petty violation. The landlord had no proof and so couldn't (wouldn't) enforce.

That said, lease violations go both ways with the added requirements of NYC housing laws. If a landlord is violating either, however petty, they are violating. If hot water is 119 and not the required 120, its a violation. It's binary.

To be clear, I'm not in favor of biometrics for this use case. A key fob, pin code, or dial by name system doesn't seem broken, so why "fix it" and add the risk that sensitive biometrics info is leaked because of hacking/theft/accidental loss.

I'm seeking to understand what the root of the concern for being forced out is over a change in method used to enter the building?

Two issues:

(1) Subletting by a rent-controlled tenant to a sub-tenant, for a profit and without the consent of the landlord.

(2) “Giving” a rent-controlled apartment to a friend or family member, without the consent of the landlord.

A rent-controlled apartment that a tenant has held for 20+ years and is renting at a small fraction of the market rate is a valuable asset that some tenants want to capitalize on.

Yeah, this is a huge thing here. I have some friends moving into one of their great-uncle's 3-bedroom apartment in the West Village that is rent controlled at < 1/3 the market price. They've been scheming it for literally years. Its great for them but terrible for the market at large, and we'd be better off as a society if these things didn't happen.

Bingo. I think that's exactly what tenants are really worried about. The "racist gentrifiers" narrative just doesn't hold up.

It doesn't even require that the tenant be trying to "capitalize". Perhaps they are subletting for a few weeks, or just having friends stay over on the regular. If that is disallowed by the lease agreement, it's enough for the landlord to begin an eviction proceeding.

One more issue:

(3) Tenants holding onto apartments that they no longer live in.

If the tenant is short term renting out the apartment to more than two people or is not there during that time (e.g. Airbnb), then the property owner is in violation and will be cited.

How does a property owner protect themselves to identify if an apartment has more than two non-tenants staying there for less than 30 days or that the tenant isn't in residence in the apartment during that time?

Key fobs and PIN codes are not sufficiently strong to ensure this.

the real issue here is that rental control is awful policy and leads to these kinds of bizarre market distortions

abolish rent control and legalize building more housing

Honestly not sure what the big deal is - if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me - plus I am certain an awful lot of people would prefer that only people that are supposed to be let in their building, are let in. Can it be abused? probably, but that is pretty much true of any technology or business process.

A human has a level of accuracy and decaying memory appropriate for the task of improving security for an apartment building.

They’ll stop a stranger walking out with a package and keep an eye out for your abusive ex for you. They won’t remember you coming home late 6 years ago shortly after someone matching your description left an abortion clinic.

They’re also human not an unaccountable automated process. They’ll let you bring home a new fling 5 nights in the same month without registering them as a tenant, and let a non-corporate delivery driver drop off a package without being registered as a SurveillanceCorp approved deliverer.

The concept of doormen is dumb, but we don’t need to automate away every human interaction in our lives.

I agree with the rest of you comment, but I am curious to know why you think the concept of a doorman is dumb

In hindight, it was an unrelated and needlessly-negative statement that undermined the rest of my argument.

But seeing as you asked, doormen hit some of the aspects of US culture I've struggled to adapt to as an immigrant of ~7 years including

* Disproportionate fear of violence. It seems like doormen largely play the role of a security guard which is nice to have "just in case", without balancing against the mental harm of constant fear and anxiety. Let alone spending that money and mental capacity on actual problems like vehicle collisions and loneliness.

* An OTT service industry. I don't want someone's fulltime job to be opening the door for me and being nice to me for tips, it makes life feel like a sales call. Ditto for hiring gardeners to leafblow your tiny lawn every week all through winter, and the server at a restaurant checking in on you every 10 minutes. It's much easier to have genuine interactions and relationships with people when they are doing a worthwhile job for a fair wage.

