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Al Franken Calls for Tight Rules on Facial Recognition Software
angry tapir writes "The U.S. Congress may need to pass legislation that limits the way government agencies and private companies use facial recognition technology to identify people, according to U.S. Senator Al Franken, who chairs the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee's privacy subcommittee. The growing use of facial recognition technology raises serious privacy and civil liberties concerns, according to the senator, who has called on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Facebook to change the way they use facial recognition technology."
Derrick Harris of GigaOM says "My gut instinct is to call Senator Al Franken a well-meaning fool when it comes to his latest outcry," but concedes that in this case "he actually has a point." Harris writes in an editorial
that "If you've heard about Alessandro Acquisti's work with the technology, you know why this possibility should be a little scary. Snap a photo of someone with a smartphone, analyze an image against a database of social media or Flickr pics and, voila, you have a name. From there, it's easy to get someone's age, hometown, interests, news coverage, you name it."
Related: judgecorp writes "YouTube has added a tool which automatically detects and anonymises faces in uploaded videos. YouTube parent Google says it is intended to allow dissidents in places like Syria to share videos without risking reprisals form the government — but it warned that this is not an exact science, so users should check videos through before making them public."
Facial Recognition Software is great because if you leave your "papers" at home they will still be able to identify you.
In addition, they will also have access to your: personality profile, criminal records, court records, land records, birth certificate, marriage certificate, political contributions, address, phone number, date of birth, and embarrassing photos of you drunk in college.
Let's legislation facial recognition technology, ie. you can't tell your friend if you recognize someone. Brilliant.
More over don't you guys have something else you need to be doing?
Ok, let's first get loose of 'omg we are loosing privacy here' attitude and analyze this a bit. First of all, private entities can take video of me in their security cameras. What's difference after this is how they analyze that collected data? What I *need* to know is that companies do that, so I can decide in a case of unusual situation would I render their services or not.
Government policy is totally different matter and should be crafted into internal documents and practices, not laws. I don't want cops to be pushed to understand that face recognition or video surveillance isn't panacea to everything, I want them to *understand* it themselves.
So in nutshell it is a old buzz about video surveillance. I'm not standing for or against it, but just against rehashing same old arguments over something new we can do with this surveillance material.
So, no law is needed (and less hysteria please) - just more common sense. Ohhh, this is media. Forget about that, crack on panicking.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Al Franken wants controls because his facial scan identifies as "asshole."
"Stop whining!" - Arnold, as Mr. Kimble
Technology is too good! We need to outlaw it!
This is another case if outlawing technology. Someone can look at a person, compare them to a lineup of photos, and then look them up in a phonebook and call them. But because a computer can do it so much better and so much quicker, we are scared and feel the need to censor progress. What about the freedom to take photos? The freedom to process photos?
I can only imagine that when someone invents teleportation, it will be outlawed and the designs burned and the inventor executed, because of the fear that 75% of the population will lose their jobs.
When are we going to accept change and take steps to live within that world? If you are so afraid of it, then stop putting your photo online? If you are a celebrity, then too bad.
I do agree that the government shouldn't be monitoring without a warrant though. Just like they aren't supposed to before technology.
Being horrible with names it would be handy to have an augmented reality glasses at a party to remind me who I'm talking to, what their interests are, plus I think it would be helpful for others to know me also. Of course it will eventually be used so salespersons know what your tastes are and what to push.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Yeah, another tired repetition of the don't give me no more regulations platitude. Maybe there's a point in it. But there's also a point that every penny you save is as good as earning one...but let's not go around repeating that platitude any more like its an insight, okay?
Snap a photo of someone with a smartphone, analyze an image against a database of social media or Flickr pics and, voila, you have a name. From there, it's easy to get someone's age, hometown, interests, news coverage, you name it.
Finally a solution for picking up pretty girls in bars ;-)
On one hand, I get concerned anytime someone wants to regulate a new technology. There is no immediate safety issue or security issue, so my initial reaction to a congresscritter wanting to dictate its usage is negative. Society has adapted to and will continue to adapt to advances in technology, so I don't see the benefit in creating a set of rules and procedures around the appropriate use of the technology.
On the other hand, we certainly see an erosion of privacy in ways that we cou;dn't have imagined a few decades ago. So much of our lives are online, but it is very easy to opt out of Facebook or Google+ (those 12 of us who are part of it). But if this network extends into "real life" and can be married up to financial accounts and transactions made on credit card or debit cards, the mind boggles at the possibilites.
