A HN contest: Provide an elevator pitch, to completely non-technical end-users, that will make them aware of this issue and persuade them that it is important to them. Vote up the best ones. [EDIT: The goal is to persuade them about its dangers, not sell them something based on it]<p>That elevator pitch is key. I have extensive knowledge about this issue but have a hard time coming up with it; I need to be prepared.<p>Change only will come through political pressure, and that requires public awareness. I had lunch recently with a journalist from a prominent publication, someone very well informed, and they told me that widespread surveillance wasn't real, a sort of urban myth. Organizations like the EFF have been unsuccessful and I think that's because they don't generate mass public awareness. It's up to us to create it, and we need a pitch.<p>EDIT: [deleted]
Also available on his blog instead of Forbes' terrible website<p><a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_face_.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/automatic_fac...</a>
As someone with prosopagnosia (neurological inability to recognize faces) I find this incredibly frustrating. My everyday life would be immensely easier with assistive tech that told me the names of everyone I see. And now that the technology exists to develop such a useful device, what do we get instead? Mass societal surveillance.
I no longer know what to do about this problem. I'm convinced surveillance is here to stay and that making it illegal will only serve to hide the microphones. I'm still extremely grateful for those who fight for privacy, is just that I don't see how we can win.<p>Not knowing how to treat the cause, I'm at least trying to treat the symptoms. We might not be able to stop them from seeing our secrets, but we might very well stop them from making us feel ashamed and from blackmailing us.
Where's the line that separates generic image recognition from facial recognition?<p>Forget corporations for a moment and think about your own rights as a programmer. I want to tinker with image-similarity scores by downloading random images from the internet and comparing with a photo I just took in a public place. Oops, my photo just so happened to have a stranger's face that matches a photo in my database and that filename contains the person's name. Should that be illegal?<p>Consider the effects of a legal requirement to have an "opt-in" for facial recognition software. That was what the "consumer advocates" thought should be a minimum standard. Large corporations with trusted brands might be able to run such an effort, but any startup certainly could not.<p>Regulating what software I can write is a slippery slope. Compare facial recognition with encryption. If there's regulation for recognition software, then regulation for encryption will be coming right after. The worst-case scenario in my mind is if the federal government has a monopoly on any kind of software. Our best defense against a government/corporate monopoly on surveillance is not to ban it, but to democratize it.
So <i>are</i> we actually there yet? I was under the impression that, while face recognition has evolved to the point that face matching against a limited group of people (say, your Facebook friends) is feasible, we're still a long ways off from being able to put a face-scanner in a crowd in NYC and have it spot the 1 suspect among 10 million without a totally ridiculous rate of false positives.
I agree with the general idea put forth by the article. This is an important issue, and the future could bring a lot of bad things if we (as a society) are not careful.<p>Schneier makes it sound pretty scary. For a general audience, this is probably good. It takes a lot to make your average Joe start paying attention to something new.<p>But on a technical level, I can't help wondering, how realistic is the scenario he describes? Or, maybe the better question is, how <i>immediate</i> is the threat of universal face recognition? If we know what time horizon we're working with, maybe we can be better prepared.<p>I think Schneier makes some substantial logical leaps in the article that make it sound like automatic, ubiquitous facial recognition is a more urgent issue than it really is.<p>For example, he goes from this<p>> Today in the US there's a massive but invisible industry that records the movements of cars around the country. Cameras mounted on cars and tow trucks capture license places along with date/time/location information ...<p>to this<p>> This could easily happen with face recognition.<p>with no supporting evidence for how this feat of engineering will be accomplished. Recognizing letters and numbers on a license plate is one thing. Recognizing faces at random angles with random occlusions, hats, eyeglasses, makeup, etc., is quite another thing.<p>I found a couple of papers from CMU and UCF a couple of years ago where they look at the problem of recognizing people in photos at "web scale" [1]. The recall/precision rates of the algorithms they tested are pretty decent, but they're still pretty far from the dystopian future described in the article.<p>[1] <a href="http://enriquegortiz.com/wordpress/enriquegortiz/research/face-recognition/webscale-face-recognition/" rel="nofollow">http://enriquegortiz.com/wordpress/enriquegortiz/research/fa...</a>
I'm not sure what "good as a person" means in the context of large scale facial recognition.<p>I know software is now scoring as people on various standard AI tests. But most people couldn't recognize a million other people correctly. The situation is kind of odd. It's like how engineering a car to drive automatically in a variety of controlled situations which might represent 90% of the normal driving. They are still nowhere near ready to drive on real roads.<p>The supposed advantages are perverse; Face recognition with a 1% false positive rate can translate one fugitive to 10 or 100 false arrests of random people.<p>A store clerk knowing your name when you walk in the store is mostly creepy and wouldn't help sales - the store that had their clerks saying goodbye by name to credit card holds a few years back have stopped.<p>So, benefits? Changes? The article is kind of light on the whole subject.
