Slashdot Mirror
Through a Face Scanner Darkly
An anonymous reader writes in with a story that raises the issue of how public anonymity is quickly disappearing thanks to facial recognition technology. "NameTag, an app built for Google Glass by a company called FacialNetwork.com, offers a face scanner for encounters with strangers. You see somebody on the sidewalk and, slipping on your high-tech spectacles, select the app. Snap a photo of a passerby, then wait a minute as the image is sent up to the company's database and a match is hunted down. The results load in front of your left eye, a selection of personal details that might include someone's name, occupation, Facebook and/or Twitter profile, and, conveniently, whether there's a corresponding entry in the national sex-offender registry."
Soon, there will be other heads-up displays. This is one of the more useful applications for them. I'm looking forward to seeing how well it works.
By donning your Glasshole Identifier, your face will also be immediately recognizable as belonging on the National Pervy Googler Registry, to be shunned by all decent company.
Snap a photo of a passerby...
Doing this is what makes you a Glasshole.
Brave Sir Robin ran away. ("No!") Bravely ran away away. ("I didn't!")
Phillip K. Dick, "A Scanner Darkly," 1977. One of the main plot points is that the protagonist, a police informant, has to keep his true identity a secret from everyone, including his police handlers.
Didn't Google ban facial recognition in its app store?
Beat down any fucker wearing these.
And no, I don't give a fuck about sex offender list crazyness.
I do not want *anybody* to tell me who i should be afraid of or not.
Perhaps we should start posting fake profiles with random data to make the thing unusable?
Soon everyone is going to want to look like a movie start hiding from the paparazzi.
Ski masks, they're not just for bank robbers any more..
-jon
And the book title is itself a biblical reference to 1 Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (King James Version) --- but I doubt the summary titler was alluding quite that far back.
Pretty sure he was an undercover agent.
He also gets horribly addicted to the drug in question.
because no one would misuse this tech to act creepy.
True story:
Back around 1989 I was maintaining a minicomputer system for a small chain of Auto Body Shops near Ft. Worth Texas. I got to know a lot about how the business works and made friends with some of the VERY blue collar guys who sanded, welded, painted and whatnot.
At that time the body shop had dedicated terminal that could dial up the Texas DMV database and retrieve the registration info for a given license plate. On at least two separate occasions I observed one of the shop guys using the terminal to get the name and address of a car they observed that was driven by an attractive woman. Nothing creepy or potentially dangerous there? Yeah.
Maybe we should study CCTV operators in England to make sure that attractive women, or any other category of people, aren't being watched more closely than everyone else.
Thank you. Do you have any idea how the word "scanner" fits in, or what it even means or refers to? The "darkly" part makes sense, as used in that Biblical quote. I just don't see how it makes sense when combined with the word "scanner".
(Yes, I know that we aren't talking about "scanner" as in modern document or photo scanners attached to a computer...)
Great, anther toy encouraging society to regress back to adolescent behavior...with much higher stakes.
Thanks to Google Translate, my Glass informs me this means: "Training is c ru ru Hng sn ca Qung South, is an lullabies delicious, ni ting lin gn i Blades of people over 2 ting ni folk song: Mom dad t Qung South thm nhm à Ru Hng loud drunk father."
The title novel is itself a Biblical reference: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
(That's the King JamesVersion; some other translations "we see in a mirror dimly", "we see only a reflection as in a mirror", "we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror", and "What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror".)
On one hand, the potential for abuse is huge.
On the other hand, no more seeing someone, forgetting their name, having them strike up a conversation with you, and then having to dig through your memory to try to remember who they are (failing miserably) while acting like you know exactly who they are.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The title is "Through a face scanner darkly."
I'm fairly sure this is referring to the Glass app that acts like a face scanner, a more casual term for a device capable of utilizing facial recognition technology in order to identify someone by their face alone. Surely it's a play on the fact that the original quote is, "Through a glass, darkly," where glass (ostensibly referring to Google Glass) is replaced with the term for its new capabilities.
There's a simple solution to this registry. If everyone takes a photo of their naughty bits and sends it to the police station the sex-offender registry will soon be full of nearly all 314 million Americans.
A positive side effect of this is that your glasses will now identify the remaining ultra conservatives who may be far more dangerous.
