Possessing a picture of someone's face is OK, but creating a model that represents that face is not OK if that model can be compared to another picture to categorize it.
Possessing a picture of someones face is OK, and having a human create a mental model that represents that face is OK as well even if that can be compared to another picture to categorize it.
The argument seems to center around how easy/hard or expensive/cheap the process is.
If we had somehow ended up inventing cameras after computers, it's conceivable that we might have regulated them.
Road laws were changed when we switched from horses to cars. The same framing as the parents comment might result in the argument: "Cars are exactly the same thing but faster, why change things?"
But this time the machine processes themselves are controlling the way we talk about them.
> without consent ... invades an individual’s private affairs and concrete interests
Consent, privacy, and concrete interests (possibly includes systematically influencing politics) are all central to this debate.
Secondly, the law is not alien to punishing the same outcome differently based on the tool used. Punching someone, knifing someone, shooting someone, or throwing a bomb at someone will carry different punishments - even if the resultant harm to the victim is roughly the same.
If FB trains to recognize the face of some friend of an FB user, but that friend is not on FB, and never previously signed up for FB, then FB would be clearly in violation.
I think FB does this when people tag friends? I'm not sure though?
You upload a pic of a night out. Tag all your friends in it. And one of those friends is not, and never has been, on FB. Well, clearly, that guy never gave FB consent. And FB is doing it all without his knowledge.
It is about scale of the violation of privacy rights.
Take murder...its not criminal to think about murder. Its not even criminal to discuss a murder (so long as no "substantial step" is taken). Its not murder if you kill someone, but did not intend to, that would be manslaughter. Intent to kill someone and doing it, that is Murder and is criminal. If one shouts a racial, ethnic, or religious slur while committing murder, then it is both murder and a hate crime. If one organizes the mass killings of groups of people based on race, ethnicity and/or religion at a large enough scale, it is genocide.
The law is very capable of distinguishing intent, acts themselves and the scale of acts. Its only these tech companies that wish to muddy the waters by spinning this decision into the court outlawing your right to take photos.
Other examples include:
* Trading card game booster packs vs. video game loot boxes
* Taking notes about people who visit your physical store vs. taking notes about people who browse to your website
That said - I do realize I'm in the minority opinion here re: GDPR, etc. But the inconsistency really disturbs me, I don't agree with a ban on facial recognition: who is to tell someone what they can and can't do with a bucket of bits? What about other automated recognition for content moderation - surely automatically detecting nudity is OK by the law? But what if those recognition models wind up doing some form of emergent facial recognition via unsupervised learning? How could someone even verify that?
I would be similarly bothered if this was somehow done manually by a bunch of government spies dispersed all over cities, using pencils and paper. Of course this is impossible, but it shows that neither computers, nor cyberspace, nor the entity doing it are essential components for it to be bothersome. Computers only play a role in this insofar that they make it possible to scale this.
Taking notes about people who visit your physical store vs. taking notes about people who browse to your website
We're not talking about a shopkeeper in a physical store taking notes (or even using sinister tech like tracking your cell phone, or facial recognition to track you) while you're in his store.
If you really want to draw an analogy we're taking about said shopkeeper, who puts a very sophisticated GPS tracking device on you, which does not only provides information, which shops you visit and what you buy, but also looks over your shoulder to track what you read in the library.
But the inconsistency really disturbs me
it's not even close to equivalency. The contents of booster packs is predetermined before the moment of purchase. Whether you buy them, or your buddy buys them, you'll get the same cards. With vidoe game loot boxes, you can modify the contents of the lootbox at the moment of purchase depending on who's the buyer. Perhaps it's a popular streamer, so you'll boost his winrate so that people watching the stream can go "wow, that was so worth it, I'll buy some boxes too". Perhaps you'll boost the winrate for a whale, only to get him hooked and put him on a dry period with no good loot at all. The online nature of such transactions offers much capabilities for abuse.
Imagine entering an electronics store in a mall and looking at a fridge. You leave the store, but an employee of the store had spotted you and what you looked at. They follow you out the door and into another store. There they whisper to an employee of that store "psst, give me $5 and I'll tell you what this guy's after". The other store's employee then proceeds to offer you a discount on a fridge.
If some store had been doing that in meatspace people would have been up in arms, but for some reason because it's a "re-targeting ad" on a computer people have mostly been blind to what's going on.
Facial recognition is the same. If you were doing it on the scale Facebook is doing it but in meatspace it would be illegal.
