A big biometric security company in the UK, Facewatch, is in hot water after their facial recognition system caused a major snafu - the system wrongly identified a 19-year-old girl as a shoplifter.
Reminds me of when I joined some classmates to the supermarket. We got kicked out while waiting in line because they didn’t want middleschoolers there because we’re all thieves anyways. So must of the group walked out without paying.
What happens if there’s a consumer boycott of retailers who use this type of harassment tech? It’s disproportionately targeted towards minorities. I think Target was recently bullied into removing Pride items based on consumer action, so clearly mass action has an effect.
a) you’d have to know who does it, and you might not until you (or somebody else) gets caught in the net b) boycotts are more effective if there’s choice, which there won’t be if mostly everybody starts using this shyte
Boycotts are almost impossible to pull off successfully. This kind of thing demands legal action. IANAL but the facial recognition company putting her on a list of shoplifters is a claim that she’s a criminal, which sounds like textbook defamation to me.
For sure, I meant in addition to suing the banning retailers and the facial recognition tech company
Didn’t it turn out the items where just moved to another area of the store ?
Could attaching infrared leds to glasses or caps be away to prevent these systems from capturing people’s faces.
Think I saw something on black mirror once or might have been another show.
Possible business opportunity selling to crackheads lol.
I think IR lights on glasses can blind cameras, and there are also infrared-blocking glasses that also reflect IR light from cameras back at them. So yes, adding lights or reflectors can be effective.
But we shouldn’t even have to consider these workarounds to maintain our privacy and security. And even if we start wearing these glasses or fooling the systems, governments will outlaw the use of such circumventing tech.
Our reaction to this needs to be “we will not allow this tech to be used against us, period.” Ban it for law enforcement, ban it for commerce, ban it in airports and schools.
governments will outlaw the use of such circumventing tech
They can’t stop all of us. If they outlaw using it, I’d support (or even organize) a protest group that organizes widespread use of them.
Well in that case, one brand of such glasses is Reflectacles 😎
Reflectacles
Cool! Looks like they also have a discount for Monero purchases. I might have to pick one up.
I wish they would make a line available for cheap so a charity could hand them out for free, ~$150 is a bit much.
Very neat, I wonder how effective they are at confusing facial recognition and 3D facial scanning systems? Not that we often encounter the 3D scanning, but an interesting aspect to consider.
I just wonder if I’d get in trouble for wearing them at the airport. That’s the most likely place for 3D facial scanning.
But AFAIK, most facial recognition systems use IR, whether they’re 2D or 3D, so I would guess they’d be pretty effective.
Thanks for the informative and thought out reply.
Also, thanks for killing my joke business idea by mentioning a brand that makes these.
I would like to see them in the rim of a cap too. As I always have a cap in my head.
Edit: Hot damn they’re expensive. Business idea is back.
Ultraviolet would be a terrible idea as UV-A and UV-B can cause skin cancer over prolonged exposure and UV-C will straight up burn your eyes and skin.
I presume at that point the store would just have security walk out the person wearing the hat.
How would they know it had lights in it?
It could be a ravers led hat that isn’t turned on.
Oh good… janky oversold systems that do a lot of automation on a very shaky basis are also having high impacts when screwing up.
Also “Facewatch” is such an awful sounding company.
Can’t wait for something like this get hacked. There’ll be a lot explaining to do.
Still, I think the only way that would result in change is if the hack specifically went after someone powerful like the mayor or one of the richest business owners in town.
I read this in a Ricky Ricardo voice.
This makes me think of people who have trouble in airports because their name is similar to someone else’s.
Only this is going to be much harder to deal with
She got more than she Home Bargained for
Did the post office let them borrow their tech?
Even if she were the shoplifter, how would that work? “Sorry mat, you shoplifted when you were 16, now you can never buy food again.”?
Sounds like a VAC ban.
IF you want to create accountability among such arrogent tech executives,
THEN you need to enforce accountability, and 1 excellent way of doing it, would be to immediately, & permanently, ban the CEO of that company from having any right to any in-country right to purchase anything.
Force THEM to be subject to the abuse they enforce on “their inferiors”, and … oh, suddenly their motivations appear from “nowhere”??
Enforced-accountability against executives & oligarchs needs to be automatic, not “politically impossible, because they’re the privileged ones, with real rights”, the way our current dogshit for-profit manufactured “culture” insists.
_ /\ _
People who blindly support this type of tech and AI being slapped into everything always learn the hard way when a case like this happens.
Sadly there won’t be any learning, the security company will improve the tech an continue as usual.
This shit is here to stay :/
Agreed on all points, but “improve the tech” probably belongs in quotes. If there’s no real consequences, they may just accept some empty promises and continue as before.
Just listened to a podcast with a couple of guys talking about the AI thing going on. One thing they said was really interesting to me. I’ll paraphrase my understanding of what they said:
- In 2020, people realized that the same model, same architecture, but with more parameters ie a larger version of the model, behaved more intelligently and had a larger set of skills than the same model with fewer parameters.
- This means you can trade money for IQ. You spend more money, get more computing power, and your model will be better than the other guy’s
- Your model being better means you can do more things, replace more tasks, and hence make more money
- Essentially this makes the current AI market a very straightforward money-in-determines-money-out situation
- In other words, the realization that the same AI model, only bigger, was significantly better, created a pathway for reliably investing huge amounts of money into building bigger and bigger models
So basically AI was meandering around trying to find the right road, and in 2020 it found a road that goes a long way in a straight line, enabling the industry to just floor the accelerator.
The direct relationship this model creates between more neurons/weights/parameters on the one hand, and more intelligence on the other, creates an almost arbitrage-easy way to absorb tons of money into profitable structures.
Death to the worthless corpo world that allowed this bullshit in the first place! Towards anarchist communism and social revolution!
Please grow and change as a person
Not the first time facial recognition tech has been misused, and certainly won’t be the last. The UK in particular has caught a lotta flak around this.
We seem to have a hard time connecting the digital world to the physical world and realizing just how interwoven they are at this point.
Therefore, I made an open source website called idcaboutprivacy to demonstrate the importance—and dangers—of tech like this.
It’s a list of news articles that demonstrate real-life situations where people are impacted.
If you wanna contribute to the project, please do. I made it simple enough to where you don’t need to know Git or anything advanced to contribute to it. (I don’t even really know Git.)
What a great idea for a page. People are becoming blase about privacy even though it’s still important.
Glad you like it.
And yeah, it’s foundational. We tolerate things digitally that we’d never tolerate in person.
Once I start connecting and analogizing digital to physical concepts in a conversation, it appears to “click” in their heads and they end up saying something along the lines of, “You’re right. It makes sense.”
Hence this project. I hope people can use this website and link it to people who need it to understand how this affects us all—now, not in the future.
From your webpage: Privacy because protects our freedom to be who we are.
I think a word is missing in that sentence.
Fixed it, thanks for flagging
They accidentally the whole word.
Lol it was the other way around… I actually added a word instead. Fixed
Tap for spoiler
it
now.
I wish I could find an English source about the guy who got woken by police assaulting him in his bed because he’d sent private sexy photos of him and his boyfriend via Yahoo mail. It’s definitely one of the things that “radicalised” me.
I’ll link your site on my personal website, which has a link collection. Seems cool.
Nice, thanks. Your site is really clean. Dig it.
Stop giving corporations the power to blacklist us from life itself.
you will sit down and be quiet, all you parasites stifling innovation, the market will solve this, because it is the most rational thing in existence, like trains, oh god how I love trains, I want to be f***ed by trains.
~~Rand
I can see the Invisible Hand of the Free Market, it’s giving me the finger.
Can it give invisible hand jobs?
Yes, but they’re in the “If you have to ask, you couldn’t afford it in three lifetimes.” price range
Darn!
Right up your ass, no less.
It charged me for lube, and I thought about paying for it, but same-day shipping was a bitch and a half… I tried second class mail, but I think my bumhole would have stretched enough for this to stop hurting before it got anywhere near close to here so I just opted for that.
