Google testing facial recognition technology for security near Seattle | Hacker News Reader

Google testing facial recognition technology for security near Seattle

cnbc.com

34 pointsgmays15 comments

If Google really wants security, they should station armed guards at all campuses and all employees should be subjected to ID checks, and they should be required to pass a biometric scan. In addition to that, Google would like to see metal detectors and millimeter wave detectors installed in the campuses to prevent acts of terrorism and to safeguard our national security and corporate policies.

They wouldn’t keep their employees if they did that.

I keep saying we need some sort of futuristic face makeup style or temp tattoos that obscure facial features in a way that confuses this. Finally I can get my 1980s style retro/future.

Reflectacles[0] claims to do this. I haven’t tried them but I do keep the page bookmarked for someday.

Certainly not as low key as something “invisible” like makeup, but I can see them being useful. If they work.

[0]: https://www.reflectacles.com/

I don't understand. You want to go to your workplace, but anonymously?

CV Dazzle makeup has been around for a while, though it's efficacy against state of the art multi-modal models is questionable:

https://radicaldata.org/projects/cv-dazzle/

It seems relevant that recently an employee who was secretly working at a startup in China was paying someone to go to the US office and scan his badge.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-ran-secret-s...

> Security is a costly endeavor for Google not just on campuses but all the way up to the top ranks of the company. In 2023, CEO Sundar Pichai’s personal security cost the company $6.8 million, up from $5.9 million a year earlier, according to regulatory filings.

wow! i know legit/top-notch exec security isn't cheap, but that much?!? yikes

Conversely, this is the CEO of a company that has yearly revenue comparable to the Czech Republic or Pakistan, and at a company that has an extreme level of political influence.

When you're the CEO of a company at that size, you are at the same level of heads of state.

And countries will attempt to attack these CEOs, eg. Jeff Bezos being hacked by the King of Saudi Arabia [0]

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/83dcdf74-3c9b-11ea-a01a-bae547046...

> His personal security cost was part of his “All Other Compensation” which amounted to $6,802,824 in 2023, and also consists of his 401(k) or Roth plan, and personal use of company aircraft or car.

https://qz.com/google-amazon-apple-tesla-nvidia-ceo-security...

I suspect a large part of that $6.8m is the cost of operating private aircraft.

e.g. A previous slide in the above link states that Apple's board requires Tim Cook to use a private aircraft for personal and business travel.

Sure, for "security". Though it bothered me when small places did this, its on another level to have a bot run company do it.

I find there is a curious rift between IT people and the obvious ultimate conclusion (everything being automated, including surveillance) that we seem to struggle with, in what feels like an almost adolescent tantrum way.

What do we expect to happen, eventually? It seems obvious that all things that would otherwise be monitored manually and less efficiently will be monitored automatically. Is that not the promise of IT?

We seem to have trust issues around our institutions, and, fair enough. But is the only way here not obviously to make sure our institutions work, because tech will do whatever it possibly can anyway, at someone's hand, eventually? We seem to marginally resist the future but I don't see to what reasonable end.

IT people already live in a dystopia where they are actively playing and creating a video game at the same time under the belief that they can defeat their own creation.

I don't share the idea that seems pervasive in tech circles that technological development and use is inevitable. There are many, many cases where we have the technology to do a thing but have decided to forbid our institutions from using it, to varying levels of success. Chemical warfare springs to mind: relatively simple to use but we've collectively decided we shouldn't (except tear gassing demonstrators?).

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