I Need His @

September 30, 2023 4:50 AM

The TikTok account, conversations with victims, and TikTok’s own lack of action on the account show that access to facial recognition technology, combined with a cultural belief that anything public is fair game to exploit for clout, now means that all it takes is one random person on the internet to target you and lead a crowd in your direction. from The End of Privacy is a Taylor Swift Fan TikTok Account Armed with Facial Recognition Tech
posted by chavenet (65 comments total)

Now this is the future I was raised to believe in by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
posted by Glomar response at 5:05 AM on September 30, 2023 [36 favorites]

See also: Your Face Belongs to Us.
posted by adamrice at 5:35 AM on September 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

This is awful.
posted by pracowity at 5:37 AM on September 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Use or possession of facial recognition software, even by police, should be punished by 25 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Same as uranium smuggling. 100% serious.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:05 AM on September 30, 2023 [15 favorites]

I want The Heist version of this. Use a "fuzzy" version (mistake prone) to search the profiles of people involved with a company to identify folks who would at a glance pass as someone internal to the company.

Not that this tech isn't already error prone, as mentioned in the article and from a slew of life-ruining-but-no-consequences errors via police.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:11 AM on September 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Good news seems to be that, if you delete your social media accounts, you can escape.

The bad news is that many of us are required by our workplaces to report ourselves to social media sites.

So, I think my work already doxxed me.
posted by eustatic at 6:24 AM on September 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

So evidence that it's at least relatively safe to be publicly known as gay or an ally. This is reassuring, but not reassuring enough.

The future is hijabs for everyone?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 6:33 AM on September 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Haha, joke’s on them! I had my face surgically removed!
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:33 AM on September 30, 2023 [21 favorites]

adamrice: All Your Face Are Belong To Us!
posted by winston smith at 6:36 AM on September 30, 2023 [13 favorites]

Use or possession of facial recognition software, even by police, should be punished by 25 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Same as uranium smuggling. 100% serious.

I'd go a step further and ban research into it if I could. It is a technology that humanity in its current state simply cannot safely possess.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:04 AM on September 30, 2023 [13 favorites]

in the future we are all in a band hikikomori
posted by glonous keming at 7:09 AM on September 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

The bad news is that many of us are required by our workplaces to report ourselves to social media sites.

Uh.. What the actual fuck ? What work requires an employee to have a social media account and how would that be even legal ? Mind you, I live in the EU, so maybe that's a US thing ?
posted by Pendragon at 7:25 AM on September 30, 2023 [10 favorites]

If I’m reading it right, I don’t think it does help to delete your social media accounts. Obviously, the less you put online, the less people can find, and the less the tech has to work with, but in terms of grabbing your identity, all they technically need is a place on the internet where your face is linked to your name. So, an employee website that includes a profile photo, an indexed yearbook, etc.
posted by Merricat Blackwood at 7:34 AM on September 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

And yet the argument of wearing a face mask during COVID to defeat the camera network and facial recognition didn't really get much traction.

A face mask, reading glasses and a hat was enough for my Aunt and Uncle by law to not recognize me sitting less than 10 feet away outside a courtroom where there was to be a hearing where I was known to be in attendance. And when the local WalMart had the the display screens showing the surveillance camera feeds WITH the yellow boxes surrounding the human faces it had trouble with the hat+mask+glass combo.
posted by rough ashlar at 7:36 AM on September 30, 2023 [11 favorites]

The author of the book mentioned upthread was on Fresh Air recently as well.
posted by jeoc at 8:04 AM on September 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Uh.. What the actual fuck ? What work requires an employee to have a social media account and how would that be even legal ?

Can't speak for the person you're asking, but I have applied for lots of jobs that required a LinkedIn profile. There are entire industries where LinkedIn in is all but essential in practice.
posted by Dysk at 8:37 AM on September 30, 2023 [14 favorites]

Something drastic needs to change about people's attitude to online privacy. I don't like that we've allowed ourselves to just accept this kind of intrusive stuff. It started when I saw articles like "Old people are freaking out about targeted ads! But actually it's just your bank tracking your browser activity! 🤗" Also if you recall, the early days of doxxing happened from right wing trolls doing this to feminists, which is probably part of why little to no legislation has been made to curb it.
posted by picklenickle at 8:56 AM on September 30, 2023 [13 favorites]

We have the technology to fight back. But do we have the will.
posted by Reyturner at 10:44 AM on September 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

Good news seems to be that, if you delete your social media accounts, you can escape.

