Using Advanced Camera Tech and AI to Target the Poor
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
Im sure this wasn't the only thing used for the eviction but if it was that is clearly over the line. With that being said, the behavior is disgusting and if I was in a building dealing with such, I wouldn't feel bad to see them go.
Having lived in such a situation before, I could find globs of spit, blood, and who knows what else on elevator buttons, door handles, mailboxes, and entry buzzers. It's disgusting and incredibly unhealthy. It's also discrimination towards people with germ related phobias or disorders.
To find the guy who spits, you can just rewind the tape.
I certainly could pay any fine that would be assessed, because that fine would be assessed zero times.
If you’re in a living situation where neighbors are regularly spitting in the common areas, I can understand the appeal of a system that would bring that to an end.
But ya, peeing college students shouldn’t registered as sex offenders, urinating on a tree when there are no open bathrooms around, even the cops understand that kind of thing happens sometimes.
I wouldn't put too much faith on human judgement of criminality. I'd put even less faith in corporate views of similar matters. Even less in machine learning models. And I'd put the very least in corporate run mass surveillance fed machine learning models.
It’s less “ok” to people if you say “A public venue is banning an individual because she works for a company our company dislikes.”
If you’re in this space at all, you should be concerned about this. If you live in a major area, hundreds of locations are running LPR on your car or have cameras capable of facial recognition. As more entities start exchanging that data, your movements are available to anyone willing to pay.
Once you open the door to this, it’s easy to go awful things in the name of quality of life. Perhaps your landlord doesn’t like your ethnicity or religion, won’t rent to folks who’ve spent time in certain places, for example.
At least in the US, this type of discrimination is illegal.
How many groups in tech are a single ethnicity or religion managed by that same ethnicity or religion? I bet the number isn't small.
ah the "if you have nothing to hide" approach.
people that occupy this perspective never withstand the level of scrutiny they espouse - i am 100% certain that if i observed you for a ~1 week i would find punishable offenses. and then you would wilt and say "well i didn't mean those things". yes that's the point - systems like this are aimed at a particular category of offenses and blind to another.
So, yes, EVERY little thing.
Spitting in public areas is bad, algorithmically threatening blind people with eviction for getting help is, in my view, an order of magnitude worse.
Your point about not experiencing these systems may be valid for the poster, but certainly not for myself. I do acknowledge that I don't speak for everyone though.
I personally, having dealt with the utter bullshit of being poor and in social housing (which isn't even a top 5 problem I have had to deal with), would prefer the cameras with AI powered horseshit over dealing with idiots spewing their spit and other bodily fluids all over public areas of the social housing. You are free to disagree. If you have not actually lived in these places (specifically the very violent ones), then you should stop referring to us as victims. It doesn't help.
Do you think that maybe, there’s a middle ground where poor disabled people don’t get hassled, but people who do impact the quality of life do get punished appropriately. My guess is that the spitter was a known problem resident, and this was used as an excuse or the final straw to get him out. As bad as spitting is, I wouldn’t want someone to lose their housing for a single incident like this.
What wasn’t mentioned, was how much this ai costs in comparison to how much it might cost to just review the footage when an actual problem is caused.
It isn’t a case of ai surveillance or nothing. The whole issue comes down to under resourced, or plain incompetent management. This is just an expensive bandaid.
You are so well damn so sure of that. Idiot.
You say you walk at 1AM. Why? Maybe your pattern of walks aligns with when some Nextdoor.com Karen thinks there’s a pervert lurking around scaring her cats.
Well hey good news, the cameras are automated now and they know all the crimes.
--Calvin Coolidge
feels like an extra janitor would be a better solution here rather than a surveillance state.
Your guess is probably not correct either.
The cameras may literally save lives. I form this opinion from experience, do you?
The cameras being there sucks. Dying is worse.
Using the footage for petty offenses sucks and shouldn't happen. I just don't think the example invokes any kind of feeling of injustice as seemingly intended. And wanted to point it out that I didn't believe it was the only reason.
Having said all that, a janitor only fixes the one problem. It also introduces new potential problems. A nosy janitor can do a lot more harm to disadvantaged people than a camera. And 24 hour janitorial is more like 4 janitors, not 1. Who is paying for them?
Just don't spit, especially indoors. Simple.
Let's move on from spitting, as it's a dull example, but into behaviors in general. How do you get someone to stop doing something? Punishment does not work. Telling someone not to do something only encourages them to do it even more. So, like most other solutions, we can instead work off incentivizing positive action. We saw this with smokers, you give them a designated area, a place to put out their smokes, alongside restrictions like not smoking indoors, and you've got a winning combination. Likewise, we need thorough solutions to behavioral problems, not "easy" ones. Easy ones don't last long. Habits remain.
If cameras save lives, why do you not have a camera in every room in your home?
