Surely the original “someone” is Meta. Good to have a redundant system I guess /s
It’s literally the first line of the article you guys, fucking read it instead of speculating:
A pair of students at Harvard have built…
Whoosh
Edit: My point was that a couple of kids doing this on a small scale pales in comparison to Meta’s reach. The students didn’t do anything particularly novel, and Meta, which has a much more comprehensive dataset of faces linked to personal information, personal communications, etc, is already using every means available to do the same thing. The college students simply demonstrated what Meta is already doing on a global scale.
at this point, masking up in public provides protections for both health and privacy reasons
Apple already demonstrated that you can still get pretty darn close from eyes and hair. Combine that with a bit of logic (There is a 40% chance this is Sally Smith but she also lives three streets over and works on that street) and you still have very good odds.
Well… unless you are black, brown, or asian. Since the facial recognition tech is heavily geared toward white people because tech bros.
Facial recognition works better on white people because, mathematically, they provide more information in real world camera use cases.
Darker skin reflects less light and dark contrast is much more difficult for cameras to capture unless you have significantly higher end equipment.
For low contrast greyscale sequrity cameras? Sure.
For any modern even SD color camera in a decently lit scenario? Bullshit. It is just that most of this tech is usually trained/debugged on the developers and their friends and families and… yeah.
I always love to tell the story of, maybe a decade and a half ago, evaluating various facial recognition software. White people never had any problems. Even the various AAPI folk in the group would be hit or miss (except for one project out of Taiwan that was ridiculously accurate). And we weren’t able to find a single package that consistently identified even the same black person.
And even professional shills like MKBHD will talk around this problem during his review ads (the apple vision video being particularly funny).
I think it would be funny to normalize wearing bloc in order to retain privacy. It’s why some people might wear accessories they normally don’t wear, such as beanies and sunglasses at protests, even if they aren’t in full bloc, covering hair and eyes (in addition to a surgical mask) can make it really hard to doxx someone.
I mean, you definitely want to wear a mask and some goggles at a protest. If only for the purpose of pepper spray. I totally don’t have a thin gaiter, goggles ,and a beanie and have definitely not heard great things about mountain biking helmets (the ones with faceguards) and totally am not considering grabbing one next time I do an REI run.
But also be aware that, with protests, you are almost always up against the groups who have access to all those “traffic” cameras and the like. And computer vision makes it fairly trivial to identify when a bunch of unmasked people walked into a dark alley and came out with their faces fully covered by tracking them back from the 4th street protest. It isn’t Enemy Of The State levels of asking Baby Busey and Jamie Kennedy to generate a 3d model from a single shot of Big Willy Style ogling some ta-tas, but most of the ways surveillance is used during that sequence are shockingly realistic and feasible.
I remember this happening with google glasses as well
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/03/google-glass-facial-recognition-ban
This headline would have carried a ton more weight if it wasn’t so extremely click-baity.
The ends do not justify the means?
If I could get glasses that told me “that guy enthusiastically greeting you by name right now is Marty, you last met him in university in such-and-such class eight years ago” I would pay any amount of money for that.
“Doxing people” and “recognizing people” have a pretty blurry border.
Imagine never having to go through “the effort” of just knowing someone.
I’m starting to get a feel for the “society is fucked” crowd.
Edit: I’m leaving this up because y’all are making good points.
That’s not what they’re saying. Nuance is important here.
Some people have a legitimate condition where they can’t remember faces. Moreover there’s a lot of different brains out there and some people have very poor memory when it comes to other people’s names or other details, especially if they’re introverted and have anxiety in social situations. It can be helpful to have reminders, like keeping birthdays attached to people in your contacts so your calendar can remind you when it is someone’s birthday. Everyone is different and what you call “effort” might be a physical or mental deficiency or differently wired brain for someone else.
Yeah, I’m neurodivergent and have a terrible memory. My life is full of alarms and notes and reminders for everything, otherwise nothing gets done.
While I’m well aware of the insidiousness of tech’s ever increasing privacy violations, I also look forward to things like AI being able to function as a full blown personal assistant to help me run my life.
Recording and even more so profiling people without their explicit consent is completely not okay.
