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Facial Recognition Cameras Peering Into Some SF Nightspots
Fluffeh writes "On Friday, a company called SceneTap flipped the on switch enabling cameras installed in around 20 bars to monitor how full the venues are, the mix of men and women, their ages — and to make all this information available live via an iPhone or Android app. Privacy advocates are unimpressed, though, as the only hint that people are being monitored is via tiny stickers on the windows. Beyond academics and policy experts, some San Francisco bar owners that originally partnered with SceneTap have said that they're pulling out and will be taking down the company's cameras. An increasing number of bars still listed on the SceneTap's site are now saying that they're not working with the Chicago startup, including Mr. Smith's, Southpaw, John Colins, and Bar None."
FWIW, I've lived in San Francisco for 17 years and I've heard of maybe one of these bars. I wouldn't want to extrapolate any kind of "trend" out of this. As the summary suggests, I think there's more press release than reality here.
Breakfast served all day!
just need some vetted moderators to rank the attractiveness of people from either gay or straight perspective, then making tallies per gender per estimated age buckets (21-24, 25-28, 29-32, etc.) THEN you'd really have something.
With the reports of undercover officers instigating incidents at protests, I am waiting for the protesting activists to start a facial recognition database of police. In crowd hand held camera's and small toy remotes scanning and feeding images to a central system like this. Already at protests you see both sides scanning both ranks with cameras.
When you can snap a picture of someone with your iPhone and get a "police" or "not police" report - that will cause the *hit to hit the fan about all sorts of things.
to monitor ....... the mix of men and women,
How can they differentiate between them?
Have gnu, will travel.
I remember setting up a spare video camera in our lab back in the early 90's, capturing images and dumping them out onto an experimental web server we had running. This would be an early hack of the webcam concept.
I hadn't considered that it would be an issue. But my colleagues were distinctly not impressed, and so I quickly tore down the rig. I think that, to them, the lab was a private space. The camera violated their expectation of privacy, and they didn't like that. I've been thinking about it ever since.
The expectation of privacy is contextual, of course, and we each have rather firm internal rules about how it works. But often these rules are tacit even to us, so it's not easy to specify them in a way that would be generally useful. For example, is a bar a public space or a private one? See, it turns out to be both. We may go to a bar to meet people, in which aspect it's a public space. And we may also go there because it provides cover for having an intimate conversation, in which aspect it's private.
As an acceptable tradeoff between security and privacy, we may be okay with security cameras monitoring us, because we assume that those images ordinarily remain locked away in a box somewhere. If the same cameras were to put the same images on the web, we might consider that the tradeoff is no longer acceptable. What about the case where the images are to be scanned for identifying features by some third party? I think the answer will depend on whether we regard the resulting data as anonymizing us or identifying us and tracking our movements. And our legitimate reason to be concerned is that, once the images have been passed to other hands, we just can't know what will happen next.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
Bugger that or a bad nightmare.
Just as I *refuse* to enter any bar/club which requires to scan my drivers license (no seriously, trust us we very carefully throw away all the information, it's as if you were never scanned), I would also find somewhere else to drink rather than put up with this massive invasion of my right to at least some semblance of privacy.
Vote With Your Wallets, People.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Around the world (eg central London) there are cameras covering some public spaces. I would like to see the output of those taxpayer funded cameras on the www. Privacy should be a non issue. Our culture will have to change because privacy in public places has (like copyright) been destroyed by technology.
If you want privacy, rent your own space, put it in a Faraday box and sweep it for bugs.
Otherwise all you do by not making those images public is deprive all but the powerful, the wealthy and the hackers of the information gathered by publicly funded cameras.
Oh, not that kind of facial?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem