Face Recognition Tech Pushes Legal Boundaries 110
An anonymous reader writes: As face recognition software becomes more capable, companies and governments are coming up with new ways to use it. Microsoft has already patented a Minority Report-style personalized billboard, and loss prevention departments in big stores are rolling out systems to "pre-identify" shoplifters. But this rush to implement the technology runs afoul of privacy laws in at least two U.S. states: Illinois and Texas forbid the use of face recognition software without "informed consent" from the target. Facebook is the target of a recent lawsuit in Illinois over this exact issue; it's likely to test the strength of such a law. "Facebook and Google use facial recognition to detect when a user appears in a photograph and to suggest that he or she be tagged. Facebook calls this "Tag Suggestions" ... With the boom in personalized advertising technology, a facial recognition database of its users is likely very, very valuable to Facebook. ... Eager to extract that value, Facebook signed users up by default when it introduced Tag Suggestions in 2011. This meant that Facebook calculated faceprints for every user who didn't take the steps to opt out." If Facebook loses and citizens start pushing for similar laws in other states, it could keep our activities in public relatively anonymous for a bit longer.
No. (Score:4, Funny)
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Um, if I am not mistaken, PermGen was replaced with Metaspace not meatspace. But considering what goes into both spaces, the confusion is understandable.
The solution seems so simple (Score:5, Funny)
You can buy all of the government some of the time, and some of the government all of the time, but . . . it takes a lot of money to buy all of the government, all of the time. So that option is only available to very large companies.
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ON a more serious note....I really wanna start looking into making those wearable infrared high powered LEDs type things...wiring them into hats and maybe onto glasses, etc.....and use them to blind out cameras to keep them from reading your facial features.
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Once encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use encryption. Similarly wearing IR LEDs wired into your hat.
Well tested code is best. Therefore you should run your unit tests many times so you can say your code is well tested.
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Solution: IR filter in front of lens.
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Which is why the IR LED trick only works on cameras with night vision.
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Like encryption, those high powered IR LEDs to blind cameras, only attract attention -- until everyone is doing it.
Once encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will use encryption. Similarly wearing IR LEDs wired into your hat.
If this ever became a trend, the device makers would just start IR cut filtering their cameras.
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I would personally love to be the guy that takes that call:
"sir, you realize if we put an IR filter in, your night vision cameras won't have night vision anymore, right?"
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Sounds totally practical I am its not as if the operators of these systems can just put a filter in front the camera or anything...
Re:The solution seems so simple (Score:5, Interesting)
Why bother? If you don't like local Wal-Mart's policy which considers entering the store to be a sign of consent, what are you going to do - drive to the next town and be faced with the same bullshit?
Consent can only exist between beings of at least roughly equal power. That is the justification for statutory rape laws, for example. Corporate America demanding you to "consent" to your shafting simply adds another layer of perversion and humiliation to an already awful situation. Which, of course, is the point: traumatized, broken people are easy to control, especially once they internalize the abuse heaped on them.
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If you don't like Walmart's consent policy then go to a different company who does not have those consent policies. Not all companies do facial recognition. Coose one that does not .
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practicalities... (Score:2)
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Until they do, anyway.
Like cell phone carriers.
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Amazon.com
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http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager02.html.
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Unless you put a post-it over the camera (assuming you have one)
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Just buy a copy of a random magazine that has pictures of various individuals -- People magazine, with lots of celebrities, is good -- then cut a page out of the magazine with a picture of the individual of your choice, tape it to your wall, and point the camera at the picture whenever you're not using it.
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Maybe I'll just start wearing a mask.
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The stores which own the legislatures of both Illinois and Texas should simply order them to change the laws.
You can buy all of the government some of the time, and some of the government all of the time, but . . .
it takes a lot of money to buy all of the government, all of the time. So that option is only available to very large companies.
A European manufacturer of ATM machines is using facial recognition to go along with the debit/credit cards presented on his ATMs. A stranger can't draw out money, even he presents a correct pin.
Sad. (Score:5, Insightful)
A bit longer, the best you can hope for. Acknowledging the fact that we will eventually lose this one.
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Re:Already lost (Score:5, Interesting)
What state doesn't store a digitized copy of the faces of everyone with a driver's license? The minute they put photos on IDs this one was lost. I can't believe the FBI doesn't have access to every single drivers license photo on file...
Whereas now they don't give grocery receipt coupons to unprofitable bargain hunters that come in just for the sales ( they know who you are! ) you'll start seeing these people recognized by face and shown loud obnoxious ads for herpes medication and depends to keep em out of the store.