Name one problem with this. If you're out in public your face is there for anyone to see. If you're hiding behind a scarf or burka then we can only guess your intentions.
"Pubic anonymity disappearing due to facials".
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
E.D. Hirsch coined the term "cultural literacy" to describe aspects of culture which have meaning that goes beyond the basic words.
An example from his book is the phrase "there is a tide".
Those four words carried not only a lot of complex information, but also the persuasive force of a proverb. In addition to the basic practical meaning, "act now!" what came across was a lot of implicit reasons why immediate action was important.
For some of my younger readers who may not recognize the allusion, the passage from Julius Caesar is:
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
The phrase "A Scanner Darkly" was the title of a book (and movie) by Phillip K. Dick. It's part of the cultural literacy of science fiction, something that nerds might recognize. As in Hirsch's example, a few words convey a great deal of complex information.
The story title comes from the bible, "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.", which artfully describes a system that identifies and footnotes faces seen through Google glass.
Cultural literacy references come into and go out of style, and Phillip K. Dick may be a bit dated for today's audience.
If you're interested, there are a few online "Cultural Literacy" tests, such as this one.
That there isn't a single picture of me on the internet.
Watch the movie.
It's the story of Bob, an undercover law enforcement officer delving into drug culture.
Use of rotoscoping takes the audience themselves on a perception-altering experience. c.f. 1993's Suture.
Tell them you know you've met but their name escapes you and (optionally) that you are sorry.
Are you horribly offended when you have to remind a casual acquaintance of your name?
No privacy compromising technology required.
The reason why this will not work any time soon is because phone cameras are too basic, they need to be ale to scan everyone's face, bone structure, and even cross-reference height / weight / sex information. Scientifically it would be cool if it worked but apps like these will only make the stupid gullible that half of us are registered sex offenders due to false positives. Imagine bringing your kid to the park but you somewhat look partially similar to a registered sex offender, and a someone that has no real clue about computers or technology in general is screaming "Sex offender" while you're playing with your kid. This hilarious example might actually happen one day but my point is, they are saying that they want to make people feel more safe but in reality it'll just make us all more paranoid except for the stupid.
That's a pretty neat trick given the Glass display is on the right. The article should talk more about that!
FWIW -- In the original biblical quote, "glass" refers to a mirror.
1. Fuck you very much, facialnetwork.com and any other company that wants to deanonymize everyone.
2. Why the sex offender registry for starters? Is facialnetwork.com trying to scare everyone into thinking that the country is overrun by sex offenders? You can piss in an alley (not that that's generally a pleasant thing) and end up on a list with people who have committed violent sexual assaults. To me there is a huge gap in the moral turpitude between the two. The latter of the two examples is probably someone to be weary of, but I don't know if the former is necessarily someone any worse than someone who uses illegal drugs.
"To stop the terrorists."
Lost a lot of good people there.
This is a play on words of St. Paul, the writer of many New Testament books. "We see now through a glass darkly" is the original quote used in western culture. A glass in the first century was a reference to a "looking glass" (a la, Alice through the Looking Glass) and similar in use to a mirror--to primp before meeting someone or going out. Dick, being a literate man, knew this quotation (and possibly the entire book it was in).
This will be a great app for all. Is your date married, are they a dead beat parent, etc. I like it.
Have gnu, will travel.
So we are basically going back to the way things used to be.
We will be back at the small village/small town stage where everyone knows everyone at a glance.
Giving the way human nature and the internet is going, people are going to voluntarily put their information in the data base.
It will also be interesting, gossip and public praise and public shaming moves from small country towns to the big city.
. . . a company offers to classify people via facial-recognition according to
1. Religious affiliation (Jews, Presbyterians, Muslims, Athiests, etc. . . )
2. Sexual orientation
3. Credit score
4. Political beliefs (according to the websites we visit, our postings on blogs, political donations)
5. Indiscretions (posted on Facebook or Twitter)
Not just this particular book or movie, but current American culture places more value on a movie than on a book; more people, like the poster on this issue here, are familiar with movie version of great books, and often don't even know it is a book adaptation. And if there is a halfway decent book, there is this cry to make a movie out of it. Why, what will magically do what? And of course, waving a check for movie rights in front of typical book author, well, here's a clue: a typical book author is not wealthy.
And books are to movie producers like College Football is the NFL or the Minor Leagues to Baseball: a cheap source of stories, plots, ideas.