Unfortunately, you would also need to delete your school/employer's social media accounts, plus all your friends' and family members' accounts. And you'd need to somehow wipe out the copies of those accounts that might already be floating around in caches, archives, wayback machine, etc.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 10:46 AM on September 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

You'd also have to wipe the copies inside the databases of companies offering facial recognition as a service. Just because you've deleted every public copy on the Internet doesn't mean a private database hasn't scraped it years ago.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:15 AM on September 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

facebook has a file+graph on you whether you choose to delete your access to the file+graph or not. and they add to your file+graph regularly without or with your GAS.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 12:00 PM on September 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Use or possession of facial recognition software, even by police, should be punished by 25 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Same as uranium smuggling. 100% serious

The problem is that anyone can write facial recognition software in a couple minutes. You can’t ban eigenvectors.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:34 PM on September 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

Normalize wearing a Guy Fawkes mask to the webinar
posted by credulous at 12:52 PM on September 30, 2023 [12 favorites]

I was under the impression that you have the rights to your own likeness. To the extent that TV shows will clear the street when filming so that there are no random members of the public. That people will have their faces blurred if they couldn't obtain a consent form.

I get that there's laws about the lack of expectation of privacy in public, but there's a difference between that, and someone intentionally making a video about you when it doesn't serve an educational or news purpose.

Doesn't this sort of thing violate the rights to the subject's likeness?
posted by explosion at 12:58 PM on September 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

1. Design an image.
2. Register it with the U.S. Copyright Office.
3. Have it tattooed on your face.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:04 PM on September 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

The problem is that anyone can write facial recognition software in a couple minutes. You can’t ban eigenvectors.

Eh. You can still ban the use of such software, conduct audits of high-risk organizations, and impose fines or imprisonment for offenses.

Anyone with enough chemistry background can build a bomb; your average mechanical engineer could probably design and construct a useable firearm. That doesn’t mean we don’t restrict those technologies.
posted by learning from frequent failure at 1:06 PM on September 30, 2023 [14 favorites]

I do get frustrated in the “you can’t ban it…” argument. To your point, you can’t stop someone building a gun. But when you turn around and start selling them, we can stop you. We can’t stop you from creating the software, but we can stop you from building a public platform for others to use for those purposes. We can regulate and control the collection of facial imagery databases. We have the technology. You aren’t running an Oracle RAC in your basement. If you’re collecting exabytes of data, you’re doing it through service providers that we can regulate.
posted by herda05 at 1:18 PM on September 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

You can’t ban eigenvectors

My reading comprehension skills are decent, and I don't understand how this relates to the original comment, which was about legal penalties for people who use eigenvectors (or some equivalent packaged software equivalent) for purposes of facial recognition, and not about putting eigenvectors in prison.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:21 PM on September 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

fwiw at the federal level in the usa it's perfectly legal to build your own firearm for your own use as long as that firearm complies with the relevant laws of its type (not a machinegun, not an unregistered short-barreled rifle or unregistered short-barreled-shotgun etc).

you can even sell it if you like but you're not supposed to *manufacture* them with the goal to sell without a manufacturer federal firearm license
posted by glonous keming at 2:09 PM on September 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

facebook has a file+graph on you whether you choose to delete your access to the file+graph or not. and they add to your file+graph regularly without or with your GAS.

Facebook and Google both have working panopticon-esque facial recognition apps, but they haven't released them to the public, because the PR and political implications would be too much.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:29 PM on September 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Fresh Air did an interview with Kashmir Hill this week. It was not not scary.
posted by lauranesson at 2:35 PM on September 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oops, jeoc already said that.
posted by lauranesson at 2:36 PM on September 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Pimeyes is based in (it appears) Poland. That’s a big part of what makes regulation of web-based software services hard.
posted by atoxyl at 3:34 PM on September 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

They have a form to “opt out” of their database, by the way - but you have to trust them with a photo to do it!
posted by atoxyl at 3:35 PM on September 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

fwiw at the federal level in the usa it's perfectly legal to build your own firearm for your own use as long as that firearm complies with the relevant laws of its type

I don't think it's worth much at all to be honest, it doesn't say anything about what is possible to regulate or prohibit. I'm pretty sure it's very illegal here and it could be in the USA too if the politics changed. It's about as relevant as the legality of a family of pesticides or a class of paint additives, but Americans like to think about guns so they always come up in conversations like this.
posted by deadwax at 4:31 PM on September 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Pimeyes is based in (it appears) Poland. That’s a big part of what makes regulation of web-based software services hard.