There's no "to me"; the argument is there in the clear and you can respond to it in terms of its content instead of the unknowns that go on in your head.
> I don't agree with a ban on facial recognition: who is to tell someone what they can and can't do with a bucket of bits?
Classic reductionist argument. They're a "bucket of bits" insofar that your physical body is a "bucket of atoms".
It‘s not „but do it on a computer“ rather it‘s „but when it becomes unprecedented“...
We are facing a completely new type of society where these types of entities are very likely to exist, we need to figure out how to deal with this.
Also loot boxes - imagine if Wizards of the Coast walked and gave away MTG booster packs on the street for free but told you "pay 10 cents to open it and you could get this cool stuff". Sets a completely different mental model in your head.
So I can have two pictures and look at them by hand, and use my own brain to categorize them. But the minute I use a computer to do so I have committed a crime.
It's this kind of stance which is going to make machine learning algorithms that casually identify people for convenience sake illegal. What the people in the court system have decided, is that they are frightened of being found out as hypocrites - as people who take bribes, and people who do bad things in public.
You can always do bad things in private. No one can stop you from doing such things, especially when they come short of murder.
There is essentially no difference between this technology, and the technology used for license plate recognition, but license plate recognition is totally legal.
In many places, if you were pulled over by a cop, you would pay a hefty fine, and the automated license place readers will simply fine you a bit less or let you go to court. What's wrong with recognizing people that are committing crimes and sending them a notice, "We were about 1% sure this was you doing something wrong, so here's a 1% fine." Everyone agrees such systems will be initially imperfect, but everyone is also totally agreed that present law enforcement is imperfect. I fail to understand the problem.
Unless of course, the problem is that everything is really run by criminals, and we're getting way too close to knowing the truth. That could be a problem.
Edit: I appreciate honest debate more than downvotes. If I have a shitty idea, please tell me why. Unless of course, you are afraid of honest discussion. Cowardice is always acceptable here.
Well then why not skip the whole imperfect parts recognition and simply fine the whole population each a fraction of the fine? We are 100% sure that the criminal is within the population. So lets just fine everybody one / $population_size fraction of the fine. The adequate fine will be paid and the criminal will be hit and hey, the system is not perfect, but what is?
Move over, mesothelioma TV commercials. We have a new target for the bottom-feeding lawyers.
When are we going to start standing up to companies who violate our privacy like this?
I never signed it. I just included the unsigned piece of paper (among others I disagreed with) in amongst the pile of papers I turned in to them. Nothing ever came of not signing but I suspect I could sue them now.
She was allowed to have a private photo site that all of the parents in the class had access to, and upload photos there. The parents were not supposed to re-share those, but some did.
SchoolBench allows you to match profiles with media consent, so you can work out what photos are able to be published or not.
> SchoolBench allows you to match profiles with media consent, so you can work out what photos are able to be published or not.
How does Schoolbench get a picture of my kid if I did not consent for the school to use pictures of my kid?
Can I sue them for them to stop?
Screenshot of the relevant settings: https://i.imgur.com/Xg4wkPV.png
According to their relevant help page about it (https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6128838?co=GENIE.Pl...), turning the setting off also deletes:
- Face groups in your account
- Face models used to create those face groups
- Face labels you created
2019: Are you scummy enough to be a Facebook engineer?
Does anyone know if other states have similar laws? Wonder what type of momentum would have to manifest for other state legislatures to get a similar bill into committee for debate
I deleted my Facebook a few years ago, so if some class-action suit comes out for people who were users in 2018+, where's my payout? How is such a system fair to people who had the sense to either delete before whatever time horizon is used in a case or people who never created an account? None of these people who could win the lottery in court suffered a real loss.
Yet the legal system gives people an incentive here to sign up for free services so they can one day reap the rewards when Free Service X slips up and breaks State Law Y. Admittedly, the rewards will be small. But nonetheless, it is an incentive and aggregated across society it isn't nothing.
This sort of litigious behavior just slides us further and further into a culture of dishonesty and makes a mockery of the justice system.
Also, let me be more specific given there's another thread on here about this. What makes anyone think they're entitled to "$5,000" for signing up for a free service and uploading their photos to it? This is absurd. Please explain specifically how running a facial recognition algorithm on person's photos is equivalent to "$5,000" worth of damages. Where did that number come from? Why not $1 or $1,000,000?
Its an invasion of privacy of all cars and drivers in the vicinity and should be illegal.
Fuck facebook.
In other words, this is ineffective. I hope EU cripples them, not even $5B FTC fines scare them.