The real issue in my mind is who this information belongs to. Is information about my purchase owned by me, by the party I do business with, the credit card company, all of the above? Should there be limitations in place on how this information gets shared? How in the world do you enforce a set of rules like this?
And if you've been keeping score, I provided zero answers to any of the questions I raise. I don't have any to be honest. But yes, this is a weighty decision, but likely one that is long overdue.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I don't get why this is a big deal. I just wear a burka.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam Sometimes I imagine myself in a world filled with people. Fuck facial recognition. Odd to love technology that produces facial recognition software, but hate the world in which it is perceived by many to be needed.
What's the lower tech precedent for these rules? I'm not saying they must exist, I just want to be able to contextualize the concern.
Genies don't go back into bottles.
And you can't regulate thought, even if some people are virtual cyborgs who do some of their thinking outside of their own bodies. If I already have the capacity to recognizes faces, there's nothing really all that bad about me getting a thousand times better at it. People's memory of having seen others, is already a "privacy concern", whether they are computer aided or not, but it's a realtively unimportant concern compared to others, and we're just quibbling about scale.
It's also bizarre prioritizing. Mass surveillance is working because We The People ultimately have no real problem with the basic idea of it, we have decided we'd rather not require warrants, and stuff like that. Why should we concentrate on one detail for how people are being tracked (faces), when we don't care about any of the others (license plates on cars, people carrying active transmitters of unique ids, etc)? We should change our mind and decide that we want privacy, before we start arguing about specific techs.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What about dissidents here in Google's home country, the United States of America?
AL Franken doesn't want to be snapped by an intelligent cam when he's blowing taxpayer funded coke from taxpayed prostitutes.
It's pretty much the only reason why a politician would not celebrate and approve of 1984 tech
Just get a scramble suit from scanner darkly.
I don't think Franken is a well-meaning fool. If there aren't already rules on how the government uses facial recognition tech, there should be.
Just to give a dystopian example, what if the government hooked up cameras everywhere (we already have traffic cameras, cameras in ATMs, security cameras in public buildings), and then tied them all into a computer system that recognized everyone's faces and kept track of your whereabouts?
Snap a photo of someone with a smartphone, analyze an image against a database of social media or Flickr pics and, voila, you have a name. From there, it's easy to get someone's age, hometown, interests, news coverage, you name it."
Interesting tech, and more than a little bit scary. However, I don't think that congress passing a law restricting it is going to slow our march toward cyberpunk dystopia one bit. In the post-9/11 security state, it's an absolute certainty that the three-letter agencies will continue to develop and use face recognition, and pretty much a given that soon afterward local cops will be using their hand-me-downs on routine drug cases (just like GPS trackers and smartphone data loggers). Businesses big enough to have offshore tax shelters will just build offshore data-processing shelters, streaming images from their front door cameras to foreign locales to be analyzed by restricted facial-recognition algorithms and customer profiles back in real time. In the end this would only bite individuals and small businesses (much like our allegedly-high taxes).
0 1 - just my two bits
What we really need is restriction on .gov use of the technology. Under today's circumstances, there must be reasonable articulable suspicion that a crime is being committed before photo ID is demanded, but if they can just scan your face with a camera, they get your photo ID without probable cause. If not stopped there, they'll use what they find trolling faces to generate probable cause for arrests and detainment. The founders wanted the limits on asking for papers, not so that real criminals could get away, but so that in the event government decided to criminalize freedom, there was still a way to practice dissent.
Technology is too good! We need to outlaw it!
I think it's more along the lines of "technology is very powerful and often allows us to carry out our wildest dreams -- no matter how bad or good they are." I don't think he's pushing for outlawing it altogether but just regulating it. Examples I can think of include when we know a corporation is using it to, say, profile customers who visit public stores and shop in certain sections (without explicit consent) or say that the Church of Scientology decides to use it at protests. Is it wrong to regulate that kind of usage of it? Actually can you please explain where Franken said we need to "outlaw it"? Because you seem to be pushing this to an extreme to invalidate his point.
This is another case if outlawing technology. Someone can look at a person, compare them to a lineup of photos, and then look them up in a phonebook and call them. But because a computer can do it so much better and so much quicker, we are scared and feel the need to censor progress. What about the freedom to take photos? The freedom to process photos?
I can only imagine that when someone invents teleportation, it will be outlawed and the designs burned and the inventor executed, because of the fear that 75% of the population will lose their jobs.
