What Else Happens When Your Face is Your Passport? (kenperlin.com) 88
Did we pass a privacy milestone without realizing it? Computer science professor Ken Perlin writes on his blog:
Recently I was traveling internationally. I have the Global Traveller option, so I could just to a machine, put in my passport, put my face in front of a camera, and get a piece of paper to hand to the immigration officer. But I was really tired from the flight. So I forgot to put my passport into the slot — I just posed for the camera.
And it worked anyway. The paper came out saying that I was me, I handed it to the immigration officer, and I was done. It seems that just my photo was enough to identify me.
Apparently sticking your passport into the slot is essentially theater. Your government can already tell who you are just from analyzing a photo of you, and they will let you into the country on that basis.
Where does this lead? In a follow-up blog post, Perlin offers one example, imagining a professor looking at a new class and already knowing "everyone's name, what their interests were, the date of their birth, and whether they played a musical instrument.
"In other words, I would be able to know far too much about them." This is, in my opinion, not a good thing. And yet it might be the future we are about to go into headlong.
I think we should be giving this a lot of thought. We take for granted now that when people look at us, they don't immediately know everything about us.
I'm not sure that particular right to privacy is something we should be willing to give up.
Thanks to Slashdot reader saccade.com for sharing the story
And it worked anyway. The paper came out saying that I was me, I handed it to the immigration officer, and I was done. It seems that just my photo was enough to identify me.
Apparently sticking your passport into the slot is essentially theater. Your government can already tell who you are just from analyzing a photo of you, and they will let you into the country on that basis.
Where does this lead? In a follow-up blog post, Perlin offers one example, imagining a professor looking at a new class and already knowing "everyone's name, what their interests were, the date of their birth, and whether they played a musical instrument.
"In other words, I would be able to know far too much about them." This is, in my opinion, not a good thing. And yet it might be the future we are about to go into headlong.
I think we should be giving this a lot of thought. We take for granted now that when people look at us, they don't immediately know everything about us.
I'm not sure that particular right to privacy is something we should be willing to give up.
Thanks to Slashdot reader saccade.com for sharing the story
Ken Perlin (Score:5, Informative)
And he also came up with "Perlin's law" -- the idea that videogames have a "credibility budget," and exceeding that budget ruins the game [slashdot.org].
He's also got his own entry on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
In 1996, K. Perlin received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for the development of Perlin noise. He had introduced this technique with the goal to produce natural-appearing textures on computer-generated surfaces for motion picture visual effects, while working on the Walt Disney Productions' 1982 feature film TRON for which he had developed a large part of the software
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I was in his class around 2003 (computer graphics at NYU), and it was awesome! He's one amazing teacher. I still lookup his code from time to time whenever I need a refresher on how to do something.
Get the info right (Score:5, Informative)
1. It's called "Global Entry"
2. The machines have been explicitly stating you no longer need to scan your passport (at first, it might require that if initial face recognition fails)
3. The machine is comparing a photo on file (the one you provided with the passport and the one you provided to GE) with your face. To do that, they have all current arrival information (that's what APIS is for). That way the set of people to compare against is relatively small.
4. If you go see an actual CBP officer, that officer performs essentially the same task - compares your face to the picture in the passport.
There are probably some other side effects to having a digital image of you stored on someone's server for their use, but the particular application at the border isn't substantially different than what was happening there prior. (Now, if they also track you everywhere you go at the airport, perhaps - that'd be a different issue)
Beside the point - the computers get the data. (Score:2)
To do that, they have all current arrival information (that's what APIS is for). That way the set of people to compare against is relatively small.
I think you are missing the key point here. In an airport you are matched in contrast to thousands of other people that are also at the airport based on the arrivals database. If you take basic photo matching and add local use of smartphone payments and visa cards to filter people then you can very likely build a considerably smaller database you have to match against. Add to that real time tracking where you can use previous matches to improve your current match (10 minutes ago the other person that looks
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I think you are missing the key point here.
