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.
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.
Great, anther toy encouraging society to regress back to adolescent behavior...with much higher stakes.
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.
"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.
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.
Having software that searches your own database of contacts might be acceptable. Searching a database containing everyone? No thanks.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
The inconvenience of forgetting someone's name is far far less problematic than the psychological and social damage pervasive surveillance does to society. I don't see how you can be conflicted at all..
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."
"...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."
I'd rather trust my own memory then out-source it.
For fuck sake people, are you listening to yourselves? This is a corporation literally trying to turn people into mobile data gathering devices. You are either deluding yourself about your own level of intelligence, or suffer from a serious lack of morality, if you think any of this is acceptable. Every person on this planet values privacy to some degree--What, exactly, do we really get in exchange for the loss of this privacy? Knowledge we could get by simply asking that person?
THINK, PEOPLE. If history is any sort of an indicator, any rights we sell today, our children must buy back with blood.
Yeah, I could really use this as a prosthetic.
I can't remember faces, and I have a lot of trouble recognizing them. It's not full-blown prosopagnosia, but it's a real problem in daily life -- for example, if I run into a familiar co-worker at a grocery store, I'm likely not to recognize them, and I might come across as cold or distant. I compensated by being friendly to everyone, which earned me a reputation for being nice, if a bit spacy. And I can recognize my family, even "picture" them in my mind -- but I couldn't tell you what shape my wife's nose or ears are. Sketching people is right out.
I'd love to have heads-up subtitles on people, not to be creepy, just to put me on even footing with the rest of the world. If the price is that I have to feed knowledge of who I'm seeing to the Overmind, though, I'm not sure I'd strike the bargain.
I usually say something like, "I remember your name, but I can't force myself to remember your face." Breaks the ice every time.
Have gnu, will travel.
No photos? You even have a Wiki page!
Whoosh. When you beat THEM up, and THEY whine, the government goes after YOU, not THEM. That's why you don't martyr them. You think the government is against the idea of people walking around with these all the time, sending data over networks they can tap? It's one of the best presents they could've asked for, and you want to take it away? Good luck not going to jail...
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.
Mod parent up.
This needs to be modded up!
Brave Sir Robin ran away. ("No!") Bravely ran away away. ("I didn't!")
I don't think it's really a government problem, either. I did suggest social solutions, ones to be implemented at the level of the individual or a business owner. Frankly, I'm of the opinion that, as much as I dislike the implications, the technology is here to stay, and we'll be forced to adapt much sooner than 20 years from now.
This is the adjustment phase, where people get in bar brawls, shopkeepers put up signs, legislators argue, inventors invent countermeasures...and eventually we'll be in the acceptance phase. What that will be like, I really can't say (sorry, my oracle is broken). I do think that beating people up over it isn't very productive, however.
Technological countermeasures are likely to be the only thing (short of government intervention, which I haven't recommended) preventing individual instances of being "glassed", but I think they're unlikely to be adopted in the long-term.
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.
I remember you! You're the guy who uses ABC123 as their password! You had it posted on this cute little sticky note on your monitor...
Simple compromise: you get to load your own database of faces using your own personal contacts. Still a bit creepy to some folks, but WAY less creepy than a stranger who can just walk up to me and act as if we knew each other way back since he knows my name and some other information about me.
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!
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 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.
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 offence, but, for you to remember someone's name, the whole worlds privacy has to go to shit pot?
Why don't you wear a post-it-note on your forehead saying "i cant remember names"?
The same reason the whole world doesn't want some twat walking around with google glass, invading everyones privacy just for their benefit.
I forget names, people forget names. This is a normal feature of the human brain, if you don't talk to someone for a while, your brain moves on.
We generally "apologise" and laugh about it. It doesn't require the whole world to suffer.
Let me know when it has a local DB and stops leaking everything about me and my friends.
Every person on this planet values privacy to some degree
Sorry, and strangely, but no. Many, if not all, traditional societies (hunter/gatherers) have little to no sense of privacy. They have sex in front of their kids in small one-room huts for crying out loud. And they find our obsession with privacy very strange. It is much more likely that for the vast majority of man's existence, there was little privacy and little desire for it. It is only in modern times, and particularly in western culture, that we have developed a sense and need for privacy. Being a modern westerner myself, I like my privacy and would like to keep it. But not everyone feels that way.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Even though I have no good reason to want this feature, I think it's cool nevertheless.
No offence, but, for you to remember someone's name, the whole worlds privacy has to go to shit pot?
Why don't you wear a post-it-note on your forehead saying "i cant remember names"?
I'd mod you a troll if I could. No offence, but, do you have a severe brain damage? You surely can't read, have unrealistic ideas, is offensive and have no empathy. Fuck off.
I have a similar problem, but I'd wait for a local version that doesn't artificially "require" a third party to datamine it "for" us.
Some favours come with too high a price.
P.S. For whatever it's worth, I find focusing on intermediary associations sometimes helps - e.g. instead of the direct approach of "that face is Tom", which tends to 404, I try to remember things like "that face threw up at cafe" and then I work on remembering who threw up at the cafe... "aha, Tom!" Of course this takes longer, but at least that means I can sometimes say, "Nice meeting you again Tom" at the end of a sufficiently long conversation with the familiar stranger. :)
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.
To clarify my original post, I'd definitely be against this for privacy reasons. (Of course, if the face matches against a FaceBook profile that is available to anyone to read, complete with tons of photos, then it's less of a privacy issue and more of a "lock your Facebook page down" issue.) However, I can see where the technology behind it could be applied to good use. I'd be all for a "snap a photo, associate a name, and keep it in a local account" version of this. You could even keep it on a cloud server tied to a user's account (so you wouldn't need to store the images locally and you wouldn't "forget" everyone if your device broke).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Aristotle was talking about 'time alone' with one's thoughts. The privacy being discussed here is about the revelation of personal information to others. _Read_ Aristotle before you quote him.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Nicely made point.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
And actually, for those of us who have trouble remembering faces and names, this could be even more dangerous. If someone comes up to me and starts acting like they know me, my default response is "they know you and you can't remember them... act like you remember them until you actually do." This would only be reinforced by them bringing up topics that only people close to me might know (wife's name, kids' names, etc.). Using this false familiarity, they could keep me guessing and off balance enough to get information from me that I might not otherwise give to a stranger. Information that could be used against me in some manner. (For example, if I'm going on vacation soon - which would be the perfect time to rob my house.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
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.
I'm a bit luckier than that -- it's strictly facial features for me (well, and names, but that's common enough that everyone makes allowances for it anyhow). Once I start conversing with someone, I can recognize them and recall their context pretty easily -- or determine, with high certainty, that I really don't know them.
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.
As a forgetful introvert this technology would help me socially in so many ways.
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.
Yeah, except that people aren't a hive mind and do not retain visual, searchable, verifiable records of every place they've been.
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.
Learn to use your eyes. Worked for me. Hey, I even know what I look like now in 3d!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
I'd mod you a troll if I could. No offence, but, do you have a severe brain damage? You surely can't read, have unrealistic ideas, is offensive and have no empathy. Fuck off.
So.
You walking around taking pictures of everyone, sending them to a database and obtaining private data on everyone isn't offensive?
But if someone asks you to admit only your faults (post it note), instead of obtaining everyones private data, its offensive?
Good to know your happy to milk from others private life, yet deny your own issues!