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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
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Facial recognition doesn’t work and is racist. Like, it actually is extremely ineffective against dark-skinned people.
That’s not what racist means…
Irrelevant what I think because gait recognition is superior.
The boat sailed many years ago.
Horrible and the start of real dystopia.
I’m glad im almost 50 now because this place is gonna suck so much soon.
Generally bad
I am in the boat that it could be a great thing, but it’s the systems around that just currently don’t have the level of trust to really leverage it.
If local AI used with systems with absolutely minimal storage and good p2p levels of permission were used and laws to minimize abuse by the state and corporations were in place it would different.
By example the opposite of what Ring represents would be good to me.
You can’t legally control weather or not someone recognizes you on the street. There is no right to privacy in public spaces. It’s the principal that protects people filming the police. Any important public events really.
I don’t see why not. There is a difference between an off chance of someone noticing you vs. camera’s with high accuracy recognising your face and being able to track your locations, what places you visited and who with for every minute of every day.
Well now that’s a different proposition.
Now you aren’t simply in a public place being photographed and identified by AI. Now you’re actively being monitored and tracked. That’s more like a person stalking you. That may be unethical, depending on who’s tracking you and why? Basically unless it’s law enforcement of some kind, with a specific warrant to track your location, it wouldn’t be ethical.
The thing is, most western governments are pushing towards facial recognition and monitoring without the need for a warrant. Most countries are already stacked up to the eyeballs with CCTV (UK for example, and hooking that in with facial recognition is dangerous). First they start off with it being for terrorists, then paedophiles, then other criminals, but ultimately, it’s monitoring everyone to track down a few. When you have that infra in place, and you don’t have sufficient oversight, you can soon tweak that towards activist groups, then opposition groups etc.
You have to challenge it before the infrastructure goes in, because after it’s in, it’s already too late.
While that is all true, it’s effectively saying nothing more than, “The misuse of a technology is unethical.” Which I think we can all agree on. So many people are pointing out obvious examples of abuse as arguments against the tech itself.
The original question was only about the technology itself. Which is only an interesting etical question if we assume, using it appropriately.
Counter-point: You don’t get to scrape my face to feed it into a settler-written algorithm that can’t be trusted to not misidentify the faces of my race; and you especially don’t get to expect I won’t thwart those attempts every time I have to leave my house. My consent to that is not given, and unfortunately, I don’t have a choice in whether or not I have to leave my house sometimes.
Those are both fantastic, but separate issues.
The effectiveness of any individual AI is separate from the ethics of the concept generally. Any specific implementation might not be reliable enough to depend on. That would have to be a discussion for each implementation. Perhaps a discussion of the reliability threshold any implementation would need to meet, in order to be used.
Also, another’s right to photograph and identify you while in public, is entirely separate from, and doesn’t effect, your right to try to conceal your identity.
Even both of those don’t touch the issue of keeping your image, and using your likeness to improve the AI product. (Which is something literally all of them ignore, along with every other copyright issue.) Since you didn’t give them the rights to use your likeness for that (or any) purpose, it would be unethical and already illegal for them to do so.
Is it opt-in or opt-out by default? I think I would be against it. But then again I am not a rule breaker so it is hard to imagine.
Given the choice, it would be a hard no for me. It isn’t 100% perfect yet, mistaken identities and discrimination are good reasons to not bother with it. Beyond that, if insurance companies had access to it, it would be a disaster.
It’s Friday night, you go out for a just a drink or perhaps the camera catches you smoking. Now your life insurance policy is messed up.
Obviously, that is an exaggeration the likes of which only happen in Black Mirror. Power and greed have never pushed anyone to any single unethical thing ever.
I imaging if I had some AR glasses and could have them recognize faces from my personal photo collection it could be quite useful in a business context to have it remind me of names and other important information.
It could also be used as a tool for service workers to recognize people involved in decision making that is hostile to worker rights and refuse any service to them as a kind of low profile strike/protest.
Its kind of wild to imagine a future where you no longer need to remember faces or names. The headset will do everything for you.
In that future world it will be a little wild when someone’s headset dies as the will just stumble around aimlessly will no purpose
Hypothetically, a just system using this technology would be capable of a lot of good!
The system is unjust, so any good use is vastly outweighed by the horror and evil it will be used for - like how they use this to track uppity Palestinians and arrest/kill them.