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Well yeah, didn't you hear this sort of thing can increase profit, PROFIT!!!, you would stand in the way of profit, because is that would just be un-American. If you don't want to be tracked and identified every step you take online and off, you must have something to hide. It's only so they can improve your shopping experience and help you stay connected to your friends. It's a win-win all around. It could also help us track criminals and terrorists, so just think of the children. /Sarcasm. God damn these
Problem is other people (Score:4, Insightful)
We need some digital privacy laws for the internet. Perhaps - the right not to be named in a public photo/video on the internet - or even have your face shown without express, written permission.
This rule would only apply to the internet, not TV or print.
In addition, real financial penalties of $1,000 could apply.
This would among other things, stop things like people posting embarrassing youtube videos of other people.
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What about NOT being on facebook/instagram/twitter/google+/linkedin ?
I don't have any social media accounts, and I feel great.
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I learned at some point, Facebook knows my face even without me ever using it. Apparently friends uploaded group pictures and tagged me in it. It seems odd to expect me to opt out of a feature of a tool that I never used. Facebook, send me $100 every time you show my face. Your lack response to this post indicates consent. If Facebook claims to not read Slashdot, that is no excuse.
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I don't have any social media accounts
oh you do, you just haven't filled in the form yourself,
see, you might not visit social media but your friends do, and they will tag you at will, happily upload your phone number from their contact list when they install that "app", you better believe that Facebook have everything except your IP address.
i had a CEO ask me why his name was coming up in google searches as listed at Facebook when he hadn't signed up, it was because people had taken photos of him at social
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You want to take away one of the few pleasures I have left in life. You monster.
https://youtu.be/Lf3EC6OUk_Y [youtu.be]
Re:Problem is other people (Score:4, Insightful)
This would among other things, stop things like people posting embarrassing youtube videos of other people.
It sounds to me like you are essentially saying you don't like free speech. Posting a video for the purpose of embarrassing someone would be a shitty reason, But any video or pic also might have an important message or information to communicate the poster feels is important, and it will always be embarrassing to the person whose bad or ridiculous behavior is being exposed.
For example: Hidden camera showing mechanic sabotaging customer's vehicle, showing hypocrisy by a political figure, or showing abusive/cruel behavior by someone against other people, who will be embarrassed when exposed.
Video footage showing that person who claims X against the entity releasing the video is doing Y that is even worse.
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I am not against free speech - you can blur the face on videos, and/or show it on local TV
It seems like you really are against free speech.... and you call curtailed or abridged speech "free".
This is like saying you can have your declaration of independence, but it's treason if you don't black out the sections that speak ill of the king, Or if you post your declaration to Twitter, but your town's Newspaper is OKAY, as long as it's not circulated nationally.
You want to force people to conceal part of t
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If they do this, they're not my friends.
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This rule would only apply to the internet, not TV or print.
What about news reports that appear on the internet?
Re:Problem is other people (Score:5, Informative)
Upload to Facebook a whole heap of random pictures of people (actors, the famous etc) or all kinds and tag the lot as yourself. Make yourself appear to be a mashup of every possible gender/race/age and physical appearance. So any photos of yourself that do get tagged are drowned in a pool of misinformation.
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I might look remarkably like George Clooney. Any attempt to sanatize George from my data might actually result in an image less like me.
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This rule would only apply to the internet, not TV or print.
I think we go down a very slippery slope when we say that the Internet should receive less First Amendment protection than television or print media. Television and print are largely in the control of large media companies with lots of money. The Internet is accessible to anyone; it costs almost nothing to start your own blog. In a sense, the Internet is (or has the potential to be) a great equalizer. As soon as you start placing restrictions on Internet speech that don't apply to "big media" speech, yo
I, Robot, C U (Score:4, Insightful)
Everyone's gonna have it in their vr goggles used to augment and overlay reality in 10 years anyway. You're all living in a fantasy world. Government will limit it to itself, or try to, and they're the ones with serious abuse potential as their panopticon keeps a live track database of all citizens out in public.
Again, I am less concerned if Facebook wants to know if I'm more interested in Pampers or Depends than of government tracking...which history shows will be abused by those in power to maintain their power.
Scary indeed (Score:3)
ust wait until Daesh (aka ISIS/ISIL/IS) decide to use this to target people in the west who criticize their particularly noxious brand of Islam, and as in target, I mean track you in real time and behead you on the street, at their leisure.
