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Is Facebook Sabotaging A Face-Recognition Law? (fortune.com)
"You know something's up when politicians bring up a bill out of nowhere, and then try to ram it through over Memorial Day weekend," writes Fortune. "That's what's happening in Illinois, where state lawmakers -- allegedly at the behest of Facebook and Google -- are poised to gut a law that limits the use of facial recognition technology."
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this month a judge refused to throw out a class action complaint against Facebook for using facial recognition software to identify people without their permission and then inviting their friends to "tag" them. Now that suit's lawyer says a so-called "Biometric Information Privacy Act" will actually swap in new definitions for "photograph" and "scan" that will apparently shield Facebook and Google from liability.
The Center for Democracy and Technology called the bill "an unnecessary loss of privacy." Google didn't respond to Fortune's request for a comment, and Facebook said only "We appreciate Senator Link's effort to clarify the scope of the law he authored."
The Center for Democracy and Technology called the bill "an unnecessary loss of privacy." Google didn't respond to Fortune's request for a comment, and Facebook said only "We appreciate Senator Link's effort to clarify the scope of the law he authored."
Privately funded. Track his every move, post it to the web in realtime. Telescopic lenses on all windows of his home. ALL the time. Maybe he'll take the hint?
It serves no purpose. Facebook is a massive advertising network. Stop using Facebook and this won't be a problem anymore. Can anyone give me any legitimate reasons to use Facebook? I sure don't see any.
There are people unlike us out there. They actually enjoy human drama roller coasters.
How about snapping an ATM-like picture every time you logon to Online Banking... that'll keep the parents out of the kid's bank account.
Edgy
Facebook was originally designed to be a repository of photos so people could point to their multiple looks... this is mainly a problem for girls with long hair. Looks like ad dollars steered this project off course... now everybody pick up their selfie sticks and SMS the photos...
Eventually most of us will be wearing some type of VR/Google Glass sort of headset which will identify people near you in real time and search/tell you who is who and maybe additional information about them.
Some people today think they can "hide" from being tagged on Facebook by altering their appearance, usually so you look like either a cos-player or a time traveler face cammo'd grunt from the forests of Vietnam hungry for action. There's even some LED lights contraption for wearing around your head.
I've read article after article about it but you're not hiding from anyone. In fact, I argue trying to hide your face in these ways (heck, even wearing a hospital type mask to cover your nose and mouth in the West) makes people MORE likely to take your photo and share it on popular sites where photos are abundant. Anyone who stands out in some way is usually on someone's camera anyway.
Privately funded. Track his every move, post it to the web in realtime. Telescopic lenses on all windows of his home. ALL the time. Maybe he'll take the hint?
He wouldn't want that, obviously. He knows exactly what he is doing to other people and he has no problem with it. It's all about the money.
they'd stop using fb, fb wold lose influence and no problem. But apparently enough people view this as acceptable practice, so carry on.
Mostly because of this invasion of privacy BS. When my family/friends post a picture on FB with me and others in it I don't have a problem with FB identifying those with FB accounts, they asked for it and got it. But me? Just because you somehow got into the DMV database,or a "friend" put a name to my face, or whatever, fuck off. I don't have a FB account, you have no right to identify me via face recognition.
There's a Zucker born ever minute...
The summary is complete bull. Here is the primary change bring made to the law. It used to say:
Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs
They are trying to update it to say:
Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, physical or digital photographs
In other words, they are clarifying that yes, a digital photo is a photo. The amendment also has wording stating that this is clarifying, not changing the law - that digital photographs were photographs last week too.
Here's the full text of the amendment. Underlined words are the words being added, words crossed out are being deleted.
http://www.ilga.gov/legislatio...
But that is not the only update. You have to follow the references.
They update the law to define scan as being something that "means data resulting from an in-person process whereby a part of the body is traversed by a detector or an electronic beam."
But "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. The definition also explicitly excludes photographs, and with the update clarifies that it excludes physical and digital photographs.
The New version of the law then changes the definition of "biometric identifier" so that it cannot include information derived from anything explicitly excluded from these "biometric identifiers."
So if you can derive biometric identifiers (such as a scan of face geometry before they change the definition of scan) from a photograph, it is no longer covered under the proposed law.
Real lawyers write in C++
In the US, this is an issue tied closely to freedom of the press. When you restrict the rights of the press, you potentially enable abuse which is why it was important enough to be included in the bill of rights.
In modern usage, the freedom of the press includes the rights to take photographs and use them in ways that make other people unhappy.
There are reasonable restrictions placed on that freedom as with all the other freedoms spelled out in the bill of rights. You don't have a right to take photographs on private property when the owner says you can't. You don't have the right to take photographs of people in settings where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as restrooms. While you do have the right to take a picture from the public sidewalk of what you see through the open window of someone's home, you don't have that right if they have blinds intended to prevent it.
This means you can take pictures of your mayor smoking crack so long as he's not doing it in his house with the blinds drawn. You can take pictures of protesters and parades without needing to get waivers from everyone photographed. The reason you can watch News Years celebrations in Central Park is because the freedom to photograph and even video those people, even live, without getting waivers is protected by the bill of rights.
You have the right to do this too, whether you're a journalist or not, because journalism doesn't rely on a government agency to approve who gets to be a journalist or not. This is also critical to preventing abuse.
The upshot of all this is that you have the right to take photographs and video without consent and use those photos and videos however you like with only a few reasonable restrictions.
In Illinois they decided the state has the right to restrict the freedom to use pictures and videos in certain ways. It's not unusual for states to restrict freedoms within their borders in order to maintain the balance of freedoms between different people, and it isn't necessarily a problem. In most cases the states are careful to craft any laws, particularly those that restrict freedoms guaranteed by the bill of rights, very carefully so that the law won't be invalidated by the federal courts.
I think this law is bound to eventually be invalidated by federal courts. Some public figure will be photographed doing something shady and the photograph will be correlated to the figure by biometric algorithms. When that happens, the public figure will try to shut down the story using this law and journalists will prevail in the courts because of the protections of the bill of rights.
Eventually we will have to accept that being photographed in public and having computers organize, sort and assist us with those pictures is something that cannot be prevented without compromising the basic rights that support our legislative system.
Whether we will decide that the protections of a free press or our privacy is more important in the long run is something that worries me. Americans are all too often more interested in their comfort than their freedom and that trend worries me.
Facial recognition is quite simply put the worst privacy invasion in the entire set of privacy invasion tools. Tools like google glass, driverless car cameras, uploaded photos, or any one of dozens of video data sources that directly feed into one of the large companies' data stores pose a huge problem for everyone's privacy. It doesn't need to be big brother with cameras everywhere to put a very good picture of everyones' lives. If you only pass a few of these cameras a week it can still put together a very solid picture of your life, where you go to school, where you work, who you hang out with, etc.
For instance today I was sitting in a park with my wife when a Chinese dragon dance occurred, the dragons came right up to where I was sitting with dozens of people snapping away. Needless to say some of those pictures went up to one of the facebooks, googles, etc. We were carrying brand name bags from some shopping. Thus a great image recognition program could put my wife and I together, at the market, in our city, and what shopping we did today.
These companies won't be content with just this, they will want more and more data, thus will probably partner with speed camera companies, security companies, stores, etc. But the icing on the cake will be driverless car cameras and delivery drone cameras; those data feeds will put us on camera multiple times per day.
With this sort of data, there is no organizing anonymous political dissent, there is no undercover journalism, there is no privacy.
I want laws to swing hard against this. Quite simply, I want it to be illegal to gather data on people without there consent. Full stop. By gather, I don't mean to store, but to have any ability to aggrigate a picture larger than the individual pieces. Also I want a law that says data gathered for an obvious purpose cannot be used for any other purpose. Thus my phone company can have my mailing address, but there is no sharing that with "trusted third parties". My driver's licence can't be accessed by any government employee beyond the proof that I can drive. If I deal with one company they can't even share my data with sibling companies.
In Europe, they have the right to be forgotten, I want the right to not even be known. Thus if any company or organization has my information without a warrant from a judge, and I didn't give it to them, I want people going to jail along with ruinous fines. So if I terminate my phone, the company has to erase every trace that I existed. If I cross a bridge and have a pass card, they can deduct my account, but not record the time or place of my crossing. If I make a phone call on an unlimited plan then there is no need to record my minutes or who I called. I want any data that can't be wildly justified to be erased.
Now some companies will argue that in the event of a billing dispute that these records are nessary. Thus one caveat could be added. They can keep the records until I phone them and say, "I am in agreement with your up to date billing. Delete all my records." In the case of a phone company this would pretty much clear out any record I had with them short of the minimum details required to keep my service active. This would include how long I had been a customer.
Quite simply using technologies such as Machine Learning these companies are abusing us more and more. We need to turn this 180 degrees and make it wildly illegal for them to mine any data we did not consent to.
And just to cover a loophole. Make it illegal for anyone to be able to offer an inducement to gather your data. So the phone company can't say our phone plan is $200 per month with a $160 discount if you give up your privacy.
I'm against laws prohibiting facial recognition unless they're explicitly targeted at the government or otherwise include the government. What will happen if this law is passed is that it will be used against activists rather than protecting the rights of the people not to be searched and prodded without warrant. The people should have the right to utilize face recognition technology to protect themselves from the state and the police/government should not.
That's a very thoughtful post. Some clarification might be helpful regarding this sentence:
> In Illinois they decided the state has the right to restrict the freedom to use pictures
Here's the old text of the law:
Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs
Here's the new text:
Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, physical or digital photographs
So they explicitly did NOT restrict the use of photographs. The law, from the time it was initially passed, regulated the storage and use of biometric identifiers, which it defined as "retina scans, fingerprints", etc. It never did cover photographs. The new text clarifies that digitial photos are photos, and therefore not restricted by this law.
Why should facial recognition and scanning be illegal? You don't have the right not be recognized in public if you put your picture on the internet for everyone to see. If you have a problem with being recognized, then don't show your face. Wear a ninja outfit (as it is called in Japan) or burka (as it is called in the middle east).
It cannot be made illegal for people to use facial recognition software. I mean, it could be useful to blind people for example. But that aside, if you put your photos in public and you also make your identity known to people .. why can't they use a computer to automate what their brain can do?
However, they now try to invade non-facebook users by using tracking cookies, and no doubt scan the internet for images to recognise.
The issue is not the technology, it is who CONTROLS the ON and OFF switch, that SHOULD be in the end users control.
Sorry but you're completely wrong and I take particular offense at your use of weasel-words like "clarify". The law is _not_ being "clarified", it's being altered.
The article's summary is perfectly accurate in that it states that the proposed changes are aimed at allowing Facebook and Google to identify people from any online photographs they may get their hands on.
The changes in the wording of the law (that you so helpfully posted, thanks for that) do precisely that by (1) excluding photographs of any kind from the definition of "biometric information" and narrowing down the definition a "scan" to a procedure that physically passes a sensor over any part of your body.
The language of the law still prohibits me from scanning your retina or your fingerprints (than handy scanner in your mobile phone) and using that to identify you online. As in: ""Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry."
However it clearly allows anyone to scan photographs (one or more) of your face, use facial recognition software on that or even do a 3-D reconstruction job to make a 3-D model of your head, and use that to identify you online.
The only thing you need to do to understand that is to read the law from the point of view of Google or Facebook and ask: "Will this law prevent me from ID'ing everyone online we can get a picture of?".
The answer is a clear "No, this (amended) law will not prevent me from ID'ing people online based on scanning and analysing their photographs !".
Facebook provides an easy way to keep up with a network of friends and acquaintances, as well as a convenient way to invite those people to events, both your own and others' that you may be attending, such as concerts. For instance, I'm going to a concert later this month, and I know some of my friends that I don't talk to every single day could be interested in going as well. With a couple of clicks, I've invited them to join. It's also been very handy to get in contact with old friends from school etc., that I've not seen in a long time, but have just moved to the area, and I only knew this from a mutual friend's update. You may know this kind of thing as "social networking".
Once you hide all the game invites and ads and shit, it becomes a pretty handy tool for those things, so much easier than manually sending out email invites and maintaining various mailing lists for events. You just have to be critical about which persons you connect to and which pages you follow, so you don't get drowned in shit.
And don't ever EVER post anything to Facebook that you don't want to become public knowledge. I don't mind people knowing which concerts and events I attend, but anything more personal than that is completely off-limits, and my profile is only visible to my friends.
Eat the rich.
Thanks for your thoughtful post. After reading it, I double-checked the amendment to see if you saw something I missed. Central to your point, I think, is your statement:
> excluding photographs of any kind from the definition of "biometric information"
I don't see where the amendment makes ANY change to the definition of "biometric information". The lines are helpfully numbered, perhaps you can point out where you see that?
I do see where three words were inserted into the definition of "biometric identifier". It originally said "photographs" were excluded, the update says "analog or digital photographs". So it ALREADY excluded photographs, that was NOT changed.
The original author of the law says that when he originally wrote iris scans, fingerprints ... excluding photographs, he meant that digital photographs were excluded along with analog ones . Importantly, he put language in his amendment saying that it was clarifying, not changing the current law. I suppose that if you can prove that he originallly meant only analog, printed photos, you can call him a liar. I believe him when he says that by "photographs" he meant digital photographs too.
Stop using Facebook and this won't be a problem anymore.
Boy, are you out of touch. Did you really think a huge company like Facebook would let something silly like not being on Facebook stop them from collecting data on people?
There's a Zucker born ever minute...
I like that. Your right.
Thank you!
I see your point about "scan". I'm not sure how a judge and jury might interpret the old wording, but adding the definition for "scan" does seem move the needle in Facebook's favor.
Speaking of defining words, now I shall try to remember a new word I learned, a discussion such as this is called "dialectic".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...