True, but that’s not the same as impossible – for example, Pimeyes is very payment-oriented. The United States can’t easily tell Poland to shut the company down but all of their payment processors are U.S. companies. Banning payment to companies in that class would make a huge impact – sure, people with resources could still roll their own but that’s multiple orders of magnitude fewer people.
posted by adamsc at 4:46 PM on September 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Maybe all we need is for Taylor Swift to tell the user she doesn't approve.
posted by emjaybee at 4:58 PM on September 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

This person isn't like running eigenface sample code from GitHub, they're using a commercial doxing service with access to a giant database of privacy violating personal information. So my suggestion would be that maybe we start with banning "commercial doxing services" and "giant databases of privacy violating personal information".
posted by Pyry at 5:51 PM on September 30, 2023 [18 favorites]

Pimeyes is based in (it appears) Poland. That’s a big part of what makes regulation of web-based software services hard.

Poland is an EU member state. The EU has stronger protections for personal data than the USA does. Admittedly I don't think it has any protections for the personal data of US citizens. But it's hard to imagine it doesn't run afoul of EU regulations.
posted by adamrice at 6:23 PM on September 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Facial Recognition is the Plutonium of AI
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 7:08 PM on September 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

And this is why I don't have a facebook account.
posted by neonamber at 9:12 PM on September 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Isn’t this similar to what people were doing to find January 6th insurrectionists and then report what they found online to the FBI?
posted by Big Al 8000 at 9:15 PM on September 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

For everyone saying just delete Facebook etc., I just took a selfie and uploaded it to Pimeyes reverse image search and about half the matches it found were indeed pictures of me but literally none were from my own social media. They were all from other people's blogs etc.

I don't even recognize/remember most of these photos so they must have been from other people taking photos at events etc. and posting them. (I didn't pay Pimeyes, so I can't click through to the source pages to confirm.)
posted by Jacqueline at 9:54 PM on September 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

The United States can’t easily tell Poland to shut the company down but all of their payment processors are U.S. companies

If they were still Poland based, we have a bunch of native payment processors. But they appear to have sold their business to a Seychelles based company in 2020, possibly to escape more onerous GDPR regulations for EU based companies.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 9:56 PM on September 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

I've been waiting for more stories like this. The tech and databases exist and seem inevitable to me. Yandex had an accidental facial recognition system line a few years ago, now gone.

We are in Transparent Society territory IMHO. Not saying that is desirable. Am concerned it is inevitable.
posted by Nelson at 8:45 AM on October 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

We're just hurtling towards the world of Brian K Vaughan's The Private Eye, just 50 years earlier than depicted in the story.
posted by tittergrrl at 9:53 AM on October 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is among the reasons I use my real name on social media and other internet modalities, and assume anything about me that’s connected to the internet in any way (including, e.g., digitized pre-internet newspapers) is public knowledge. I think it behooves most people in the present day to think of themselves as celebrities when it comes to this sort of thing.

Not too long ago an unhinged person came after me in a quasi-legal way that included items that were clearly gleaned from my social media. The final analysis was that, “None of this appears to be factually true, except that he does sing opera and love cats.” Well, yeah… guilty.

It seems clear that we should never post images/video of ourselves or allow ourselves to be photographed/videoed unless we’re okay with the potential repercussions. What’s concerning to me is that there is no presumption of privacy in public spaces and images/videos can be captured/posted without our knowledge and consent. I try to be aware that, at least in urban areas of any size, we are almost constantly being recorded by security cameras, and some percentage of the time by individuals. I was reminded of this just the other day when I was approached by an artist in my neighborhood who complemented my style of dressing and said she had taken some photos of me. Knowledge that we are constantly under a kind of surveillance has prompted several decisions to not do things I might have done 25 years ago in a similar circumstance.
posted by slkinsey at 10:11 AM on October 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

"Isn’t this similar to what people were doing to find January 6th insurrectionists and then report what they found online to the FBI?"

