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Face Recognition Tech Pushes Legal Boundaries
An anonymous reader writes: As face recognition software becomes more capable, companies and governments are coming up with new ways to use it. Microsoft has already patented a Minority Report-style personalized billboard, and loss prevention departments in big stores are rolling out systems to "pre-identify" shoplifters. But this rush to implement the technology runs afoul of privacy laws in at least two U.S. states: Illinois and Texas forbid the use of face recognition software without "informed consent" from the target. Facebook is the target of a recent lawsuit in Illinois over this exact issue; it's likely to test the strength of such a law. "Facebook and Google use facial recognition to detect when a user appears in a photograph and to suggest that he or she be tagged. Facebook calls this "Tag Suggestions" ... With the boom in personalized advertising technology, a facial recognition database of its users is likely very, very valuable to Facebook. ... Eager to extract that value, Facebook signed users up by default when it introduced Tag Suggestions in 2011. This meant that Facebook calculated faceprints for every user who didn't take the steps to opt out." If Facebook loses and citizens start pushing for similar laws in other states, it could keep our activities in public relatively anonymous for a bit longer.
In meatspace nobody recognizes Rorschach.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
The stores which own the legislatures of both Illinois and Texas should simply order them to change the laws.
You can buy all of the government some of the time, and some of the government all of the time, but . . . it takes a lot of money to buy all of the government, all of the time. So that option is only available to very large companies.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
A bit longer, the best you can hope for. Acknowledging the fact that we will eventually lose this one.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
We need some digital privacy laws for the internet. Perhaps - the right not to be named in a public photo/video on the internet - or even have your face shown without express, written permission.
This rule would only apply to the internet, not TV or print.
In addition, real financial penalties of $1,000 could apply.
This would among other things, stop things like people posting embarrassing youtube videos of other people.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Everyone's gonna have it in their vr goggles used to augment and overlay reality in 10 years anyway. You're all living in a fantasy world. Government will limit it to itself, or try to, and they're the ones with serious abuse potential as their panopticon keeps a live track database of all citizens out in public.
Again, I am less concerned if Facebook wants to know if I'm more interested in Pampers or Depends than of government tracking...which history shows will be abused by those in power to maintain their power.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The article says that "Privacy advocates and representatives from companies like Facebook and Google". I'm assuming this is extreme naivete or the writer is a shill for these companies. These are lobbyists looking out for Google and Facebook's profits, not your privacy.
In the UK, the police have decided that they'll use face recognition software at the Download Festival (a music festival) to spot 'criminals' where criminals is defined as a set of faces they determine what is the set to look for. No warrant, no requirement that it be used only for criminals, no limits, its *THEIR* choice.
So you will visit the Download Festival, be tracked everywhere with RFID tags linked to your name, and your real ID matched using the police cameras surveillance. And the police will have access to the RFID data (because festivals need police approval to get the license and Police set the conditions needed for that approval, which is how they got to plant cameras everywhere at a private festival, and since they are out of control, so they will have demanded access to the RFID and visitor data too).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/06/11/download_festival_big_brother_playground_leicestershire_police/
And of course, as happened with DNA evidence, the data will be kept and stuck in the big surveillance database. (DNA evidence was collected voluntarily in rape cases on the promise it would be discarded, the police kept it anyway, the court ruled this illegal, the police kept it anyway while the Home Secretary 'decided how to procede' and it was never deleted).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/04/dna_fingerprints_echr/
There's also a big database of information on UK citizens that the civil service have free access to. This was revealed by the UK tribunal investigation into the GCHQ surveillance. He pointed out there is no legal basis for its existence. This facial recognition data will likely be added to that.
rolling out systems to "pre-identify" shoplifters
// if (CustomerColor != WHITE) {ShopliftingAlert == TRUE} // XXX: uncomment *ONLY* for demo!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
ust wait until Daesh (aka ISIS/ISIL/IS) decide to use this to target people in the west who criticize their particularly noxious brand of Islam, and as in target, I mean track you in real time and behead you on the street, at their leisure.