The doorman at a certain medical facility in New York was one of the most AMAZING people I have ever seen. He was as much a part of those people's treatment as the doctors/nurses there. I often had to wait in the lobby during our software implementation for someone to escort me around and ended up spending a total of days worth of time in that lobby. He knew every patient. He interacted with people and made them feel human. I went home and cried every night the amount of human suffering that went through that place, but he lifted every single person I saw come through that door up and I imagine had a huge therapeutic benefit to those people, giving each one a personal, human, intentional and present positive interaction when they were facing horrible chemo, body part removal (people would have cancerous noses, ears, arms, legs removed), etc. Dude was a friggen saint and should have been paid millions the amount of people he touched and strength and positivity he had within him to give. I haven't had a lot of interaction with New York door men but that dude made me a lifelong champion of them. Sorry for the random off topic anecdote.

Counter point: a non human won't gossip with your neighbor about you bringing an overnight fling.

Might be better than receiving personalized ads for birth control and relationship/dating advice the next morning.

The doorman isn’t dumping a log of your comings and goings as well as who entered or exited with you into an unsecured s3 bucket in the cloud.

then thats the problem to fix - your landlord could also be dumping copies of your drivers license, rental application, lease and other financial data onto an unprotected s3 bucket as well - are we going to ban them from collecting that information?

The solution is harsh penalties for negligence or willful misuse of customer data - not banning the technology imo.

> The solution is harsh penalties for negligence or willful misuse of customer data - not banning the technology imo.

Well since the solution (in the form of those laws) doesn't exist yet, the technology shouldn't be usable until it does.

Yeah. That ship has sailed. Too many companies have been too blithe about customer data in order to blitzscale that growth curve and make their investors jump for joy. The next decade is going to be a series of overreaching regulatory baseball bats to the tech industry for abusing the trust and naiveté of the generic consumer.

As it should be. Companies that abuse the public trust _should_ be regulated harshly.

It's not the landlord personally doing it though, it's third-party companies with low public visibility and no disincentive to try to monetize their data. it's harder to regulate entrenched abuses than to regulate new ones, so I see this as a perfectly valid and beneficial short term measure until we as a society can get our heads more properly around personal privacy rights in general.

Current law/policies kind of does this and isn't just reactive. Like to access a tenants background check the credit bureaus require an on site survey of the landlords office with requirements for a paper shredder, a locking file cabinet or similar way to secure records, and that the space is separate from a living area.

Basically every single building is doing this with key fobs.

Let’s not equal widespread abuse to no abuse at all.

as I started reading your comment I thought it was going to be about him being in the bathroom and not being able to do his job

> Can it be abused? probably, but that is pretty much true of any technology or business process.

This is such an incredibly misleading statement. This is why we need legislation restricting the (ab)use of these technologies.

I would even venture further and suggest that parent just argued for rather aggressive regulation of that space.

>Honestly not sure what the big deal is - if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me

One difference is in the automation of recording your movements (and those of your friends) and giving easy instant access to it. I could not care less for a conscierge writing it down on a paper notebook.

Another difference is that most buildings don't have a doorman to begin with.

>> Honestly not sure what the big deal is

I would want assurances that it works equally well across skin types. I hate it when, say, HR sends me to a hotline and the phone cannot understand my accent. Often, automated system experiences are optimized for only some people.

As a PoC, I dont want to be locked out of my own building because i'm being identified as someone else.

Or worse, automatically calling the police.

This is line of reasoning is a pro-tech disease: "Dangerous thing X has always been technically possible, but logistically prohibitive. Since we have not explicitly done anything to prevent thing X in the past, new technology that removes all logistical barriers to doing thing X is not at all problematic."

It is a problem that our only guardrails to thing X were that human labor was too slow and costly to do it at scale. That we built no other guardrails does not imply that thing X is not a problem, nor that automating thing X at scale is no worse than doing it manually. Moreover, if the only additional guardrail you support is that every time thing X occurs, it goes to the courts, then the reasonable bad actor only needs to make the rest of their operation efficient enough to profit before they go to trial.

Having a doorman sounds arcane to me. Don't you just beep your key to get in? Why should I pay for someone sitting there all day watching the entrance? Will they stop my brother from coming in and watering my plants while I'm on vacation?