My final point, IMO, most movie versions of books fail. One problem is books are great for interior dialogue, great for an imaginative reader, great and reading a nice passage and staring off into space for 10 minutes. Movies struggle with interior dialogue or subjective experience.
Another problem is Hollywood tends to Hollywood-ize everything.
End of rant.
I do admit that on my to-do list is the see the Ender's Game, the movie.
I find that use creepy and annoying.
I would like face recognition, but for people I've added.
There is a disability called Face Blindness that I have more than an average level of.
Something to remind me who the heck that person is talking to me would be a godsend.
Maybe the name I stored along with a small note as a reminder, something like "Bill Sond, married to Betty the pool player. I owe him $15.".
You have no idea how much better that would make things.
Of course, the anyone & everyone, is totally creepy and not something I'd support.
In the Biblical quote, its a metaphor for our imperfect knowledge, in contrast to how we will be in Heaven.
In the Phillip K Dick novel, the main character hopes that all of the high tech government scanners watching him can understand him (see cleary, rather than darkly), because he can't understand himself.
In the New Yorker article title (which was used for the Slashdot title), it makes no fucking sense and is just intended to reference the Phillip K Dick novel.
They could have had an interesting tie-in to the title by bringing up that the information you get from such an app probably wouldn't be a good representation of what a person is like. But I didn't see anything like that in the article.
The paparazzi will pay big money for this app. Then someone will get strangled with their own google glass like a bitch.
I don't really mind being so sick, and close to death. I think that quite a lot of people have seen thse days comming for a long time now. I feel sorry for the people who will inherit the world in these ever growing troubling times. I still wil hpe that humanity will change our path to a better future.
wear sunglasses.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This will be great once they fix the minute pause issue...then I won't have to remember people's names again and can reserve my brain capacity use for purposeful things like storing what I read on Slashdot
"BTW, that same database the cops used to stalk other cops? Also used to stalk political candidates."
And that is just the databases that the cops are allowed to use.
Did anyone pay attention to the full contents of the latest Snowden document release, aside from the Angry Birds articles that The Guardian and The New York Times focused on? There was significantly more important information in the latest leak. Mind-blowing, really.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
THINK about these capabilities. When you start taking into account such things as RF/Pulsed communication technologies built into the electrical grid, and combine them with the technologies listed in the latest leak, the true extent of surveillance is far more than most people would imagine possible.
http://www.landisgyr.com/webfo...
Now you know why Google recently purchased Nest--sensing technology that can be tied directly into existing Landis-Gyr communications.
This isn't future tech, it's already out there and has been for awhile.
HI Joe. Who the fuck are you? Well I see you have been looking online for a car, and now you are in our car lot. I see you were at 3 other dealers looking at electric cars and I'd like to show you. Get the fuck away from me, I see you got a price of 38,999 for the car across the road. I'm afraid I can't do any better than that. How the hell do you know that. Oh It was recorded in your google glasses. Yeah, I want that.
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
This quote is from IMDB and taken from the movie, the original novel I believe had an almost identical quote by the main character. The Scanners are the cops who monitor the surveillance footage from the hidden cameras in a suspect drug house.
At this point in the story the drugs he's taking have basically ruined his grasp on reality, to the point where he actually remembers the people from his "cover story", and has forgotten that the person "Scanning" the house is actually HIM.
"What does a scanner see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does it see into me? Into us? Clearly or darkly? I hope it sees clearly because I can't any longer see into myself. I see only murk. I hope for everyone's sake the scanners do better, because if the scanner sees only darkly the way I do, then I'm cursed and cursed again."
It's an excellent story, but other than including cameras has absolutely nothing at all to do with this news article.
I think /. probably lost closely identifies with Libertarian ideals, with progressive social policy. Personally I can't stand half the libertarians I meet because they are just conservatives that are just a little less stupid than the average neocon troll.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
mechanical hound soon to follow (sic)
Or take the ARC storyline and unleash Revelation upon the Internet.
how difficult is it to search on tineye with google glasses?
and wtf is it with 'wait a minute'? a minute? they could get away in that time
In some countries it will get you to jail. Other countries will follow the trend soon.
