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."
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?
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.
Maybe we should update our privacy laws and stop allowing companies and the government to store all this information about us in shitty databases to begin with.
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.
Maybe we should update our privacy laws and stop allowing companies and the government to store all this information about us in shitty databases to begin with.
This.
When even the cops use these databases on on other cops you know the only solution is to stop building the databases in the first place.
Stalking pretty girls makes for a good visceral story, but the larger problem is one of political repression -- essentially using these databases to make it harder for political upstarts to instigate change, basically co-opting democracy.
BTW, that same database the cops used to stalk other cops? Also used to stalk political candidates.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
"...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.