No I'm pretty sure you are. As GP explained, this is just facial image comparison, you provide them a photo and then they try to match it to a photo of you on arrival, failing that they fall back to the image on your passport and failing that they refer you to a human. There's nothing magical about it and there are heaps of systems available [rapidapi.com] that do it.
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It isn't really the same. The issue is that before one airport employee would check if your passport matches your face, then forget all about that and get on with their life. If the machine does it, it leaves a digital record. Also, if your face can be used to identify you here, it can be used to identify you from any images of your face, such as photos posted on social media or anywhere on the internet, or from security camera footage. Such systems already exist in China.
Airport security systems are not
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Airport security systems are not the most alarming place facial recognition is used, but they are one of such places.
They aren't the most alarming, but they should be. It's a high security environment which means your data is relatively safe which means they won't develop proper security for the system. It's also an environment with quite a bit perceived of terrorist threat and real, largely agreed upon identity needs which means that it's an area where a bunch of functions will be developed which might not normally be acceptable.
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It's also an environment with quite a bit perceived of terrorist threat and real, largely agreed upon identity needs which means that it's an area where a bunch of functions will be developed which might not normally be acceptable.
In the US, it is also considered a place that is extraterritorial, so it has been ruled the Constitution does not apply there, so the Fourth Amendment has no power there.
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It isn't really the same. The issue is that before one airport employee would check if your passport matches your face, then forget all about that and get on with their life. If the machine does it, it leaves a digital record.
So you think that previously there was no digital record kept of whether your passport matched your face, i.e. that there was no digital record kept that you entered the country?
Also, if your face can be used to identify you here, it can be used to identify you from any images of your face, such as photos posted on social media or anywhere on the internet, or from security camera footage.
What do you mean "if"? There are dozens of facial image comparison tools out there that I linked above, there are even a heap of open source ones too and these have all been around for some time, anybody can do this and this has been around for a very long time, nothing here is new.
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Oh, a slippery slope argument. Ok then. PANIC!
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Oh, a slippery slope argument. Ok then. PANIC!
Except there is no slippery slope. The border check performs the same function they have in the past, just "with a computer." There is no increase in authority or mission creep happening.
The only "slope" is that technology is improving, and the airport line moves faster because of that.
Ken is complaining about an optional program. He could have avoided the "problem" by not choosing the option.
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The border check performs the same function they have in the past, just "with a computer." There is no increase in authority or mission creep happening.
Except that it actually doesn't. When you used to talk to a person at the passport booth, the person looked at your face, looked at your passport, possibly looked at a few photos of people know to have forged passports and then, in almost all cases just let you through. The entire transaction was local and your data security wasn't threatened. With a system like this, the photo of your face has to be sent to a remote database. In order to guarantee your privacy that remote database has to record the access,
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With a system like this, the photo of your face has to be sent to a remote database.
But you sent it there. You send them a photo and then they take a photo of you at the airport and probably use something like CompreFace [github.com] to do the comparison. How would they do it without saving the photo you sent to them to compare to?
Alternatively they scan your passport and try to do an image comparison with that, failing that they have a human try to do the comparison between you and the photo in your passport.
so all of the functions for a centralised registry of people's movements are put in place.
People's movements through passport control, sure, a record of who entered the country and whe
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People's movements through passport control, sure, a record of who entered the country and when is probably something important to keep.
Somehow we survived fine without it for years. It's normally nobody's business when I choose to travel from one place to another no matter whether internationally or not. This is a perfect example of the mission creep which was being denied just a few comments ago.
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Somehow we survived fine without it for years.
We always had it, flight records of who was on the flight and therefore who entered the country were always kept.
It's normally nobody's business when I choose to travel from one place to another no matter whether internationally or not.
Except they always had that anyway, somehow you just didn't know that or thought that they just threw the passenger manifests out.
Re: Get the info right (Score:2)
Works well until there's a lookalike appearing.
My uncle had an uncanny resemblance to a member of the terrorist organization RAF in Germany so he got some extra checks at some passport checks.
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What a paranoid waste of resources
I know right. Who would think following up actual intelligence related to security clearances is sensible. Why don't they just give extra checks to brown people with beards like they do in the USA. /s
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People who've not committed the crime should not be harassed by the police over the crimes, or imagined crimes, of some other person. It's supposed to be just Germany now, not East Germany. I know "Innocent until proven beyond a doubt to be guilty" is a US thing... or it's *supposed* to be the way our police operate anyway. I'm well aware that they don't. But surely Germany or the EU has *some* sort of similar legal principle.
Re: Get the info right (Score:3)
Unless that lookalike is arriving on a flight right around the same tim at the same airport - not a problem.
And if he is - live CBP agents are as likely to make a mistake, and that would make for a Very Bad Day.
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Except, it *IS* a problem, because the GP's uncle was suffering harassment from the airport securitygoons despite having done nothing wrong himself. Come on... there was only one sentence to read. How did you miss that part?
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Maybe the computer's AI system is a fan of Ken Perlin and knows him on sight
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The other strange thing that stood out is his imagined scenario where the teacher knows everyone's names.
Any country with sane privacy laws only allows personal data to be used for purposes agreed before hand with the individual, and ensures that if a service can be provided with it then it can't be refused if the use isn't authorised.
Re:Get the info right (Score:4, Interesting)
If you go see an actual CBP officer, that officer performs essentially the same task - compares your face to the picture in the passport.
There are probably some other side effects to having a digital image of you stored on someone's server for their use, but the particular application at the border isn't substantially different than what was happening there prior.
Wrong. It's completely different. A CBP officer will forget who's been through their checkpoint given enough time. A physical plane ticket and passenger manifest only has so long before it winds up in a landfill. Analog CCTV footage only has so many hours of tape before it needs to record over previous recordings. Other passengers could give a fuck less about you once they land safely. The pilot never even saw your face.
A computer however remembers everything. Need to know who was at the checkpoint 20 years ago? Here's the arrivals list, the passenger manifest from each plane, the complete social media history and old account info for every foreigner, every social media post about each flight organized per passenger, the complete set of security camera photos from the coffee shop across the hall from the terminal gates, the IP and MAC addresses of every device that pinged our wifi in the terminal, the domain names they accessed and the amount of money our ad placements made along with the advertising IDs and relevant metadata about both the device user and the advert shown, and selfies from those in the baggage claim area. If you need more, just call Ed downstairs. He's got some Darkweb connections and a buddy at the NSA we can turn to.
It's gotten to the point that computer memory is so dirt cheap that being forgotten is a luxury only the rich and powerful can access. With abuse of that memory being routine at all levels of law enforcement. If that doesn't scare you, you won't live long if that memory is ever turned against you. Let alone the next major societal upheaval.
Re: Get the info right (Score:1)
If you've traveled in China - it's common there (Score:2, Interesting)
How old is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Global entry is a voluntary program in which a citizen pays money to be investigated and additional information is taken. I donâ(TM)t know if it\f racial recognition is reliable enough for the general population. You still have to go through an immigration officer to enter the US. You still have to go through a physical process to get past security
The interesting thing is to get on the plane it is often 100% facial recognition.
In the other country I often travel to the entry and exit is retinal scan. No human intervention. Type I. Your info, scan your passport, and the nice gate opens. To get on the plane, though, is two to three levels of security.
Not just that (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently sticking your passport into the slot is essentially theater.
One of many theatrical things at airports ...
False positives (Score:2)
I went through Global Entry at SFO a few days ago. I was recognized properly without my passport. However, several other travelers in a short line of about 15 got mismatched - they were recognized as somebody else on the paper printout that comes out. I didn't stick around to check how they resolved this. Suffice it to say, face recognition technology is still far from perfect.
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Suffice it to say, face recognition technology is still far from perfect.
And yet I wonder just how far we've taken this not-so-perfect technology into the courtroom.
Could you be "identified" and potentially convicted of a crime, with nothing but facial recognition today? Most likely, unless you've got a solid alibi AND the financial capability to hire a competent lawyer to defend a false accusation.