Marking complete strangers as sex offenders based on lookup of a name found using facial recognition... what could possibly go wrong?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The results load in front of your left eye
I thought most if not all Google Glasses were right-eye.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I see we can now add constant public shaming of anyone in any unpopular category, even if such category is invisible.
I am slightly face blind. I meet you today, I don't recognize you tomorrow. I recognize people I know well, but not if I haven't seen them for a long time. I have developed a skill to keep talking to someone until I find out who they are. I frequently recognize people by their voice. This thing would be a great help to me.
no, I don't have a sig
WONDERFUL idea! I think EVERYTHING should be recorded EVERYWHERE at ALL TIMES. End stupid arguments over who did what to whom!
This is the truth and needs to be modded up. Sickening.
I don't want to be tracked even more thoroughly, thankyouverymuch.
-- Eugen* Leitl leitl ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://molecu
Problem solving always has to start by creating awareness of the problem. This may finally create a boatload of awareness for our lack of privacy.
Anonymity and privacy issues are only getting worse, and reading this, I thought: "Ok, let's just get it over with." If we're going towards a society without any privacy anyway, maybe it is better to go there in one giant leap, so that we can at least use all the outrage that it causes to start fixing it. If we go to this new culture without privacy in a thousand small steps, people may never realize what happened, and accept it as a part of life instead.
because the enemy hide in burkas.
Let me know when it has a local DB and stops leaking everything about me and my friends.
Even though I have no good reason to want this feature, I think it's cool nevertheless.
I always wonder about these huge, private databases compiled without anyone knowing what is in them. What % of the data in them is wrong? How do you know what data has been compiled about yourself, other than being denied for a job or arrested? Why doesn't society care about these private databases which are determining what people can do with their lives - where they can work, where they can live, etc - when there is no way for an individual to know what's in the databases or correct wrong information? Society isn't even asking itself these questions.
SO you are walking up the street and someone comes up to you with a hat and sunglasses...do you ask them to remove their gear like going through a TSA checkstop and hold still while you try to scan the face and then ask them to wait for the stats to come in.
are you kidding me...what a fucking joke.
Now, what happens if you speak out on the internet ?
Then some group wants to silence you. All those Google (Glass) sensors can give them a fix on your location. Then you eat the basball club.
Have fun with all those supergreat American inventions.
And don't tell me this scenario won't happen. It happened in the past and this kind of thing will be an enabler for more of it.
It is only in modern times, and particularly in western culture, that we have developed a sense and need for privacy
You are SO wrong.
Aristotle listed respect for privacy as a virtue - "He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude” http://thinkexist.com/quotation/he_is_his_own_best_friend-and_takes_delight_in/170955.html
Aristotle was decidedly not a modern westerner.
What's worse than losing anonymity when walking down the street is now this company will have a crowd sourced DB of peoples movements. Sure the cellphone companies can do this to me now but I can choose not to carry a phone -- we won't be able to choose not to be scanned by other pedestrians.
It does occur to me anyone using these will then become subject to the dpa in the UK and need a registration if thats what they are going to do with them. If you have home CCTV that can see onto other properties or public land you can also need this. Of course if you are storing anything sensitive you also gain a duty to properly store (and protect) said information; Also it can only be processed for the stated purposes.
All that said IANAL but have to be aware of the dpa, yea it is a laugh a minute read.
Sounds like the kind of domain name which would trigger these nanny-state filters some countries are so fond of nowadays. But let's be clear on this - facialnetwork.com is in no way involved with bukkake porn involving minors and there is no record known to myself of any of their senior management being on any form of sex offender registry.
Nicely made point.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
and we complete the loop back around to the reference in the story title by re-inventing scramble suits! +10 pts
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Not to dispute your insightful point in the short term, but taking this one step further, won't the "vigilantes" eventually also have their actions recorded? If so, presumably they would be subject to easy prosecution for assault, which presumably would be a deterrent or at least prevent it from happening repeatedly? That said, recordings could always be faked or erased I guess, so some sort of "cyber arms race" might continue at the community level.
See also Brin's Transparent Society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
And the end of Marshall Brain's Manna: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...
I'm not saying I'm especially looking forward to such a future, but If universal surveillance is indeed where we are heading, at least we can try to make the best of it. A generalization on that I suggested three years ago:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM [punched card tabulating equipment] in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
In "The Skills of Xanadu": https://archive.org/details/pr...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Just do what I do to hookers and put a bag over your head.