Yup.

There are tons of legitimate uses for the technology, just like there are with Deep Fakes.

A lot of the problem seems to not be a loss of anonymity, but asymmetric anonymity — people making threats rarely leave their names; if they had to, there'd probably be less online harassment.
posted by klangklangston at 6:23 PM on October 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Facial Recognition is the Plutonium of AI

Oof, that's an awful article.

At its core, the argument is that any collection of biometric information is inherently, inexorably racist, because any quantification will lead to sorting, and sorting will be inherently hierarchically ranked, therefore racist.

But… that's not true, and it's simple to think of counterexamples. Like, fingerprints, which are generally personally identifiable but, as far as I know, encode 0 racial information about the subject. Or DNA, which is used (I'd argue mistakenly) to generalize from population clusters, then presented as race. But the argument that the quantification causes inherent sorting and ranking is weak. That something can be used for racist ends doesn't mean that it's an inherent outcome (and citing Foucault to imply that it is just shows the danger of sloppy usage of Continental thinking).

He also plays fast and loose with skin color versus race, betraying his own racist assumptions — really, his whole citation of the lower success rate of facial recognition on people with darker skin is muddled. If facial recognition is plutonium, and people with darker skin are less likely to be able to be identified, isn't that a good thing? Otherwise, the argument is that people with darker skin aren't getting the benefit or utility of facial recognition at the same rate as their lighter peers.

By making so much of his argument rest on an alarmist prediction of inherent racism, he does read as alarmist and frankly captured by some bullshit uncritical responses to an emerging technology. People who are skeptics of facial recognition in this thread, even some I disagree with, have made far better arguments than that.
posted by klangklangston at 6:59 PM on October 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

If facial recognition is plutonium, and people with darker skin are less likely to be able to be identified, isn't that a good thing?

I have no idea how plutonium enters into this, but have you not read the oodles of articles about Black people getting arrested because facial recognition software misidentified them because it’s bad at recognizing darker skinned people, and how disruptive (and sometimes deadly) that is for the people targeted? Police racism leading them stop any Black person when searching for a suspect and claim that they look the same as the description or video of the suspect (‘cause all Black people look alike to them, and/or they don’t care about blowing up some random law-abiding Black person’s life just to up their arrest numbers) is already bad enough without some supposedly impartial computer program backing up their prejudice. Likewise, voter suppression targeting Black voters by dropping them from voter roles if someone in another state shares at least two bits of personal identifying information with them is already a giant problem, that also doesn’t need a sheen of supposed impartial legitimacy that people mistakenly assume facial recognition software provides in such cases. It’s racial profiling on steroids.

Being identified when you don’t want or expect to be is not the only problem with facial recognition software. False matches and misidentification are also big problems.
posted by eviemath at 7:59 PM on October 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Tip of the iceberg of how bad this can get. Facial ID will be used to deadname trans folks. Facial ID will be used to find people who support abortion rights. Someone will point a camera at the entrance to a gay bar for a few months and then doxx everyone who ever went in there. Someone will point a camera at a synagogue and do the same thing. A BLM protest. A Court building. A mortuary.

Just hate this shit so much. And I'm not prepared really.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 9:34 PM on October 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

And this is why I don't have a facebook account.

They probably know about you anyway
posted by 41swans at 6:00 AM on October 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

"I have no idea how plutonium enters into this,

That entire essay that I was responding to is arguing that "plutonium" is the analogy and framing we should use to talk about facial recognition.

but have you not read the oodles of articles about Black people getting arrested because facial recognition software misidentified them because it’s bad at recognizing darker skinned people, and how disruptive (and sometimes deadly) that is for the people targeted?

Oodles? I've read about a few, but 1) that's the inverse of the argument that the essay was making; 2) that sounds like the sort of thing that would be solved by … better facial recognition.
posted by klangklangston at 6:40 PM on October 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Facial ID will be used to deadname trans folks. Facial ID will be used to find people who support abortion rights. Someone will point a camera at the entrance to a gay bar for a few months and then doxx everyone who ever went in there. Someone will point a camera at a synagogue and do the same thing. A BLM protest. A Court building. A mortuary.

Just hate this shit so much. And I'm not prepared really."