Otherwise, the law will take the side of "the system" until that system is dismantled due to an overwhelming (read: class-action) amount of evidence proving inaccuracy happens. Don'
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You could be identified incorrectly without facial recognition too. Incorrect identification has been a thing in the courtroom since it was presided over by kings instead of judges. It's why the bar in the courtroom is "beyond reasonable doubt" rather than "one dude said he thinks so".
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You could be identified incorrectly without facial recognition too. Incorrect identification has been a thing in the courtroom since it was presided over by kings instead of judges. It's why the bar in the courtroom is "beyond reasonable doubt" rather than "one dude said he thinks so".
The actual bar in today's courtroom, is far more devious than that.
Can you afford to properly defend yourself, or not.. THAT is the actual bar that makes your comment quite irrelevant. it better be beyond a complete slam-dunk if you expect free legal services to provide freedom, both physically and financially. Taking off 3 months to blow $20K on your innocence due to a false positive makes an unaffordable $400 unscheduled expense look like a pathetic joke.
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I didn't stick around to check how they resolved this.
There's no way to resolve this. Once the piece of paper identifies you as the wrong person you are that person now for life. It's not possible that on verification they simply ask for your passport. Fallbacks aren't a thing ever anywhere.
Like just this morning I used my fingerprint on my phone, but it said fingerprint not recognised and I was left with no other option than to burn my phone and buy a new one. 5th one this year, I honestly don't understand why people need a right to repair when they get repla
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Therefore I never use fingerprint unlock or face unlock for any of my electronic devices. It is just plainly stupid. Why would I want my phone or laptop be unlocked easily by any groups that kidnap me? It is so common for spy movies portraying biometric security checks being copied or faked, I don't understand why so many people still feel comfortable for their uses.
And then in cases similar to you, one lose access to the devices by either some unknown change to body throwing off the detector, or lose ac
my voice is my passport verify me (Score:2)
my voice is my passport verify me
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my voice is my passport verify me
I was thinking the same thing, except:
"My voice is my passport. Fuck You."
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Nice Sneakers [wikipedia.org] throwback.
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my voice is my passport verify me
In the early days of voice recognition, I read about a lawyer who thought it would be cool to dictate his letters directly into his computer. First, you have to train the algorithm to recognise your voice. This lawyer rather liked his liquid lunches, and did the voice training in the afternoon. Trouble is, the algorithm would not recognise his sober voice in the morning.
Next year the EU will get such a system (Score:2)
Imagine the fun.
Black mirror was there first .. as ever (Score:3)
This is very much the Chinese idea of social credit and as ever the Black Mirror [wikipedia.org] foresaw this. What does the future look like if all the Black Mirror episodes are true simulataneously?
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Do you have any idea what this story is about?
This system has been in place for years. Many countries started offering it to their own returning citizens before the global option existed.
Long before that, passports started to include RFID chips that contained the same data as the information page of the passport, to make machine processing easier. The slot you put the passport in has both an RFID reader and camera to OCR the data.
There is no sign of any kind of social credit system emerging. Indeed, that wo
They got it all wrong (Score:2)
The phrase is, "My voice is my passport. Verify me."
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Joe Dragon beat you to this post by 13 minutes.
Does the passport have NFC? (Score:1)
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NFC design range is only a few centimeters (that's an inch for people who don't understand metric). It is possible to use big antenna and fancy h/w to extend the range, but I highly doubt the passport readers do anything beyond the international standards. So no.
Problems with biometrics. (Score:2)
I said it before under numerous articles on slashdot - biometrics alone are not viable as an authenticating factor/password. They have an inherent issue and that is that they cannot be changed. Your password gets compromised? No problem - you generate a new one. Your fingerprints leak? Oh-oh. Better get a cleaver, chop of your finger and 3D-print a new one... Once your biometrics get stolen you are pretty much f**ked from now until the end of your days.
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Welll...I was just reading an article that was wondering how often photo-ids need to be updated, because facial features change over time. Seems that between 20 and 60 faces are pretty stable, but outside that range they change more rapidly. (But they didn't go into details about that, except that babies faces can change within months.)