Not sure why your post was marked flamebait. It's a chilling possibility, that illustrates in very stark terms why we cannot afford to simply give up and allow our privacy to be stripped away, and why we need to roll back the invasions into our personal and digital space marketing firms and government agencies have already made. Our very lives may depend on it. Facial recognition is terrifying in this context.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
No. Laws do not have the ability to put genies back into bottles.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What state doesn't store a digitized copy of the faces of everyone with a driver's license? The minute they put photos on IDs this one was lost. I can't believe the FBI doesn't have access to every single drivers license photo on file...
Whereas now they don't give grocery receipt coupons to unprofitable bargain hunters that come in just for the sales ( they know who you are! ) you'll start seeing these people recognized by face and shown loud obnoxious ads for herpes medication and depends to keep em out of the store.
...
My stupid sister and an equally stupid cousin uploaded their address book to Farcebook.
Then I got threatening mail from said Facebook imploring me to join 'my friends' on their website, a cold day in hell indeed!
So now after a few idiots have tagged me on their stupid 'Social' pages I'll be recognisable for every privacy invading company in the world.
Al I can do is waiting for a EU court to cut this crap as the US side won't do anything for us 'The People'.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
New Hampshire gives you the option to have the photo deleted after they print the license. Or at least they used to.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I cringe at the thought. This here illustrates pretty well what it would be like.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are Facebook tagging people who don't have Facebook accounts if their face is in a photo?
Seems like a breach of the data protection act - keeping details (face, place, time+date, more(?)) on a person who has not agreed to their T's & C's.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
And that's where marketing fails. People only have so much attention to spend. Drowning them in marketing reduces it to static noise.
Think for a moment. Think of the movie you watched last night. Now tell me the name of a single product you saw the ads for. If you don't watch TV, take the billboards on your way to work.
We get so flooded with ads that we don't recognize them anymore. The spam filter in our brain works. We notice them as a waste of space (billboards) and time (tv ads), but the networks could as well broadcast static and the billboards could as well be blank, they simply don't work anymore. We're saturated. It has reached the level where we simply don't register it anymore except as a nuisance. But we don't even tie that nuisance to a brand or product anymore, it's just "ads".
And this is where advertising fails.
And targeted ads won't change that. So you tell me about a product that I'd want, but you do it in the same way that all the other ads I already mentally filter do. I do not register that anymore. Your ad will be part of the noise. The ad industry bothered us enough that we filter their messages on principle. Brand recognition is by no stretch as deeply ingrained in people as marketeers want to think. And people don't obsess about a brand (ok, unless it's Apple or something else that managed to tack a lifestyle package to its primary use). More likely than not, they don't give a shit. Do you care if the detergent you use is Wisk, Ariel, Persil or Tide? Or do you simply take whatever is on sale when you simply have to buy a new box 'cause the old one is empty?
I mean, for real, dear marketeers, do you think we have any semblance of an emotional attachment to the brand of shoe polish we use?
The ad industry is allegedly a creative one. But it fails at exactly that. It fails at what's most important about advertising: Being noticed. Ads vanish into the background noise of getting a new coke or taking a dump. They are flipped over in the daily newspaper and ignored on billboards.
You fail to get noticed, advertisers!
And no, slapping them in our face with popups won't change that. At least not for long. What it will accomplish is to annoy us for the time being 'til we automated reaching up to the close button. Without even registering whatever blocked our view.
Your job, advertisers, is to turn from a nuisance into information. You have to turn from something people HATE to something people WANT. Once you manage that, we can talk about you being successful again. And targeted ads can do that.
If, and only if, you implement it sensibly. But it will be an uphill battle for you. You have to undo about a century of bad advertising that taught us how to ignore you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You can educate yourself, but it is hard to educate your friends and still keep any.
Waiting for the first person to use a full body suit and mask to be harassed because they stick out like a sore thumb....
The state or even the FBI having these pics on file isn't nearly as bad as having them available electronically to whomever pays for access, and offering the ability to combine them with camera feeds and facial recognition software so that pretty much anyone anywhere can track your whereabouts or be alerted to your presence (and in the near future your behaviour as well).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Now tell me the name of a single product you saw the ads for. If you don't watch TV, take the billboards on your way to work.
We get so flooded with ads that we don't recognize them anymore.
I can't name a single product. Now if you don't mind I need to run down to Burger King and get a Whopper made my way. Then I need to call Geico to see if 15 minutes will save me 15% or more. For some strange reason I also have an itch to look at a new car today.
It's not the idea of 6 huge people around me that bothers me, so much as the one needed on top.
I think you got it wrong, the point of advertisements is not to remember one particular ad impression. It's that after hundreds of ads you associate "Always Coca-Cola" the slogan with the bottle with the logo with the drink with the taste until just seeing it in the store or on a menu triggers you into buying it. Heck, a quick check indicates they got that stuck on my mind in 1993-1995 and I still fucking remember it.
It's the thing you don't care much about or that's too big to get first hand knowledge that gets you, not those you actually research. There you pretty much know all the options and what actually fits you, it's when you're feeling a hunger and a burger is good enough the ads kick in. Because you know there's a burger shop two blocks away, all that branding triggers that. And you might have gotten a wrap or a sandwich or a hot dog or a pizza slice but you're not making a full evaluation you're just thinking "good enough, burger it is".
Do you care if the detergent you use is Wisk, Ariel, Persil or Tide? Or do you simply take whatever is on sale when you simply have to buy a new box 'cause the old one is empty?
We're mostly creatures of habit and just buy whatever we bought last time, advertising and sales go hand in hand to make you try new products. Make lots of people aware that it's a sale, lower the price so they'll try it out and some of those will just keep buying until a different campaign steals them to some other brand. Maybe a few are meticulous but if I got 20-30 things on my grocery list I'm mostly just picking what I'm supposed to buy.
Same sometimes goes for where to shop, if I know one store that has something that's often enough because I don't need three. It's something rare I'm buying once in forever and it's just not worth the time and effort to find and compare multiple sources. Basically volume*frequency*savings = total difference must be enough to justify it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
When somebody says "dude, we found your DNA from the crime scene", most will believe will believe A) This guy's DNA was found, B) He/she was the murderer. We don't have to check even A. Some laws of thought can't be questioned.
There was a news in my country where the police reported they will extend the fingerprint database to all citizens (before they were only those with criminal record). Before the police had "probable suspects" who could be the real offenders. As fingerprints are not accurate - the databases contain full fingerprints but those from the crime scenes usually do not - the police will have more data of fingerprints and more suspects. Who will they pick? They should pick those guys with no alibi and a print with the best match.
Perhaps signs at the entrance of stores could announce that entering the store is an agreement to use electronic investigation of a shopper or visitor. It might have a crushing effect in that a violator might never be able to enter any store, ever, again. And how about the drunk driver being banned from every place that serves or sells liquor for life? This technology may look the Puritans look like flaming liberals. In my area people that have a misdemeanor conviction are pretty much unemployable. It doesn't take a felony to keep you out of work. Not to mention that many states now make almost everything a felony. It might be a felony of the 5th. degree and employers don't even ask if you were found guilty. The arrest is all they consider. All of this may change as unemployment lets up a bit.
It sounds like blatant defiance of the law:
this rush to implement the technology runs afoul of privacy laws in at least two U.S. states: Illinois and Texas forbid the use of face recognition software without "informed consent" from the target. Facebook is the target of a recent lawsuit in Illinois over this exact issue;
This behavior should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, including civil and criminal penalties for company management and people involved.