Not sure why your post was marked flamebait. It's a chilling possibility, that illustrates in very stark terms why we cannot afford to simply give up and allow our privacy to be stripped away, and why we need to roll back the invasions into our personal and digital space
Re:Scary indeed (Score:4, Informative)
Scary "TERRORISM!" scenario aside, you don't have an expectation of privacy when you walk down the street. You can't tell someone that he can't take a photo of you walking down the street (or run that photo through a facial recognition algorithm) because it violates your privacy. Now, if you have facial recognition being forced on you in your own house, that might be an issue.
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For reasons of free expression to basic practicality we can't stop this stuff. As you say people can take your picture and people can produce what amounts to a hash of your facial features.
None of this stuff is a problem. It only becomes a problem when its stored and datamined. What we really need to do is actually regulate big data.
Start regulating what information about people may be stored in machine searchable formats and you can start to solve this problem. Regulate under what circumstances PII may
Re:I, Robot, C U (Score:4, Insightful)
I am less concerned if Facebook wants to know if I'm more interested in Pampers or Depends than of government tracking...
Which just goes to show that you've totally underestimated the ability of private organizations to abuse power. There are many forms of power, not all of them come from the barrel of a gun.
Privacy advocates from Facebook and Google? (Score:2)
What about the police? (Score:1)
In the UK, the police have decided that they'll use face recognition software at the Download Festival (a music festival) to spot 'criminals' where criminals is defined as a set of faces they determine what is the set to look for. No warrant, no requirement that it be used only for criminals, no limits, its *THEIR* choice.
So you will visit the Download Festival, be tracked everywhere with RFID tags linked to your name, and your real ID matched using the police cameras surveillance. And the police will have
Re:Follow The Dollars (Score:4, Interesting)
And that's where marketing fails. People only have so much attention to spend. Drowning them in marketing reduces it to static noise.
Think for a moment. Think of the movie you watched last night. Now tell me the name of a single product you saw the ads for. If you don't watch TV, take the billboards on your way to work.
We get so flooded with ads that we don't recognize them anymore. The spam filter in our brain works. We notice them as a waste of space (billboards) and time (tv ads), but the networks could as well broadcast static and the billboards could as well be blank, they simply don't work anymore. We're saturated. It has reached the level where we simply don't register it anymore except as a nuisance. But we don't even tie that nuisance to a brand or product anymore, it's just "ads".
And this is where advertising fails.
And targeted ads won't change that. So you tell me about a product that I'd want, but you do it in the same way that all the other ads I already mentally filter do. I do not register that anymore. Your ad will be part of the noise. The ad industry bothered us enough that we filter their messages on principle. Brand recognition is by no stretch as deeply ingrained in people as marketeers want to think. And people don't obsess about a brand (ok, unless it's Apple or something else that managed to tack a lifestyle package to its primary use). More likely than not, they don't give a shit. Do you care if the detergent you use is Wisk, Ariel, Persil or Tide? Or do you simply take whatever is on sale when you simply have to buy a new box 'cause the old one is empty?
I mean, for real, dear marketeers, do you think we have any semblance of an emotional attachment to the brand of shoe polish we use?
The ad industry is allegedly a creative one. But it fails at exactly that. It fails at what's most important about advertising: Being noticed. Ads vanish into the background noise of getting a new coke or taking a dump. They are flipped over in the daily newspaper and ignored on billboards.
You fail to get noticed, advertisers!
And no, slapping them in our face with popups won't change that. At least not for long. What it will accomplish is to annoy us for the time being 'til we automated reaching up to the close button. Without even registering whatever blocked our view.
Your job, advertisers, is to turn from a nuisance into information. You have to turn from something people HATE to something people WANT. Once you manage that, we can talk about you being successful again. And targeted ads can do that.
If, and only if, you implement it sensibly. But it will be an uphill battle for you. You have to undo about a century of bad advertising that taught us how to ignore you.
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Now tell me the name of a single product you saw the ads for. If you don't watch TV, take the billboards on your way to work.
We get so flooded with ads that we don't recognize them anymore.
I can't name a single product. Now if you don't mind I need to run down to Burger King and get a Whopper made my way. Then I need to call Geico to see if 15 minutes will save me 15% or more. For some strange reason I also have an itch to look at a new car today.
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I think you got it wrong, the point of advertisements is not to remember one particular ad impression. It's that after hundreds of ads you associate "Always Coca-Cola" the slogan with the bottle with the logo with the drink with the taste until just seeing it in the store or on a menu triggers you into buying it. Heck, a quick check indicates they got that stuck on my mind in 1993-1995 [wikipedia.org] and I still fucking remember it.