There was a great discussion I wont be able to find about this recently on HN after an article about a zebra/leopard patterned couch. Thwarting an image id algorithim is not difficult and the researcher came on and spoke about the problems in the space similar to this xkcd[0] comic. It is a super complex problem to solve. How far away are we? It is like the turing test, everytime someone gets close the term is redefined. It is certainly coming, maybe reasonable models in ~5 years publicly acknowledged. What can someone really do to prevent it? Short of making an account every few months with a lot of your data but different pictures, what american doesnt have a photo that has been published on the internet? Even if you dont have facebook, someone you know does. The tech will take a while to dev and refine, and longer to deploy at scale, but I can't think of a scalable solution to this.<p>[0]<a href="http://xkcd.com/1425/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/1425/</a>
There was a comic recently that had a main character who had little emitters constantly blasting his face with IR radiation, so it would just turn up as an overexposed blob on surveillance cameras. Of course all they need is an IR filter to combat this, but the idea is fun.
This article is a bit alarmist. I agree that government entities using this technology as a tool of oppression is definitely bad & going to happen somewhere but I'm not worried about the shop clerk knowing my political affiliation because there is zero profit motive there. You're talking about a truly massive database of customer info joined with facial info obtained...how? Is the DMV gonna start giving away my license to Home Depot? Is facebook going to torpedo their business by selling this info? I doubt it! Second, why would they want it? to creep me out when I walk into their store?
It is a scary vision. However, the scary part seems to come not so much from the increasing data availability, but rather from the increased likelihood of discriminatory uses of such data. Enforcing non-discriminatory uses of data sounds like a hard problem to tackle, especially if we realize how diverse is the space of possible missuses (e.g., in law enforcements, business, and politics) and that this problem affects both humans and computer systems. As hard as this problem sounds, the article provides a great motivation for research that defines computationally what "discriminatory" means, as well as for the research aiming to design systems (both human and computer) that are privacy-protecting and non-discriminatory.
My default interpretive framework when I read something like this is, of course, nearly hysterical paranoia and sociopolitical despair. And, speaking as objectively as possible, I think those are not invalid responses. However, for the moment, I'm instead trying to imagine sociology/psychology of the first generation to grow up native to this environment, and I admit that it's fascinating to think about. What will the teenagers be like who grow up expecting to be identified and known everywhere they go, by friend and foe alike? How will it affect manners, speech, courtship rituals, expectations for entertainment/education/employment? Etc. So strange.
When surveillance systems are put in place and collected information stored for later use, irrespective of whether it's a personal, business, or government system, the people who get themselves in control of them will use the surveillance and/or information to steal from, preach to, discredit, and/or wear down the target/s, all of which ultimately equate to benefiting in some way at the target's expense. There's no such thing as unused surveillance capacity or unused collected information.
Watching Minority Report the other day, this reminds me of the automated retina scans in the movie. Really creeped me out when Tom Cruise was walking through a mall, gets picked up by the scanners and they start shooting targeted advertising at him.
Walk into a store, and the salesclerks will know your name.<p>- they already do once you scan your store card<p>The store’s cameras and computers will have figured out your identity,<p>- store card<p>and looked you up in both their store database and a commercial marketing database they’ve subscribed to.<p>- store card again.<p>They’ll know your name,<p>- store card<p>salary,<p>- if you entered it and if you didn't lie when you filled out your store card form<p>interests,<p>- if you entered them and your didn't lie when you filled out your store card form<p>what sort of sales pitches you’re most vulnerable to,<p>- if the "deep data" / AI is actually correct<p>and how profitable a customer you are.<p>- store card<p>Maybe they’ll have read a profile based on your tweets and know what sort of mood you’re in.<p>- MAYBE. assuming the AI is anywhere near correct.<p>Maybe they’ll know your political affiliation or sexual identity,<p>- MAYBE, probably wrong.<p>both predictable by your social media activity.<p>- PROVE THIS.<p>And they’re going to engage with you accordingly, perhaps by making sure you’re well taken care of or possibly by trying to make you so uncomfortable that you’ll leave.
You show your face automatically everywhere you go. Expecting other people not to look is folly.<p>It's no different from the idiocy around fingerprints.