Don't forget that the person wearing the google glass (or other technology) is a child molester, or a radical muslim, and since he now has all the details of the person he just looked at, he has selected the family of that person as his next target...and it's YOUR family!
I'm sorry but I don't subscribe to the right to be anonymous in public
Then you are an idiot who doesn't understand what you are saying. Being "anonymous" is about a lot more than whether your neighbor recognizes you. Anonymity is about keeping what is private, private. It's about being able to live your life without having to explain your every action, without having to justify every choice you make, without having to worry about perceptions of meaningless actions and personal opinions and/or things beyond your control like your appearance. If I go down to the store to buy some food and I'm not causing anyone any trouble along the way, then there is no reason for me to expect to be tracked or harassed. There is no reasonable argument you can make that would justify such an intrusion into someone else's life.
I know this is a cliché but if you behave normally and have nothing to hide, why fear being recognized?
Because even people with (theoretically) nothing to hide have plenty to fear and in reality we ALL have something to hide. Nobody wants their entire life to be an open book. Opinions and actions which are perfectly appropriate, legal and justifiable can be used against you in ways you might not expect. There are people who will hate you simply for existing or for holding an opinion they disagree with. Even simply being in public can be cause for you to fear. I don't know a single black man who doesn't have at least one story about being hassled by the police for no reason whatsoever aside from the color of their skin. Even our president has stories like that. There are crazy, mean, cruel and malicious people out there. There are criminals who will take advantage of you given the opportunity - some of which are in duly elected/appointed positions of legal authority. In some places anonymity can save your life. There are public places in this world where some (crazy) people would kill me for having the skin color I do, the religious opinions I hold, the country I'm from, the clothing I wear, and the politicians I support. There are times when the only thing protecting you is your anonymity. Don't be quick to throw it away.
The scale between left and right is a continuum, and anyone who sees it as binary needs to stay the fuck away from me.
See the problem with that idea is the notion that it is a one dimensional continuum where everyone's opinions (on average) can be measured in terms of left/right. The collections of ideas that make up "left" and "right" are unbelievably arbitrary and frequently unrelated. My opinions on abortion or gun control or environment really have nothing to do with "left" or "right" and frankly it is a pointless exercise to try to pin my location on that spectrum down.
Basically I feel like you do but even more so. Anyone who thinks everyone falls somewhere on a left/right spectrum is making an unjustified over-simplification of reality.
It's the New Yorker. They probably thought that was implied...
As a forgetful introvert this technology would help me socially in so many ways.
I swear it's accurate.
E.D. Hirsch coined the term "cultural literacy" to describe aspects of culture which have meaning that goes beyond the basic words.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Temba, his arms wide!
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Note that, unlike the KJV, PKD did not include the comma. Not sure what that means, but I doubt (in the title of a book) that it was done without reason.
From doing a little digging here, in the original greek version of 1 Corinthians the translation of the word "esoptrou" (translated as mirror in the KJV) is uncertain.
However, the Latin Vulgate has " speculum" instead of "glass" - a speculum was a mirror. Given the age of the Vulgate, I think I would trust that translation and assume that a mirror was intended.
Knowing something of Biblical translation, I expect to be criticized for coming to any definite conclusion, but there it is.
In King James' era, a "glass" might refer to a mirror as well as, e.g., a window-pane (think "looking glass"), so the term was probably a reasonable translation at the time. However, "mirror" is more likely for a modern translation --- hence "in a mirror, dimly" in some modern translations. In less likely possibilities, the Greek word could also refer to crude lenses and glass panes (which wouldn't have been very high optical quality).
Note, also, "darkly" in the Greek was (transliterated) "ainigmati," cognate to modern "enigmatic" --- my Greek lexicon (BDAG) gives that as "that which requires special acumen to understand because it is expressed in a puzzling fashion, a riddle," or, alternatively (and more in-line with modern translation), "an indirect mode of communication; indirectly" (as in, by reflection) when used in the context of mirrors.
Also, it'd be nice to randomly talk to strangers about subjects you're both experts at!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
the cameras tiny lcd sensor can probably be overloaded by your own pair of glasses which detect cameras and direct infrared light at the sensor, thereby blocking your face.
See?
http://makezine.com/2008/02/20/temporarily-blind-surveil/