A doorman helps keep randos who intend to steal packages, jiggle door handles to check if any apartments are unlocked, or urinate and puke in the elevator from tailgating their way into the building.

Do people still seriously allow tailgating through locked doors these days?

Unreal. When I lived in apartments I always made sure no one followed me in unless I recognized them and knew they were my neighbor or a neighbors guest I saw frequently.

As a socially awkward computer geek, yes, yes people do.

When your neighbor broke up with their boyfriend, did they notify everyone in the building to no longer let him follow them in like you seem to be ok with doing? Or did you just assume it was fine and let him in since you saw him come in with them before?

I once closed the door on the landlord's wife because I don't let people follow me into the building.

I think I'm probably more socially awkward than you but maybe just in a different way. :)

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/facial-recognition-too...

imagine this but now you are being evicted because of "lease violations". You see the footage and none of it is of you, but they dont really care to bother with manual error correction.

Oh, and do you think Ring is the only private surveillance company with a police integration?

Good doorman forgets if you slip him a tenner, unless the cops show up that week.

A doorman costs money; upwards of 3x salary a year (as you need three if it's manned 24 hrs a day). That's a cost too high to catch people subletting illegally.

A camera and an internet connection is a tiny fraction of that.

If you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me

So you're trusting your cheap-ass landlord to install an additional system layer reliably let you in at 2AM?

You know - the same landlord couldn't figure out how to check his camera backups last time someone got mugged in the vestibule?

One difference is occurrence: most apartments don’t have doormen, because they’re expensive (and don’t make sense for a building with just a few units, which is the majority of apartments in NYC).

Even in fancier neighborhoods (UWS, UES), I’d guess that less than half the buildings have doormen. And those are neighborhoods with tall buildings with dozens of large apartments.

> Honestly not sure what the big deal is...

Then you've already given up and accepted your new surveilled reality.

> if you have a doorman recognizing your face and letting you in vs a camera doing the same thing seems pretty much like the same thing to me

A doorman isn't putting detailed records in a database that can be combined with other databases.

This is borderline ignorance in this age of privacy erosion. Is someone overhearing your phone call the same as a warrantless wiretapping program?

"If left unchecked, she said, racially biased algorithms driving these systems risked further fueling gentrification, which threatened to, “erode what should be a diverse collective identity in the city.”

I don't get this statement. If s minority already has a apartment lease, how is registering their face data leads to all of that?

It's explained right there in the same paragraph,

- "she feared aggressive landlords could use the tech to issue petty lease violations against tenants, which could eventually lead to their eviction"

Selective enforcement is a tool for capricious abuses. If you allow landlords to spy on their tenants with automated systems, passively collecting vast amounts of data, it's very easy for them to "find" an infraction if they deliberately set out to find one. It empowers petty tyrants.

As if the landlords didn't already know their renters were in minority groups.

Your fear is no different than if the landlord had surveillance cameras in public areas of the property, recording 24/7... which they absolutely should anyway.

With the 24/7 surveillance camera setup, the cost to the landlord of gathering enough violations to evict minority tenants is “watch all recorded video from all cameras, looking for the target”. Facial recognition allows landlords to start with a target in mind and have the technology filter an arbitrary amount of data for just the moments when the target is on camera.

The tech removes that O(n) search where n is hours recorded, which was the dominating factor making it impractical, and crucially was the only thing that made pervasive recording correspondingly more expensive to mine for violations.

Cameras can just recognize humans, so a lot of the N hours can be removed simply by detecting human activity and without using facial recognition. It's still quite practical. I have cheap Wyze cameras that allow me to do this.

It would also be trivial to pore through those videos and just pick out the ones where the human has dark skin if I'm a racist landlord.

The thing is, I agree with people against this simply on the principle that the landlord shouldn't be able to use facial recognition on tenants without their permission, and the landlord also shouldn't be able to use that lack of agreement to withhold a lease in the first place.

But the race-reductionist arguments being used to prop up this position come off as sophistry. I don't think a landlord in NYC of all places is going to waste time targeting black people that they already gave a lease to an apartment, rather than just targetting shitty tenants. The cameras will probably be able to find people littering in the building, for example. Those are the people you target if the plan is to start kicking people out of the building to improve it.

> It would also be trivial to pore through those videos and just pick out the ones where the human has dark skin if I'm a racist landlord.

Yes, but you can't do it at scale. Automation via facial recognition makes it cheap. That's the problem.

I have no problem with an individual person remembering the face of another individual person - I have a problem with a system that allows a landlord to pick out every interaction with any person they choose after the fact for the entire term of the data collection.

> I have a problem with a system that allows a landlord to pick out every interaction with any person they choose after the fact for the entire term of the data collection.

If that's the case, then why bring race into it? The racial aspects of the argument infers that such law would only be put in place, in spirit, to protect the privacy of minorities, and not anyone else.

I'm not the one who brought race into it, I'm pointing out that it should be banned for everyone. Nobody here is saying "we should ban facial recognition only on minorities", they are pointing out that it can and is likely to be abused specifically to further existing racial inequality.

If you're going to move the goalposts in the middle of a conversation, you might want to call that out a little clearer.

I'm not sure "enabling easier abuse of power will likely have bad consequences for populations of people who are already targeted for abuse by people in power" is moving the goalposts.

Shoehorning racism into every argument has the opposite effect of what you are expecting.

Rather than some call to action, people either roll their eyes or tune it out because of overuse.

Continued tyranny over the poor by the powerful is the real injustice in this story, not racism.

This is a HUGE leap.

You're saying a technology should be banned because there might be some racist landlord who could leverage it to capture minority tenant lease violations?

First, we already have systems to deal with this sort of behavior. If someone is found selectively applying rules based on race it is typically illegal and punishable.

Second, why would a racist landlord rent to a minority and then spend all of that effort gathering evidence against just that tenant to kick them out?

You're assuming that a landlord who wants to evict a tenant without "proper" cause is going to bother with gathering evidence, instead of simply fabricating it or finding some other way to lay blame on them.

What kind of violation can happen in a building lobby that leads to an eviction? I'm seriously confused. Littering?

- violation of guest policies (having too many or staying too long)

- if you hook up a decibel meter, being too loud

- loitering

- allowing someone to tailgate

etc.

The main one landlords are interested in is people illegally subletting.

So if the person/people going into your apartment every day for three months are not you or on your lease, then they evict you.

Maybe this? but then it has nothing to do with face recognition but with any kind of renovation:

> he saw it as a sneaky attempt to jack up prices in a gentrifying area and force people like him out.

“They were trying to find ways to expedite ways of flushing people out of the building and then try to market new flipped-over apartments to gentrifiers,” Rogers told Gizmodo.

Facial recognition is well known to have racial biases with respect to accuracy.

If the building I’m currently renting in suddenly decides that I’m not a legitimate visitor some random percent of the time, then I’m very likely to move and go somewhere that isn’t going to do that to me. That percentage doesn’t have to be very high; it just has to be higher than a key, which has a success rate approaching 100%.

Edit: forgot to mention: it’s also somewhat common for a building’s owner to change beneath its tenants, with the new owner enacting policies that are clearly intended to flush to old (and therefore less profitable) tenants out. Cameras that track the activities of tenants and make them feel unwelcome would typify this kind of policy, even before any racial bias in the technology itself.

System records all people smoking on the staircase. The smoking tenant is evicted. New non-smoking tenants pay more. Old tenant can't sue the landlord over his eviction being racially-driven.

> Landlords, under this bill, would be banned from collecting biometric data on anyone unless they have “expressly consented” in writing or through a mobile app.

So old fashioned writing is ok, a mobile app is ok, but the in-the-middle technology of a website on a PC is not ok? Why does the form factor of the computing device matter here?

This also reads like landlords can still do it, they just have to require you to consent first to be able to enter the building.

Unless you’re “frozen caveman lawyer”, recently thawed and awoken from the glacial ice, it should be pretty obvious that scale changes things. It’s not creepy when the guy at the coffee shop knows your order because you come in every day. It is creepy if every Starbucks barista knows who you are and what you want.

Technology has already put significant limits on free movement and privacy. It is impossible, for example, to enter or leave an urban area by vehicle without at minimum LPR footprints tracking that movement. Photos and video are increasingly common.

The problem in a place like NYC is that the residents there will feel it first. Nobody can afford property, so private entities can record everyone in your home at any time, in public or private spaces. We’ve already seen abuses of this - an employee of a law firm was ejected from Radio City Music hall because her law firm was suing MSG, the venues parent company.

I think this should be completely banned. I can see cases where people will say "no" and then will no be allowed to rent or put on the top of the list for large rent increases.

Rental leases are contracts of adhesion. Consent to facial recognition will be added to the boiler plate text. If tenants want to negotiate, they’ll be told that the contract is just a standard form that can’t change.

> they’ll be told that the contract is just a standard form that can’t change.

One of the biggest problems with rental contracts is that the person who is counter-signing the contract on behalf of the property owner often doesn't have the authority within the organization to negotiate, only the owner does, but you have no opportunity as a tenant to speak to them. The manager of most apartment complexes is a low-mid paying role that basically exists to say "no" a whole lot and be a scapegoat for the choices/decisions of the owners. This is even /more true/ with corporate-owned apartments. When you combine this with the systems used to effectively illegally price fix via collusion with other landlords (although somehow this is never prosecuted), it becomes an untenable system for renters who have essentially no legal recourse.

Ironically, the more expensive the apartment rent, the less likely you are to put up with these things because the owners know that their tenants can afford to sue them and are likely educated and know their rights. It's primarily lower rent locations where abuses occur en masse. In order for a contract to be enforceable it must allow for negotiation and must provide consideration for both parties. But there's a huge difference between a contract being legally enforceable and upheld by a court vs a contract you must follow because you have no means to legally challenge it. Contracts of adhesion are very rarely fully enforceable, because they often do not include consideration and may be unconscionable. As an example, you are not allowed to contractually sign away your civil rights in most jurisdictions, but many rental contracts include clauses that effectively have you do so.

And even if you don't consent in writing, they'll just do it anyways because they're too lazy to special-case your request, and they'll bank on you not figuring out that they're doing it anyways, and then not bothering to drag you into court even if they did do it.

There's no conspiracy here.

It's that they bought a particular iot hardware package from some company like Yardi or Realpage for half a million, installed that in every apartment, and since they're using the management software from those same companies they have little ability (or frankly, desire) to exempt the one jackass who demands that from that lease clause, when they don't even know how to turn off the facial recognition for the one customer.

You talk as if it's part of some sinister plan, when it's really someone making $19/hr at the front office who is bad at the software that their business uses to manage said business. Besides, everyone complains when they have to dig their phone out of their pocket every time they want to open up a gate or door to the building, when it could just unlock itself when it sees them coming (it's not as if there are going to be many apartment buildings relying on brass keys here in 10 years).

This is apathy, trends, and convenience. Nothing more.

Right, it's the "banality of evil" all over again.

It's not even evil. It's just the plain fact that corporations choose a business model that means they do not care to negotiate with individual consumers on contract terms.

Then you have several layers of products (software titles in this case) being stacked one on top of another, until the renter isn't even the consumer of the product.

Virtually none of these places are using anything that allows them to one-off a lease for a grouchy asshole. But if renters really demanded that and wanted to pay for it, I guess there could be an onsite lawyer willing and able to vet those modifications and put the lease through. But in a day and age where every whiny Starbucks barista complains that they can't afford the 4000sqft studio apartment of their dreams, I doubt they want to pay the extra premium that would result from individualized lease contracts.

It's the banality of "you're not important enough to spend the time on". No one's being loaded into cattle cars.

This comment feels like it's butting up against the snark/flamebait HN guidelines. More than half of it is lambasting an exaggerated, fictional character.

> and they'll bank on you not figuring out that they're doing it anyways

I mean, if this is the kind of apartment that requires an app, and showing your face at the door, to enter, you'd figure it out

The mobile app thing is weird for sure.