My thoughts are that there is no ethical way to use facial recognition in public spaces. I’m having a hard time thinking of a single, ethical way to use facial recognition anywhere on the planet.
I have some minor mild variant of face blindness. I can see faces, but my brain won’t store them properly. I therefore struggle to put names and faces to people.
An AR device with real time face recognition would be a godsend for me.
Phone unlock. Is unlocking a phone unethical? Categorical no.
Facial recognition is a tool. And like with any other tool there are always ways in which it can be used for good and for bad. In fact I can’t think of a single tool, guns and nuclear bombs included, that don’t have some potential uses for good, in addition to bad. In fact, you might say that the very definition of a tool is that it has a desirable application, and a good use is merely a desirable application where the collateral damage of it’s use is contained or offset by the benefit.
Perhaps what you mean to say is corruptible? That is to say that use of the tool tends to devolve into other unethical uses and consequences? I might be in agreement with you on that one.
In the U.S., you do not want to use face unlock for your cellphone. It’s not protected by the 5th amendment. Law enforcement can get into your phone without a warrant.
PIN & password should be used.
For those not willing to give up on convenience, on Android, there’s Lockdown mode, which will temporarily disable access via biometrics and force the use of your PIN/password to get into your device. Not sure about other brands, but on Pixel, you can enable it by long-pressing the power button and tapping on “Lockdown”.
Yes, however, I’m not taking the risk that I don’t have hands on my phone if shit ever hit the fan. And in any hectic situation people might not remember “lockdown”. Definitely, not as simple as you think.
I agree and don’t use it. But that’s not an ethics question.
It’s important info no matter the context.
Fair enough
That I don’t mind using some kind of mask in public. Just to mess with their systems.
It is illegal in some countries to fully cover your face in public. If it became a way to bypass surveillance, it could be made into law if it wasn’t already :(
Edit: for those wondering, Switzerland is one of them. Though they don’t have a large number of public cameras (yet?).
Yeah, awful. In my country, it is legal (or rather not illegal) in some places.
Do I give the air of someone who gives the first fuck about ‘legality’ under settler-colonial ‘legal’ frameworks?
Or more simply, all countries that are authoritarian enough to surveil their people, from Britain to China. First they say they are trying to prevent terrorism or somesuch BS, targeting minorities first, and then scaling up to the general population.
Fuck does any of this have to do with my point? ‘Authoritarian’ is just a McCarthyite smear in the first place; I’m talkin about not being able to trust the settler-colonial government to handle my race’s data, at all, in any manner or circumstance, and civil disobedience against said settler-colonials. It’s not about ‘authoritarian’ countries to me, it’s about blatantly-racist settler-colonials that can’t be trusted, and don’t you ever fix your fingers to try and ‘amend’ my words again.
I already mentioned the oppression of minorities. Why do you feel the need to make this about race, and exclusively your race?! By doing that, you ignore oppression and abuse by many governments worldwide.
(Is “settler” also a race? If we’re talking about definitions, I’ve seen that one abused a lot, to the detriment of human rights activists.)
Besides your offense at one word, do you have an actual problem with my statement? If I remove the word, will that put you more at ease?
And like that, you’ve broken clause c of my rules-- I don’t hold dialogues with those who even so much as sound like settlers, and that was a real crackerish JAQoff you just pulled there my boi. Fuck out my inbox.
Imagine, after my people are still getting literally genocided by the occupation government that stole us from our homes, forced us to build their country for them, then spent 200 years telling us they’d never pay us for it; imagine thinking that I’m ever going to waste my time reserving more of my energy for people halfway 'cross the world, that ain’t never oppressed me and never will, when my most immediate problem is you, and everyone who thinks like you.
Real talk, if you can’t wrap your malaised meat around the concept that your mentality is my enemy before any external ‘enemy’ that y’all claim to have, you’re not fit to discuss with.
I’ve already said I am against the oppression of minorities across the world. If you are oppressed, I’m against that.
Meanwhile, for some reason you are vocal about not caring about other minorities. That’s just… Strangely lacking in empathy.
You seem to be creating a dichotomy where people are either indigenous or settlers, without any room for a middle ground. If someone isn’t indigenous, are they a settler? And if that’s the case, based on the context clues you’ve provided, are you not a settler also?
based and correct. Masked, sunglassed, hatted and gloved.
“ethical” doesn’t belong in that sentence.