These are much more accurate concerns about how facial recognition will be used, but instead of going for a reactionary and unlikely response of "ban it all," we should be thinking about how to mitigate harms from asymmetric anonymity and stochastic terrorism. It's unlikely the genie is going back in the bottle, and even if it does, it still makes sense to prepare for the worst. Increasing enforcement and resources dedicated to tracking down people who make threats, creating better buffers for those likely to experience threats, and having better proactive toolkits for people who do get doxxed is a hard lift, but worthwhile.
posted by klangklangston at 6:47 PM on October 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don’t recall a plutonium analogy in the fpp link I read. Was that from something else that got linked upthread? Regardless, that it wasn’t the specific threat the article focused on doesn’t mean it’s not a concern.


creating better buffers for those likely to experience threats, and having better proactive toolkits for people who do get doxxed

To call this a hard lift might be a bit of an understatement. What sort of buffers are you imagining? Currently, our options are: restraining orders (often ignored by those seeking to do harm, no actual security provided to go along with them, so these really only serve as a way to justify more severe punishment after they have been violated); or having the victim disrupt their entire life by moving, going into hiding, changing identities, the social restriction of having no online presence or social media use, and being hyper vigilant about the risks of having their image appear in other people’s photos online. Some abolitionist or alternative policing models have called for requiring that those who make threats that would merit a restraining order be the ones required to uproot their lives and move far away and restrict their internet usage. But that requires resources to keep tabs on them and ensure they are following the restrictions (basically a parole type situation). And expanding who is legally deemed a threat (as pointed out in the main fpp link). I’d certainly agree that there are some specific, concrete changes that have been proposed by domestic violence advocates and those working toward either abolition or policing reform that would be quite helpful in addressing the threats posed by use of facial recognition software (generally that would also help with broader failures in the ability of current legal systems to help protect victims of domestic violence or stalking or similar) - but that advocates have been calling for these same changes for decades with very little progress highlights the difficulty involved. In particular, we’re talking about some fairly fundamental changes to legal frameworks around stuff like domestic violence and stalking, and how that intersects with privacy rights.

It seems to me that facial recognition software is like guns. Yes, the underlying problem is whatever leads people to use guns to harm others (a lot of which boils down to patriarchy: domestic violence, toxic masculinity and online subcultures like incels that promote gun violence as a valid response to feeling aggrieved, etc.). But access to guns makes that underlying violence much worse and significantly more lethal, with the evidence showing that regulating gun ownership itself in specific ways is the single most effective measure we can take to reduce harm. Likewise, facial recognition software is in one sense just a force multiplier for stalking, harassment, etc. that people might want to engage in anyways. But it both significantly enables people to actually act out their harmful desires, and significantly exacerbates the resultant harm. The underlying problems are, as with gun violence, vey ingrained cultural problems. We should absolutely continue to work on addressing them. But in the mean time better regulation of facial recognition software will significantly reduce harm in the present.
posted by eviemath at 2:13 AM on October 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Link in the discussion: Facial Recognition is the Plutonium of Art.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:32 AM on October 3, 2023

The problem with the gun analogy is most guns are designed for killing people and have little other utility. Handguns and assault weapons should be banned and nothing of value is lost. Facial recognition has all sorts of positive uses as well as negative. I do not want to see it banned, even if that were possible.
posted by Nelson at 8:20 AM on October 3, 2023

What are the positive uses? I haven’t seen any specific examples yet mentioned (my understanding is that much of the tracking down of January 6 rioters involved more traditional sleuthing, for example), though I don’t want to a priori deny that positive uses exist.

Given that I’ve mostly lived in rural areas where a proportion of people hunt for food using guns, this doesn’t seem to be a valid critique to me. Many of the evidence-supported effective gun regulations include things like background checks, requiring safety training and safe storage, restricting those with a history of domestic violence, other violent crimes, stalking, or harassment from gun ownership. Likewise, folks with a history of stalking, harassment, or certain categories of violence should not have access to facial recognition technology that would enable and exacerbate the impact of such behavior. Ethics and safety training prior to use of facial recognition software would likely have some small impact (depends on how rigorous or extensive such training is, of course). And we can also identify categories of use of facial recognition software, like categories of types of gun, that are broadly harmful and no one particularly needs access to. This can look like, as the fpp article recommends, regulation that requires social media platforms to enact and enforce codes of conduct that would get people who misuse facial recognition technology booted off, or more regulations and restrictions around police and military uses.
posted by eviemath at 8:40 AM on October 3, 2023

Good news seems to be that, if you delete your social media accounts, you can escape.

