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."

Comments

Wrong; summary is fairly accurate.

[SeattleLawGuy]

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.

Argument or abuse?

[argumentsockpuppet]

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.

The ultimate in privacy invasion

[EmperorOfCanada]

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.

Re:I support Facebook

[michelcolman]

The problem is: what if other people put pictures online with you in them, while you don't even have a FaceBook account?

Indeed, if you post all sorts of information about yourself online, then you shouldn't complain if those companies, providing that "free" service, take advantage of them in all sorts of ways. But if you appear in a picture that someone else took and posted on the internet, and FaceBook can automatically reconstruct where you were at what time based on those photos, that's a different matter. Especially if they are tracking people who don't even have a FaceBook account.

But apart from that, what kind of so-called democracy tries to sneak laws through the system taking advantage of memorial weekend to avoid people noticing?

Summary is perfectly accurate

[golodh]

@RayMorris

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 !".