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Biometric Face Recognition At Your Local Mall
dippityfisch writes "The Sydney Morning Herald reports that face recognition is being considered at Westfield's Sydney mall to catch offenders. The identification system matches images captured by surveillance cameras to an existing database of faces. Police said they could not comment on the center's intentions, but would welcome any move to improve security and technology in the area."
One possible solution that I can think of, if you want to keep your privacy, is to wear a mask. Security should not have a problem with that, right?
Wow. I'm not familiar with "Sydney morning herald" so I'm not sure what I was expecting, but they certainly didn't meet it.
Half: "Police say this is great!"
Maybe a third: "Besides, it's already being used and you didn't even know it, so it can't be bad!"
And then: "Some academic loon has his panties in a twist over this"
Quickly followed by: "Another professor... of various more important things... says it should be used more though."
Australia often makes me feel better about the US. Right now, they're making me realize that as bad as Fox news is, it could get somewhat worse.
Ah, yes. I should have been thinking of the children all along. This erosion loss of my own right to privacy is all good, because of the benefits to the children.
No matter that most kids are abused at their home or in the home of another family member or close family friend. Let's put security cams up in the mall. That'll solve it.
But seriously now, I'm not sure about the implications of these things: would a mall count as public or private? Generally, you wouldn't be allowed to take photos in a mall because it's private property, and they're obviously allowed to take photos of you, because they own the joint. However, what would Joe Public be able to do if he was flagged as a criminal through a false positive?
I'd be pretty pissed if some fool tasered me while I was grocery shopping on a Saturday morning 'cos the camera erroneously ID'd me as the local pedobear or whatever...
It's their property they can do what they want with it. It's no different from me running facial recognition against people who walk up my stairs. (which i dont do btw..)
No, they can't. People's rights must be respected even in private property, that's why local bars can't install cameras on girls bathrooms. You can install facial recognition, but people can still walk on the street with glasses and a hat.
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
If you ignore the possible invasion of privacy which is kind of moot in such a public place
I find fault with that logic. You wear clothes in public, don't you? That's privacy in a public place, it clearly exists. Being automatically identified by a computer, WOULD eventually be used to track you between destinations and WOULD eventually be used for things which are not at all security related (such as in minority report, vending machines calling to you personally.) You can and will lose your privacy in public and in private if this shit continues.
If you were being facetious, you need to be a little less subtle, or else it's just borderline trolling.
If you don't want to be entered into their surveillance system don't shop at their mall.
And when every business participates in a facial ID program to help stop theft, the excuse will be "it's private property and everyone else does it." When cities start putting facial ID systems in public places the excuses will be "It's to help catch bad people, and anyway it already happens every place you go into, so we might as well connect it all and know where you are at all times."
Maybe that won't happen, but why the hell are we letting them risk it? This is to catch "thieves?" Give me a break. That's a stupid reason to start this crap.
Greetings and salutations...
Here is an interesting study that indicates that the chances of a false positive are fairly great, especially in a chaotic setting:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB396/DB396.pdf
One might wave this off as inconsequential, until one gets a security escort in the mall because their face happens to resemble that of a pedophile or thief.
Automating enforcement is a tricky thing, and, should be approached with great caution. We should not hop on the train simply because it is new, and shiny, and a sales person has taken us out for a multiple martini lunch!
Of course, this is a USA-centric view, where at least we have the historical documents that are SUPPOSED to protect the citizens against abuse of one's civil rights by the authorities... You folks out in the rest of the world...well....learn from the fact that over the past eight years or so, that, in spite of the Constitution, America has taken many large and troubling steps towards a Kafa-esque police state.
Pleasant dreams.
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
Video Surveillance is Useless Presentation from prominent computer vision researcher, inventor of phase correlation method It basically saying, that on current tech level video surveillance is useless for face identification. What follow is that it's actually harmful, due to wrong impression of it's reliability.
One false positive can ruin your whole day, week, or life.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
When you go to the mall you have no expectation of privacy outside of the bathroom.
Or maybe in changing rooms or phone booths or ...
How about they have a guard follow you around watching your every move at close range, listening in on your every conversation, making notes of everything you touch, everything you buy and so on. That's ok too? How about random searches of your bags? After all, you might have stolen something and you're on their private property.
The whole "no expectation of privacy in public" is nonsense. Just because you are in a public space shouldn't mean it's ok to protocol your every move, word and thought and store it in some database.
Just wait till thought/feeling reading gets perfected. Hey it's a public place so we can record all your brainwaves. Yes yes of course, such technology will never come. Good for us.
You wear clothes in public, don't you?
Yes, but only because last time I tried not to, they put my face in their database.
No, I wasn't being serious, but thanks for asking!
Absolutely. Malls have an implied invitation to the general public to enter - and their rights come in with them. 'Private property' isn't a law-free zone even in a capitalist analysis.
As someone once said: one pole isn't really all that different from the other if you're stranded there.
Extreme libertarians and extreme communists have a lot in common: they have ideology, will sacrifice anything for their ideology, consider it the perfect solution to every problem, refuse to listen to any indication that there might be a problem with it, etc etc. The end result of either ideology getting control is an economic and humanitarian disaster. The same is true of every ideology: taking a good idea too far turns it into a parody of itself. That's why people who want economic and personal freedom end up building a private police state. The state with the smallest possible government is known as a jungle, and only the biggest gorillas have freedom there, the rest having only the freedom to obey or die.
I wonder how many "libertarians don't support corporations" replies will I get? They all miss the point, of course: the shield of limited liability is not needed if you're too big for anyone to hold you liable. That's why you can't sue the government: who would enforce the judgement?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
There's a difference between "someone might see me" and "someone is watching my every move". The latter is stalking, and we have laws against stalkers. And I don't think "officer, I stalked him just in case he happened to be a criminal" would fly in court.
I don't. I can understand why such people might be banned from working as kindergarden teachers or other positions requiring trust, but banning them from shops because there might be children in the same building is just ridiculous. The whole "sex offender" thing is nowadays simply used as an excuse to bully a socially accepted target; I find the practice every bit as disgusting as rape.
Not that being a "sex offender" has anything to do with rape, or even with sex; you can get on the list for urinating in public.
Think of the chiiildren!
Ironically enough, without the whole "sex offender" hysteria lost children would probably be escorted to security personnel, who would then find the parents. Instead everyone will steer clear of them for fear of being accused of being a "predator", the accusation being sufficient to get them inserted into the sex offender registry and apparently banned from malls forever, as well as being subjected to any arbitrary punishment someone who "thinks of the children" can come up with.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.