The whole wide world of authors who have written about the difficulties of this new technological age and you choose the one who had to pretend her work was unpopular
go read rand, her books literally advocate for an anti-social world order, where the rich and powerful have the ability to do whatever they want without impediment as the “workers” are described as parasites that should get in line or die
Are you suggesting they shouldn’t be allowed to ban people from stores? The only problem I see here is misused tech. If they can’t verify the person, they shouldn’t be allowed to use the tech.
I do think there need to be reprocussions for situations like this.
Well there should be a limited amount of ability to do so. I mean there should be police reports or something at the very least. I mean, what if Facial Recognition AI catches on in grocery stores? Is this woman just banned from all grocery stores now? How the fuck is she going to eat?
That’s why I said this was a misuse of tech. Because that’s extremely problematic. But there’s nothing to stop these same corps from doing this to a person even if the tech isn’t used. This tech just makes it easier to fuck up.
I’m against the use of this tech to begin with but I’m having a hard time figuring out if people are more upset about the use of the tech or about the person being banned from a lot of stores because of it. Cause they are separate problems and the latter seems more of an issue than the former. But it also makes fucking up the former matter a lot more as a result.
I wish I could remember where I saw it, but years ago I read something in relation to policing that said a certain amount of human inefficiency in a process is actually a good thing to help balance bias and over reach that could occur when technology could technically do in seconds what would take a human days or months.
In this case if a person is enough of a problem that their face becomes known at certain branches of a store it’s entirely reasonable for that store to post a sign with their face saying they are aren’t allowed. In my mind it would essentially create a certain equilibrium in terms of consequences and results. In addition to getting in trouble for stealing itself, that individual person also has a certain amount of hardship placed on them that may require they travel 40 minutes to do their shopping instead of 5 minutes to the store nearby. A sign and people’s memory also aren’t permanent, so it’s likely that after a certain amount of time that person would probably be able to go back to that store if they had actually grown out of it.
Or something to that effect. If they steal so much that they become known to the legal system there should be processes in place to address it.
And even with all that said, I’m just not that concerned with theft at large corporate retailers considering wage theft dwarfs thefts by individuals by at least an order of magnitude.
Reddit became a ban-happy wasteland, and if the tides swing a similar way, we’ll see a society where Big Tech gates people out of the very foundation of Modern Society. It’s exclusion that I’m against.
This is why some UK leaders wanted out of EU, to make their own rules with way less regard for civil rights.
It’s the Tory way. Authoritarianism, culture wars, fucking over society’s poorest.
nah i think main thing was a super fragile identity. i mean they have been shit all the time since before EU. when talks between france,germany and uk took place the insisted to take control of EU.
if you live on an island for generations with limited new genetic input…well, thats where you end up.
We humans have these things called “boats” that have enabled the British Isles to receive regular inputs of new genetic material. Pretty useful things, these boats, and somewhat pivotal in the history of the UK.
sure
I don’t understand the tendency to attribute harmful behaviours of the rich and powerful to these strange, irrational reasons. No, UK leaders didn’t spend millions upon millions on propaganda because they have a fragile identity. They did it because they’ll make money off of it, and will be able to move the legislation towards their own goals.
It’s the same when people say Putin invaded Ukraine because he wants to restore the glory of the Soviet Union. No, he doesn’t care about any of that, he cares about staying in power and becoming more powerful. One of the best ways to do so is to invade other countries, as long as you don’t lose.
It’s the same when people say Putin invaded Ukraine because he wants to restore the glory of the Soviet Union. No, he doesn’t care about any of that, he cares about staying in power and becoming more powerful. One of the best ways to do so is to invade other countries, as long as you don’t lose.
Thank you. I see so many people who don’t get it. I’m happy some people understand it without sending them link to one of few Ekaterina Shulman’s lectures in English.
Thank you for the validation, sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy with how often these things are repeated.
But those lectures do sound interesting - would you mind linking them when you have the time?
This is not the lecture I originally intended to post. Also small correction for 1:00:02 first answer in poll should be translated as “social fainess”.
If you find lecture where she says about “dealing with internal problems by external means” and “dropping concrete slab on nation’s head” - that is one I intended to link, but still searching which one it is.
Awesome, thank you!