I just wanted to note that the very first example in the article was a man being identified via a photograph on his employer's website, so lack of social media presence isn't a guaranteed out.
posted by star gentle uterus at 8:42 AM on October 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

What are the positive uses?

Ever unlocked your phone with your camera? Had Google Photos or Facebook automatically recognize photos of you and your friends? When you go through US border security they've been doing facial recognition for a decade+, but in the last few years they now couple it with the actual passport check so the agent just says "hello Nelson" when you walk up and saves you a little time. Me, I'd love facial recognition on a personal camera so I have a record / reminder of everyone I'm meeting in the real world. Etc etc.

Facial recognition is a deeply human thing, one of our most hard-wired complex perception mechanisms. Giving computers the same ability allows a lot of terrific uses. It does already. Companies like Google are being very careful in exactly what they allow to avoid causing problems or upsetting people; early on Facebook had a photo label test that freaked everyone out so they pulled it. But I think increasing application of facial recognition is inevitable and, hopefully, mostly positive.

where a proportion of people hunt for food using guns

I explicitly said handguns and assault rifles and I said that for a reason. I hope those people aren't shooting deer with Glocks or AR-15s. Those guns are murder toys, not tools. It's possible we could extend a categorization like that for facial recognition but it's very hard to know where to draw boundaries. Particularly for law enforcement (an issue with guns in the US, too.)
posted by Nelson at 9:07 AM on October 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ever unlocked your phone with your camera? Had Google Photos or Facebook automatically recognize photos of you and your friends?

Nope and nope. The first is not particularly secure, and the second is definitely not a positive application, all things considered (eg. taking into account Facebook’s history of privacy violations, and the fact that selecting friends to tag manually takes only a fraction of a second longer).

When you go through US border security they've been doing facial recognition for a decade+

Yeah… also not a positive application, for folks who are in historically marginalized groups.

Me, I'd love facial recognition on a personal camera so I have a record / reminder of everyone I'm meeting in the real world.

Or you could not violate other people’s privacy merely for your convenience, and ask for consent before taking a photo of them on your smartphone to help you remember them. Also not a positive application for facial recognition software.


But I think increasing application of facial recognition is inevitable

Regulation (almost?) always lags behind development and adoption of new technology. Think regulation of leaded gasoline, air or water quality regulations, regulation of pharmaceuticals, regulation of food production, etc. The “this technology is inevitable” argument is quickly disproven by the entire history of government regulation of new technologies.


No analogy will be exactly one-to-one. But military uses of automatic weapons and law enforcement uses of handguns are common carve-outs from any proposed bans on assault rifles or handguns. Noting that there might be carve-outs in any regulations (which might not necessarily be bans, as I pointed out) governing uses of facial recognition technology doesn’t break the analogy, however.
posted by eviemath at 10:10 AM on October 3, 2023

Another point in which the analogy holds: “but I enjoy recreationally shooting my handgun and/or assault rifle, despite the overall negative impacts on other people; and I’m only concerned about how this issue affects me” as on par with “but this will be a convenience to me, personally; and I’m weighing that as more important than other people’s privacy or discrimination concerns from those uses I like that I don’t personally experience any negative impacts from”.
posted by eviemath at 10:19 AM on October 3, 2023

... except the overall effects of facial recognition aren't necessarily negative. From disability assistance tech (e.g. memory support), to reinvigorating the Commons (and the environmental ridealong benefits of a healthy Commons), to preventing and policing harassment behaviors (including those enabled by FR).

Draconian bans of this technology represent an impulse to bury heads in the sand to avoid adapting to the emerging social reality. The cats out of the bag, good luck catching it (even with an assault weapon analogy). What we actually need is better protocols for handling remote interpersonal connections.
posted by grokus at 9:06 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

To quote myself,

Noting that there might be carve-outs in any regulations (which might not necessarily be bans, as I pointed out) governing uses of facial recognition technology doesn’t break the analogy, however.
posted by eviemath at 10:32 AM on October 5, 2023

"I don’t recall a plutonium analogy in the fpp link I read. Was that from something else that got linked upthread?"


Facial Recognition is the Plutonium of AI
posted by klangklangston at 12:53 AM on October 7, 2023