Technology is powerful, there's no way to argue with that. Look at the evolution of guns. Look at the advent of the Maxim gun. Do you think that the laws at the time covered cases where people start stockpiling automatic weapons? Technology has the power to enable to the user past their original abilities and as such, yes, we do find ourselves forced to regulate certain extremes. You can only imagine that the designs would be burned and inventor executed because that's what Al Franken is proposing we do to facial recognition? Try not to hyperbole on your way to the parking lot. We wouldn't outlaw teleportation used for transportation of goods and services, hell, why do you think we built the interstate highway system!? We would outlaw the use of teleporation to rob your neighbor's home or banks!
When are we going to accept change and take steps to live within that world? If you are so afraid of it, then stop putting your photo online? If you are a celebrity, then too bad.
I do agree that the government shouldn't be monitoring without a warrant though. Just like they aren't supposed to before technology.
Yep, it's okay that this hurts everyone else right up until Big Brother and Evil Corp are using it to track/profile/target you and your family. Then I'll bet you'll come around to Al Franken's regulation of this technology in both private corporation and government sectors.
My work here is dung.
I create a high-speed facial recognition camera and sell a network of my devices set up along highways and major streets. I can with good accuracy identify people based on social media and I can track roughly the travel of millions of citizens a day. I can even quickly install temporary cameras around "problem areas." Now, the government probably can't buy this system, but they can license access to my database the same way the government has been licensing access to Total Information Awareness data mining databases from the private sector. Still don't see a problem?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases. So Kudos to Mr. Harris for seeing beyond this.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Derrick Harris of GigaOM says "My gut instinct is to call Senator Al Franken a well-meaning fool when it comes to his latest outcry," but concedes that in this case "he actually has a point."
It's unusual that Franken is either well meaning or that he has a point, let alone both at the same time.
The Senator's party affiliation is left out of the summary - as is typical. Let's play "guess the party".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
While this is admittedly troublesome, I'm more worried by attempts to require new technology. For example, what if a a law passes that requires everybody to get a Facebook account as a form of dgiital identification? Or what if the only way you can pay your taxes would be by downloading an official tax app? Or that every baby now has to be implanted with an RFID tag? That would be more terrifying than any law that bans (regulates) Google from indexing certain sites, teachers from "friending" their students, or adults from downloading (but not 0wning pr0nography).
Regulating new technology is less of a problem for me. After all, if it's new technology, we've survived fine without it.
Problem solved
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Regulation is bad. Right? The free market will take care of everything, including our privacy. Right? RIGHT?
A Jewish person has a problem with people potentially using technology to catalog and document people? I can't say I blame him, having read a history book once.
... is government regulation of corporate spying -- because in the end corporations and government will collude to spy on everyone else. Only the rich will be able to afford to know what's really going on.
Currently hooked on AMP
A lot of people, and even more sadly a lot of politicians, don't realize that laws need to be updated to account for changes in technology. Often old laws rely on the technological limitations of the time when they were made, and new technologies shouldn't be allowed to effecively do an end-run around the spirit of the law. Privacy is often a casualty of these situations.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Hey, is there any "find that girl" app for Android out yet?
Wow, are you a natural-born asshole, or do you have to work at it?
Rorschach masks for some, miniature American flags for others!
You know you're absolutely right... its not like there are any guys out there stalking women, or that someone fresh out on parole for rape charge wouldn't want to be able to find out where that pretty girl he just got a shot of on his cell phone lives. Please engage your brain before opening your mouth. Just because you don't care if everyone on the planet knows where you live and what you do, doesn't mean that we shouldn't be protecting people's privacy for a whole host of good reasons. Most of all, the government, shouldn't be able to surveille you at a whim. The one place where regulations are a damn good thing... regulations on government power. So I tend to agree... Senator Frankin has a point whether your fer'im or agin'im.
Wow, are you a natural-born asshole...
I doubt he works at it harder than Al Franken does.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I was going to post a criminal use-case for your humiliation, but if it's not as obvious as I think, I'm not going to inform would-be criminals. This is only made possible by the ability to identify random people on demand. I'm sure there are many other nefarious uses.
I approve of this message
You replied to the wrong post. DeTech's post is the one you meant to reply to. You and AC agree.
Citing criminal behavior as a reason to require more legal restrictions doesn't really work well as a convincing argument. Someone who has decided to engage in a high level crime is not going to think twice about committing a lesser crime in the process.
That being said, I believe the restrictions would be good to prevent a company from providing that service and making it easy for said criminals.
Brought to you by: "Al"toids - the curiously weird mint.