I think reasonable people can disagree on the use of facial recognition by law enforcement (in the "point a camera at the sidewalk and see what happens" sense) but I see absolutely no reason why a private entity should be able to use this type of technology. A landlord doesn't have the right to know the identity of every guest every one of their tenants has - they just don't. A commercial venue like the whole MSG thing is a little stickier but the scale of it and the wild potential for abuse (again, MSG) makes my gut reaction an outright ban.

I'm not crazy about the government/LE doing this either but I'm really not crazy about private entities doing it.

> A landlord doesn't have the right to know the identity of every guest every one of their tenants has - they just don't.

I don't think it would give them that. My understanding is that these facial recognition systems for building access work by registering and storing the face data of the people who are supposed to be able to open the locked door.

This was partially driven by this[0]:

"Madison Square Garden Uses Facial Recognition to Ban Its Owner’s Enemies MSG Entertainment, the owner of the arena and Radio City Music Hall, has put lawyers who represent people suing it on an “exclusion list” to keep them out of concerts and sporting events."

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/nyregion/madison-square-g...

Here I wa thinking that was just journalists jumping to hasty conclusions, but no that is the actual text:

> [...] except where such user has expressly consented, in writing or through a mobile application [...]

Not sure how they defined "mobile application" however.

How does this even work? Are the landlords trying to prove that the tenants aren’t living there anymore because they don’t see them on a recording? If so, isn’t it plausible that the tenant in question is bedridden or similar and someone is bringing them things to assist them?

Seems like a poor use for the technology even if we ignore the privacy issues.

Tenants putting the apartment up on Airbnb and not using the property themselves. That could run counter to other laws in NYC and have the property owner at least partially liable if they are complicit or didn't take action to prevent their properties from being used as short term rentals.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/specialenforcement/stay-in-the-know...

> Under the NYC Administrative Code, property owners are responsible for ensuring their properties are maintained in a safe and code-compliant manner at all times. Property owners can and will be issued the violation for any illegal short-term rentals at their property -- even if it is conducted by tenants.

Even aside from that, short term rentals can generate more complaints from neighbors and increase wear and tear on the property.

These issues arise anytime you have rent control and units with a large disparity between the legally-allowed rent and the market rate rent. Some tenants will want to capture that value (e.g., by subletting to a market rate tenant and living somewhere else).

Yep, except now it's all of NYC that has the "property owner on the hook for any short term rentals".

Rough math... let's say a doorman costs $200/day ($70k/year). 20 units in the building. This would amount to $10/day/unit and thus a rent increase of $300/month for everyone.

For a one bedroom rental, that would represent a 15% increase (on average) for rent increase (based on https://www.apartmentlist.com/rent-report/ny/new-york ).

Note that the long term sublet isn't necessarily a problem - it's the situations where someone is renting out their apartment for less than 30 days and are not occupying it themselves during that period of time.

So now that the property owner is going to be issued a violation if there is an illegal short term rental, how does the property owner prevent that? Note that it is legal to rent out a bedroom of a 2 bedroom apartment on a short term basis if the person who holds the rental lease is there the entire time.

I agree. With long-term subletting the tenants are just cheating the system to the detriment of the landlord, but short-term subletting can actually get the landlord fined by the city. I don’t know which is a bigger problem, but I do know that dealing with violations can be a nightmare for landlords even if the violation is cause by the tenant.

I believe the violations would be the larger concern by the landlords. A rent controlled property that is transferred represents a known loss that can be mitigated (and it's not worse than it is today - rent controlled).

Violations represent an unknown amount and are unbounded, cannot be controlled for and cannot be mitigated easily or inexpensively... though that's part of the article (if you could do face recognition as a landlord you'd be able to alert someone about suspicious activity at apartment XYZ) that would otherwise represent some significant expenses (that would be even harder to do with rent control).

aimco properties have been requesting tenants drivers licenses or passports to be scanned by facial recognition technology from their contractors in india and then sold to advertisers. They have been doing this since 2010, you cannot live without selling your soul to landlords and advertisers

At a certain point it seems like the start of all shit is targeted ads, just ban em. And all the tracking and targeting magically disappears.