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"between 20 and 60 faces are pretty stable, but outside that range they change more rapidly" Get off my lawn!
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biometrics alone are not viable as an authenticating factor/password
This is not authentication. This is identification. Passport control effectively has zero authentication.
This is not the future. (Score:2)
We have a professor in University of Maryland who has developed, for the Chinese government, a way to identify people by their gait and walking stances. In a Covid world of masked faces, the Chinese needed a better way to identify people, and as a bonus this method can ID all the people a crowd.
Pretty soon Chinese will lease that technology to USA and as you walk off the airplane, the cone
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Some news articles have used the word "identify" when reporting about this research, but I believe that is an overstatement of what the researcher claimed. He "only" claimed that "The algorithm would then use the gait signatures to classify pedestrians as “aggressive,” “shy,” “impulsive,” and other personalities."
Your face has always been part of your passport (Score:4, Insightful)
That's rather the point of having a photo of your face in it. It's just that until now a human checked it.
AWS, 1984 (Score:4, Interesting)
If so, 1) Amazon is lying. And if lying, 2) why? I assume it's to collect data for themselves, to train some AI or sell the information to someone, etc.
Privacy is valued? Prove it. (Score:2)
Yeah, or you could just go browse their many social media accounts and find out all this shit anyway. Because they openly post it online for the world to see.
"In other words, I would be able to know far too much about them."
Really? In a world full of well-paid Attention Whores, I'd challenge you to prove this is an actual problem, because it sure as hell doesn't seem like it. At all.
The only thing Mass Narcissism has proven in the last decade, is that damn near everyone's privacy has a price, and no one gives a shit about becoming The Product.
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The issue isn't the availability of the data, it's the normalization of using a database as a source of that information rather than a social interaction.
As an example, at my dentist they bring up my patient record before beginning a cleaning. Two of the items in there are that twenty years ago I passed out due to low blood sugar, and that in 2 visits in the past 3 years the hygenist didn't know how to clean around wisdom teeth and caused an infection. Because of the way the system presents the data, I'm al
Privacy invasion to prevent privacy invasion? (Score:2)
How do you prevent people from running AI and facial recognition algorithms without invading their privacy? Inspecting what programs I'm running and what electronics/sensors supposedly aimed at the street in my car, home, glasses, pocket, and business seems like privacy invasion to me.
The problem with a universal ID (Score:3)
is that when somebody steals it, you're stuffed. I am not talking about physically stealing someone's face, but hacking the computer that contains the facial recognition data, so it recognises someone else (the crim) is you. How would you prove that had happened?
A big problem these days is people trusting computers rather than good old paperwork. I heard a documentary this morning and a nationwide system in the UK, to connect up lawyers, courts, prison services, and other criminal law stuff. This would theoretically save time on all the paperwork. The trouble is, the computer system frequently made errors, such as failing to send a warrant to the prison when a prisoner is eligible for release. What the legals did was to keep notes, to check up on the computer system. This actually made the job harder, not easier. The people developing and running the system swore that the system was working, so they ignored the lawyer's paperwork. The documentary did not get to the bottom why the system was making so many errors. It could take years. Bear in mind that if courts are wired into the system, it is a wee bit difficult proving your case in court.
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so it recognises someone else (the crim) is you. How would you prove that had happened?
Authentication and identification are two different things. In systems where identification alone provides access there's usually very little damage without additional authentication.
I heard a documentary this morning and a nationwide system in the UK, to connect up lawyers, courts, prison services, and other criminal law stuff.
The UK is largely known as one of the most incompetent nations in any digitisation / automation project. They manage to fuck up the simplest things. The fact that you saw a documentary on how bad they did it doesn't disprove the concept, it just reinforces the existing impression of ineptitude of the UK government.
Re: The problem with a universal ID (Score:2)
They are too busy holding their noses high in the air. The side effect is that they can't see what they're working on.
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Gattaca.
Copy of your passport (Score:2)
This program is a private company that copies your passport to the internet. You pay money give an interview, add a bunch of additional information and effectively your face becomes a passport.
Note, technically, legally, you still need your passport on you and if someone bothers to check you could find yourself stuck in jail till the government decides to let you go. Not to bad if it is the US government, but what about other countries....
A professor? (Score:2)
It's really sad when a professor writes a sentence like that. A verb, professor, we need a verb!
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Re: A professor? (Score:2)
And that's probably for the best. You are there to get an education, not buddy up with the teachers
Legalising stalking (Score:2)
That's basically what it is. Stalking's ok as long as you are not some creepy person looking into windows and staying in your car at a distance.
Not really (Score:2)
With Global Entry there are only a few dozen people arriving at any time to compare against. The level of biometrics is pretty coarse.
The more this happens (Score:2)
The higher and thicker my mental and social walls are built, and I'm sure it's the same with other people.
We are creating an absolute nightmare where we can't trust anyone and we feel like we are always being watched. This is not compatible with a stable and sane society.
Alternative scenario (Score:3)
Let's turn the table and play the game from a different angle. (I just watched "The Hunt" in Netflix, so this scenario comes to mind right away.)
Imagine while travelling in another country, you lost everything (e.g. your passport, wallet and everything stolen), you walk into a US embassy and asked for help, and they asked you for your papers, you said you got nothing.
Now, imagine they then asked you to go to this machine which scans your face, and it quickly identified you, confirmed that you are a US citizen, and they tell you that you will get a new passport very soon.
This, in my opinion, is a good thing.
See? Using imagination and movie plots to determine if something is good or bad is silly, it results in security theatres that required people to take off their shoes in the airport.
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That use case could be just as easily resolved by a fingerprint scanner which; is less easily abused as a tool of mass surveillance and also doesn't exude creepy (whether justifiable or no, it does come off as creepy) Orwellian vibes like the facial scanning. Plus the government already has my thumb print for my driver's license and my full prints for Global Entry. So why roll out a whole new (expensive) system to replace fingerprints and print readers when they do the job just as well... perhaps better..
And we blame the wrong thing (Score:2)
In the professor example, in TFA, the complaint/fear is that this mythical professor would know too much.
Only if the administrators permitted that information to be made available to professors.
"everyone's name" - yeah, pretty necessary
"what their interests were" - Well, maybe for some courses. Have the professor request this in advance and offer justification for it.
"the date of their birth" - Oh, hey, this isn't even a recommended data point on your resume. Why would it be for your class records?
"and whet
Privacy may be more resilient than it seems. (Score:2)
The rational function of privacy is to reduce your likelihood of being randomly victimized, same as not walking down a poorly-lit ghetto street at night alone. But the type of privacy hinted at in this anecdote is something more absolute and illusory: The idea of forcing power institutions to "avert their gaze" from readily-available data so that, given a specific reason to targe
yes, please (Score:2)
Perlin offers one example, imagining a professor looking at a new class and already knowing "everyone's name, what their interests were, the date of their birth, and whether they played a musical instrument.
I've been waiting for that for over two decades.
I'm an introvert and social interactions are a challenge. You won't notice much because I've trained myself, but they're still difficult things I need to focus on. And because I don't much care about unimportant things, I tend to not remember a lot of small talk stuff people told me.
I'd KILL for a smart device that remembers this stuff for me, pops up up into my FOV and helps me do what most people seem to do naturally: "Hey (read name from display). Wow, long
Biometrics (Score:2)
But I cannot be compelled to remember a password and my memory is spotty.
Some will doubtless observe "Just don't be a criminal" while ignoring or willfully ignorant of th
It's already there (Score:2)
Where does this lead? In a follow-up blog post, Perlin offers one example, imagining a professor looking at a new class and already knowing "everyone's name, what their interests were, the date of their birth, and whether they played a musical instrument. "In other words, I would be able to know far too much about them."
Google Glass, anyone? Fortnunatly seen by the public as the creepy privacy-invading device it is.
Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. (Score:1)