Punishment does work. It works to get those people out and get people who can be decent human beings in. It is punishment to the other residents to let it continue unabated.
Your camera comment is odd. I know the cameras saved lives. Witnessed it with my own two eyes. You also don't know what cameras exist in my home, maybe I do have one in every room? It is a deterrent that reminds a person who may think twice about their actions because of the increased probability of being punished.
Go walk through some social housing without cameras while wearing expensive shoes and jewelry. Do it daily for a year. That will change your perspective, assuming you are still around to provide it.
A rational human would have seen that a stranger was accessing the building using a disabled person’s credentials with armfuls of groceries and correctly surmised the situation, or made a quick call to confirm that it was authorized. Instead, a formal process was initiated where one possible outcome is that a low income blind person is evicted. That didn’t happen, but it is a waste of resources to have a formal process to have a blind person file a report explaining their shopping needs.
No, its not.
> because you hate capitalism
I don't hate capitalism any more than I hate childhood; it has its purpose and needs to be moved beyond.
Like feudalism, though, it creates a class that is very interested in preventing that at the expense and who, insofar as they act on that interest, are bad actors and need to be held accountable.
> Like feudalism, though, it creates a class that is very interested in preventing that at the expense and who, insofar as they act on that interest, are bad actors and need to be held accountable.
Apologies for the misunderstanding of your position.
I hear you. I also have empathy for people who clean public bathrooms.
I strongly suspect the “rich” and “upper class” aren’t the ones putting the “out of order” signs on the doors. It’s the workers at the store who are responsible for cleaning them.
I suspect they’re tired of being responsible for cleaning up the stuff that happens in there. Feces smeared on the walls, wads of paper shoved down in the urinal and urine overflowing and flooding the floors. Vomit everywhere.
If I had to hazard a guess, if you personally organized a volunteer group, went around that neighborhood, and provided reliable bathroom cleaning services and repair you’d start seeing more bathrooms.
Next time you walk by one, ask the person at the front desk if they’ll let you clean it.
Tell me, whose side are you really on?
I wasn’t addressing anything beyond the generalization offered that “personal accountability is becoming bourgeoisie [sic]”, which was the only claim in the post I responded to. If I want to discuss the specifics further upthread, I’ll respond to something discussing those specifics.
Assuming that I had a message other than what I said which is not reasonably related to either what I said or what I said it in response to is... quite a reach just to have something to argue about. I’m sure you can find someone actually saying something you can argue against, rather than something that requires you to conjure a fantasy point just to get upset and aegue against it.
You're acting as if poor people are inherently helpless and incapable of following basic rules. Most people are going to have friends or family that would rather spare a couch rather than them live off the streets. If not, he can live in a shelter. Either way, he's going to have to learn how to respect other people's property if he wants to stay.
In the meantime, someone else on the wait-list for public housing who is willing to follow rules can move into now-vacant apartment.
Poor people also want to live in housing that doesn’t have people spitting all the time. They want to live in a relatively secure environment. Poor people also want to feel safe.
In the name of caring about poor people, a lot of well-meaning people are basically enabling the oppression of poor people.
@dang, can link be replaced with this?
Preventing crime has more to do with social and architectural decisions, like expanding visibility, removing chokepoints, and promoting more activity near a given space. The problem is that you can’t demolish all the public housing built poorly in the US and replace it at a reasonable cost.
The new thing is that AI makes all of this less tedious, but I’m skeptical this will put a serious dent in the problem.
The fundamental question is whether we as a society are allowed to enforce any standards of behavior even if they end up having racial disparities in enforcement. The solution that is fashionable right now--to just not apply rules to people of color--seems more racist than holding people of color to the same standard as everyone else.
This kind of thinking is why people also think that POC also use illegal drugs at a higher rate than non-POC, thereby putting more enforcement on POC, hence catching more of them when statistics show relatively equal rates of illegal (but not necessarily the same drugs) drug use.
And again, America loves having different standards that apply to different groups for roughly the same crime. Cocaine use, well that's not good but rich people do that so you should go to rehab. Crack use, time to bury you under the jail.
But why did we put the camera there? Not because we enjoy spending money on cameras, but because we had a problem there already.
https://panopto.essex.ac.uk/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=a58...
(thankfully this one is open-access ... hopefully sharing on HN won't bring the university's server down, hahah)
I’m in camp two. What organisations are working to walk back all this surveillance? How do I get involved? Are any global (not just US based)?
I think it’s a shame that we have billions of cameras because we have conditioned society to be fearful, thus compliant to surveillance tools like this, and so many others.
I think employers should have to disclose every method manner and technology used to surveil their employees.
I’m coming to add value to your company, not blindly give up ALL of my rights.
(If there are no AI generated images anymore, probably Dang changed the link to the Washington Post)