Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fwlr | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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