Yes this. 100% this. Surveillance at scale must be paid-for, and regardless of how cheap we make the surveillance, if no one pays, it won't happen.

pointless. renters are hardly in any kind of position to negotiate in NYC. if the city wants to stop it, simply ban it.

Yes this is exactly why it just needs to be banned outright, with no wiggle room. Don't even allow people to consent to it, especially for residential areas, because they can't reasonably consent for something like this on behalf of guests they may or may not even know yet.

If you allow FR by landlords in certain scenarios, you'll just end up with everyone slapping one line on their standard rental agreement and now it's everywhere.

I'm curious how these systems deal with COPPA. If a young child is coming home from school, how does this internet-connected system comply?

Existing security cameras don't turn off when a kid walks by; otherwise they'd be easy to defeat.

In a perfect world, 100% accurate facial recognition and record-keeping would encourage apartment owners to make their leasing decision based on a person's actual rental history, instead of deciding based on prejudice.

But my own prejudice is that the people selling the renter blacklist software solution will only care about sales, and not the software accuracy or people affected by false positives.

NYC LLs suffer huge penalties if a tenant airbnbs an apartment (there are extra special fines for that). They basically can't get a tenant out without tons of video evidence that the T is violating their lease. Now this. Basically it is a set up to enable different groups of people to sue and bankrupt LLs.

Oh these poor poor NYC landlords, hardly evading the bankruptcy under the unfair and unjust pressure of the evil renters. /s

It's like when neighbors in an apartment building get a Ring. I immediately think less of them.

My HOA (condo) banned Ring door bells thankfully. Not only does it track everyones movements without consent, it would stare directly into neighbors apartments depending on door locations in the hall way...

From the article it seems like that "current tenants don't want the building to be improved at all so it won't become more attractive to new tenants and current ones get priced out". Looks like inverse NIMBY, NIMBY for tenants? Sad.

Current tenants won’t be priced out because the apartments in question are under rent control. Tenants sometimes want to move, however, but if they do they will lose their below-market-rate rent. So, they instead sublet their apartment to someone else and keep the difference in value. This is a violation of their rental agreements, but if the landlord doesn’t find out they don’t see a problem. Facial recognition and other technologies help landlords identify these tenants who are gaming the system in this way. The tenants gaming the system obviously don’t like that.

Then maybe the very existence of regulated rentals is the problem that should be fixed. It's little but bending of market, Soviet Union style, which naturally creates abuses. Commonplace in Europe especially in Nordic countries, where a net worth of a typical family is mostly the value of their regulated rental contract stretching from 1950s, which they sublet and make sometimes more than their entire income.

This is the root of the issue; smaller landlords can find out that subletting is happening because they only have one or two properties, and may even live in one.

Massive landlords can't do that, because they have thousands of tenants; but facial recognition and computers could flag the ones to be interested in, and then they hire the private investigators.

Sad that this is happening and sad that it had to come to online shaming to make changes happen.

Join the Dark Carnival [1].

[1] https://consequence.net/2019/07/juggalo-makeup-facial-recogn...

Seems like the U.S. needs some kind of data protection law like the EU's GDPR.

I can't see any reason why the data needs to be stored and it sounds like an invasion of the tenants' privacy if the landlord is recording their coming and going.

But but freedom, free market blah blah. That's the argument I receive. I strongly believe the free market only works when a business is small, but not when companies become big.

New Yorkers Want to Stop Landlords from Existing

unironically this

Don't just ban facial recognition for landlords, ban it for everyone, including the government.

You’d have to be a maniac to want to become a landlord in NY these days.

Tenants are breaching contracts with landlords, sub-leasing and renting out their property to others without the consent of the owner-landlord. The lease is a contract that always specifies who is permitted to use the property. It is the right of the owner-landlord to hold the tenant accountable for breaching contract. Facial recognition access control systems are the same as a human being posted at the door permitting the same. However, the latter is far more costly and unnecessary.

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