It's the thing you don't care much about or that's too big to get first hand knowledge that
demo code (Score:5, Funny)
rolling out systems to "pre-identify" shoplifters
// if (CustomerColor != WHITE) {ShopliftingAlert == TRUE} // XXX: uncomment *ONLY* for demo!
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rolling out systems to "pre-identify" shoplifters
// if (CustomerColor != WHITE) {ShopliftingAlert == TRUE} // XXX: uncomment *ONLY* for demo!
Had a genuine laugh at this.
Thanks... althrough i usualy prefer people to *not* laugh with my code!
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shouldn't this be single '=' ?
IANAD.
Yes, you just found a bug in my code... it started as *very* racist, i was sure the "/." compiler would raise an error, and since a had to release it quickly i refactored without testing it... not my fault, i blame political correctness!
The tech _exists_, and that's that. (Score:3)
No. Laws do not have the ability to put genies back into bottles.
Re:The tech _exists_, and that's that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, a man can dream... But the fact that such undesirable practises are easy to do and hard to police doesn't mean that we shouldn't still have those laws in place.
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But at least we can stop such sensitive data to be shared and processed en masse by both corporations and governments alike, by outlawing the practise.
An interesting side effect of this would be to give even more advantages to large companies. If this technology actually provides value, and small companies cannot buy this data from third parties, then only companies large enough to amass their own huge data sets have this advantage.
I am almost convinced the best route is to force large companies to open up their data (for a fee), similarly to how we forced certain utility providers to rent out their physical infrastructure. This lets a local grocer have t
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Technology and having it available does not imply that we have to use it.
At least so far I don't see mushroom clouds popping up left and right. And don't tell me we couldn't do that!
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Technology and having it available does not imply that we have to use it.
At least so far I don't see mushroom clouds popping up left and right. And don't tell me we couldn't do that!
You are quite correct that not all technology will be used just because it exists. A better statement would be that all technologies which can be used to improve someone's utility will be used. Using nuclear weapons does not benefit a country when their opponents have them or if the political fallout would be too severe. And there are plenty of conventional weapons which are just as effective for most warfare requirements.
None of this has anything to do with consumer and corporate face recognition software.
Damn! (Score:5, Interesting)
Then I got threatening mail from said Facebook imploring me to join 'my friends' on their website, a cold day in hell indeed!
So now after a few idiots have tagged me on their stupid 'Social' pages I'll be recognisable for every privacy invading company in the world.
Al I can do is waiting for a EU court to cut this crap as the US side won't do anything for us 'The People'.
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Not? You should. FB accounts are fun!
Especially if they're not your own. I consider it a social service, teaching people what happens when some stranger takes control of their life because they enable him...
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Targeted billboard ads (Score:5, Funny)
I cringe at the thought. This here [amazonaws.com] illustrates pretty well what it would be like.
Data protection act / EU law (Score:4, Interesting)
Are Facebook tagging people who don't have Facebook accounts if their face is in a photo?
Seems like a breach of the data protection act - keeping details (face, place, time+date, more(?)) on a person who has not agreed to their T's & C's.
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I disagree - I don't watch TV ads, ghostery and noscript kill internet ads. I'm more concerned with the corporate stalking, like any stalking it's creepy and wrong.
In the UK trading standards and ofcom govern 'truth in advertising' already. But advertising overall is a lie, it sells a false reality - that endless consumption is ok, that the dream is to be able to consume more than anyone else. The whole advertising message is 10% anti-sustainable.
Things will get worse... (Score:1)
You can educate yourself, but it is hard to educate your friends and still keep any.
Full body suit (Score:1)
Waiting for the first person to use a full body suit and mask to be harassed because they stick out like a sore thumb....
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It's about trust (Score:1)
When somebody says "dude, we found your DNA from the crime scene", most will believe will believe A) This guy's DNA was found, B) He/she was the murderer. We don't have to check even A. Some laws of thought can't be questioned.
There was a news in my country where the police reported they will extend the fingerprint database to all citizens (before they were only those with criminal record). Before the police had "probable suspects" who could be the real offenders. As fingerprints are not accurate - the data
Change Is Happening (Score:2)
It's not the tech pushing the law. (Score:2)
It sounds like blatant defiance of the law:
this rush to implement the technology runs afoul of privacy laws in at least two U.S. states: Illinois and Texas forbid the use of face recognition software without "informed consent" from the target. Facebook is the target of a recent lawsuit in Illinois over this exact issue;
This behavior should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, including civil and criminal penalties for company management and people involved.