Most reps and senators are honorable people, there are a few bad eggs. Yesterday in front of the House Armed Services Committee, they had heads of several corporations that supply the military, Lockheed-Martin was one I recall, but they also had some smaller firms and even very small firms. Several on the committee encouraged the panel to tell them what to do, raise taxes or cut expenditures. To a man and a woman, the panel said it was not their job to tell Congress what to do, they were only there to point out the effects of Sequestration were it to happen (actually, the effects are already starting because businesses have to plan ahead). To a man and woman, the Committee claimed they didn't want Sequestration but it is there and they must do something about it.
Then a congressman from Ohio got his chance, last name was Ryan I believe (not the well-known Ryan). Dunno if he was Dem or Rep. He told off the panel by saying that every Tom, Dick, and Mary, and Jane had advice: don't raise taxes, keep all services. In short, he accused the panel of doing the same by refusing to answer what they thought Congress should do. The result was that there is no consensus from the American people about what Congress should do, but they expect Congress to fix the problem the people helped to create by voting in representatives, senators, and presidents but never calling them to task for the financial problems.
The point: it is the American people which caused Congress's spending and taxing problems, not the other way around. So stop acting like you somehow have Seen the Light and Congress is full of jackals. It isn't. It is the American People who refuse to take responsibility and tell Congress they are willing to bear increased taxes and decreased expenditures to fix the budget.
And as much as I don't like Al Franken and believe he has no sense of fiscal responsibility believing government can solve everything and bring to the Promised Bunny Land, one thing he is not is corrupt.
That might be sarcasm.
this is a paradoxical time: we've all become used to the mostly-anonymous nature of living in large cities. we confused this sense of "freedom from recognition" with privacy, though. they're very much not the same things. privacy never applied to what you do in public, even if it sorta felt that way because no one knew who you were. if you drive somewhere away from your usual circles in order to buy drugs or dildos, it used to be low probability that someone would recognize you. a PI might still tail you, or maybe your relative happens to be working the register. the only thing that facial recognition has changed is the chances of anonymity. the things that actually were private are still private. of course, travel as a way of obtaining anonymity used to be relatively difficult and uncommon - if you never leave your village, you're never anonymous. (and this probably explains why there was a certain de-identification aspect to certain feasts/festivals...)
zuck is an idiot when he says privacy is dead - it's the presumed anonymity in public that's dead. should we care? I think so, but only to the extent that it actually impinges on what we do in private. if I can't get my drugs or dildos without being recognized, what do I do, make them myself? anonymity was a way of extending privacy, not privacy itself.
of course, there are segments of society who would like nothing better than to have TIA at their fingertips. I don't see any way to prevent people from collecting whatever data they want from public sources; we can, theoretically at least, limit the degree to which the gov does this.
http://www.amazon.com/Groucho-Marks-Eyebrowse-Disguise-Glasses/dp/B001FSSUFS
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
... Senator Franken and "Stuart Smalley" are one and the same person! No wonder he wants to limit it use.
(Presumably, you mean "of" rather than "if".)
No, its not. Its a discussion about regulating the conditions in and purposes for which entities, including the government, can use a particular technology It is not about outlawing technology, any more than speed limits, drunk driving laws, and driver's license requirements are the about outlawing automobiles.
Discussing whether there is a need for regulation on the use of a particular technology and if so what that regulation should be is part of the process of accepting the change in technology and taking steps to live within that world.
Not every person in a photo posted online is in a photo that that person posted. So, insofar as there is an issue, your proposed approach does little to address it.
Actually, information that is in public view hasn't required a warrant for the US government to monitor "before technology" (presumably, you mean before this technology, as the government didn't exist before technology.) Warrant requirements exist in a subset of those cases where someone has what is referred to in law as a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
He is a clueless jerk. Has not a single clue about who Al Franken is except that he WAS a comedian.
I wish people like him would just keep here damn mouths shut.
"The People are irresponsible" is not really a full picture. Most voter have a pretty clear idea that they want small government/few services, or large government/lots of services. Say, 40% and 40%. It's the minority that swings things to irrationality. If we're voting on spending, we get the 40% large goverment folks, plus the 20% irrational idiots voting for (so it passes). If it's taxes/tax cuts, we get the 40% small government plus the 20% irrationals voting for it (so it passes). We have yet to find a way to tie spending to taxes in a concrete enough way to force the 20% to face reality. They just keep blaming foriegn aid, illegal immigrants, welfare cheats, corporations, whatever, for deficits.
RIP, Tom Davis, the brain behind "Franken and Davis".
As to every issue there is a solution then I recommend the burqa !!