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.
We have so many dystopian futures and we decided to invent a new one.
Actually this one feels pretty similar to watch_dogs. Wasn’t this the plot to watch_dogs 2?
Now I’m interested in the plot of watch dogs 2…
Edit: it’s indeed the plot of watch dogs 2
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Dogs_2
In 2016, three years after the events of Chicago, San Francisco becomes the first city to install the next generation of ctOS – a computing network connecting every device together into a single system, developed by technology company Blume. Hacker Marcus Holloway, punished for a crime he did not commit through ctOS 2.0 …
Also, a kickass soundtrack by Hudson Mohawke.
Now now, thought we had agreed not to use facial recognition, am I going to have to collapse civilization or are you going to behave ? Last warning
But you don’t need to do anything in order to let our civilization collapse.
Ah come on ! You’re spoiling the magic trick !
How you gonna do it?
So many ways, it’s hard to pick just one. Plus it would ruin the surprise.
Get facial recognition to lay the heat on someone else might be a good start. Gotta game the system to destroy it.
Stop giving corporations the power to blacklist us from life itself.
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.
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
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
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.
Facial recognition still struggles with really bad mistakes that are always bad optics for the business that uses it. I’m amazed anyone is still willing to use it in its current form.
It’s been the norm that these systems can’t tell the difference between people of dark pigmentation if it even acknowledges it’s seeing a person at all.
Running a system with a decade long history or racist looking mistakes is bonkers in the current climate.
I’m curious how well the systems can differentiate doppelgangers and identical twins. Or if some makeup is enough to fool it.
Facial recognition uses a few key elements of the face to hone in on matches, and traditional makeup doesn’t obscure any of those areas. In order to fool facial recognition, the goal is often to avoid face detection in the first place; Asymmetry, large contrasting colors, obscuring one (or both) eyes, hiding the oval head shape and jawline, and rhinestones (which sparkle and reflect light nearly randomly, making videos more confusing) seem to work well. But as neural nets improve, they also get harder to fool, so what works for one system may not work for every system.
CV Dazzle (originally inspired by dazzle camouflage used on some warships) is a makeup style that tries to fool the most popular facial recognition systems.
Note that those tend to obscure the bridge of the nose, the brow line, the jawline, etc… Because those are key identification areas for facial recognition.
Yeah, if we can still recognize those as faces, it’s possible for a neural net to do so as well.
But I’m talking more about differentiating faces than hiding entirely from such systems. Like makeup can be used to give the illusion that the shape of the face is different with false contour shading. You can’t really change the jawline (I think… I’m not skilled in makeup myself but have an awareness of what it can do) but you can change where the cheekbones appear to be, as well as the overall shape of the cheeks, and you can adjust the nose, too (unless it’s a profile angle).
I think the danger in trying to hide that you have a face entirely is that if it gets detected, there’s a good chance that it will be flagged for attempting to fool the system because those examples you gave are pretty obvious, once you know what’s going on.
It would be like going in to a bank with a ski mask to avoid being recognized vs going in as Mrs Doubtfire. Even if they are just trying to do banking that one time, the ski mask will attract unwanted attention while using a different face would accomplish the goal of avoiding attention.
Functional and subversive, just how I like my makeup
You make it sound like that’s a bad thing.
The catch is that its only really a problem for the people getting flagged. Then you’re guilty until proven innocent, and the only person to blame is a soulless machine with a big button that reads “For customer support, go fuck yourself”.
As security theater, its cheap and easy to implement. As a passive income stream for tech bros, its a blank check. As a buzzword for politicians who can pretend they’re forward-thinking by rolling out some vaporware solution to a non-existent problem, its on the tip of everyone’s tongue.
I’m old enough to remember when sitting Senator Ted Kennedy got flagged by the Bush Admin’s No Fly List and people were convinced this is the sort of shit that would reform the intrusive, incompetent, ill-conceived TSA. 20 years later… nope, it didn’t. Enjoy techno-hell, Brits.
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
They fixed it, the new implementation requires a DNA sample now.
There we go guys. It’s funny when nutty conspiracy theorists are against masks when they should be wearing frikin balaclavas
Please tell me a lawyer is taking this on pro bono and is about to sue the shit out of Facewatch.
For what? A private business can exclude anyone for any reason or no reason at all so long as the reason isn’t a protected right.
I’d be surprised if being born with a specific face configuration isn’t protected in the same way that race and gender are.
In the uk you can pet much guarantee that won’t happen because it would shut down their surveillance state.
Is it even legal? What happened to consumer protection laws?
Brexit. The EU has laws forbidding stuff like this.
I don’t think this is legal in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus either.
I’m going to think twice before enerting any big box store because of this.
No need to avoid such stores, just wear a protection to avoid your face from being falsely flagged.
I am amazed that anyone is still using them. It is the 21st century, just shop online.
Last time I ordered big boxes online, they just shipped me empty boxes. I don’t know how they screwed that up, but then I’ve always gone to big box stores so I can actually see the big boxes I’m buying.
Welcome to 2024. Where we move closer and closer to black mirror being real due to our technology improvements.
Plus our allowing sociopaths to hold so much power.
Allowing bad character to reign generally speaking. Sociopaths are like seed crystals; it’s the rest of us implanting their way of life that do most of the evil, even if they’re the ones providing the purest examples.
We need to be good people, not just nice people, in order to improve things.
This is why some UK leaders wanted out of EU, to make their own rules with way less regard for civil rights.
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!
deleted by creator
This can’t be true. I was told that if she has nothing to hide she has nothing to worry about!
She got more than she Home Bargained for
Dang… the UK got China’d.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
They accidentally the whole word.
Lol it was the other way around… I actually added a word instead. Fixed
Tap for spoiler
it
now.
Fixed it, thanks for flagging
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.
_ /\ _
