<story><title>Facial recognition: It’s time for action</title><url>https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/12/06/facial-recognition-its-time-for-action/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>phkahler</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; This is a laudable first step in advocacy for real regulation of a technology...&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I&amp;#x27;m jaded, but I don&amp;#x27;t agree at all. They&amp;#x27;re trying to get it regulated so they can be creepy without fear. One of the first &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; uses listed was finding 3000 children. &amp;quot;Think of the children&amp;quot; is a common rallying cry for evil. Nothing else mentioned was really relevant.&lt;p&gt;The line IMHO needs to be drawn at anything that you&amp;#x27;d call stalking if it were done by a human. If a store wants to recognize me as a prior visitor, that&amp;#x27;s fine because an actual employee might do the same. But when my presence (just my presence, not even my purchase history) is shared among more than one location, that&amp;#x27;s like someone following me around. Stalking. This tracking of people and creating databases about them is at its essence a form of automated cyber stalking and should be illegal. The &amp;quot;societal benefits&amp;quot; of this are nothing more than claiming what&amp;#x27;s good for corporations is good for society. It is not. Please stop pretending this shit is OK.</text></item><item><author>geephroh</author><text>This is a laudable first step in advocacy for real regulation of a technology that already has huge impacts on privacy and civil society. I was in the room for one of the meetings with Microsoft&amp;#x27;s senior leadership as a representative of a Seattle-based civil liberties group. While our coalition would like to see MS go further, it was quite clear that they take their commitment to corporate responsibility and ethics around the AI issue very seriously. In particular, they seemed to understand our concerns about how facial recognition technologies can magnify existing biases in our criminal justice system.&lt;p&gt;This stands in stark contrast to the meeting I attended on Tuesday with Amazon&amp;#x27;s general counsel regarding their Rekognition service. There was a near complete rejection of the idea that mass deployment of surveillance technologies in today&amp;#x27;s largely unregulated environment posed any danger to civil society. He also denied that Amazon had any responsibility for the negative impacts of their AI&amp;#x2F;ML technologies, or role to play in industry efforts to self-regulate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kromem</author><text>Except with a warrant, it&amp;#x27;s entirely legal (and has been for a long time) currently for a surveillance team to physically stalk you in areas with an expectation of privacy (TEMPEST, wiretaps, etc), and in public areas they don&amp;#x27;t even need a warrant (actually, in public areas, it&amp;#x27;s legal for anyone to stalk you - just ask celebrities about their paparazzi stalkers).&lt;p&gt;As best I can tell, from a surveillance standpoint what Microsoft is encouraging to become standardized is to apply the same level of legal rigor for wiretaps to facial recognition, which would be a significant step beyond matching legal standards for physical surveillance (which is as it should be, as there&amp;#x27;s a scaling potential with automated surveillance that needs to be kept in check beyond simply the legal limits of physical surveillance).&lt;p&gt;Microsoft&amp;#x27;s stance is a pretty good one &amp;quot;in a perfect world.&amp;quot; The problem is that it isn&amp;#x27;t a perfect world, and we&amp;#x27;ve already seen a good system of FISA courts established after the uncovered abuses from the 1975 Church committee turn into a revolving door for exponentially increased secret warrants for NSA surveillance, even to the point of that surveillance becoming available to local police forces.&lt;p&gt;What doesn&amp;#x27;t help is that Hollywood has already normalized a lot of surveillance tech so that most of the public assumes things are already legal&amp;#x2F;implemented in much broader ways than they are, so it&amp;#x27;s normalized the very idea of the surveillance state that we are growing into.&lt;p&gt;If anything, private corporate abuses of the technology is the only thing that will generate enough public outrage to lead to a generalized reform. Self-governance at a corporate level may seem good, but I suspect it will simply mitigate the necessary outrage.&lt;p&gt;The necessary conversation starter would be the ACLU running a personalized erectile dysfunction out-of-home display advertising campaign in Washington, DC. As long as that level of abuse is against the terms of use of the intermediate providers, it protects the less visible abuses of the technology.&lt;p&gt;Ironically, a &amp;quot;race to the bottom&amp;quot; is precisely what will result in the appropriate level of regulation - corporate self-governance will always be a half-measure that seems good on paper but leaves a lot of procedural loopholes for systemic abuses that go unnoticed for a very long time.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facial recognition: It’s time for action</title><url>https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2018/12/06/facial-recognition-its-time-for-action/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>phkahler</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; This is a laudable first step in advocacy for real regulation of a technology...&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I&amp;#x27;m jaded, but I don&amp;#x27;t agree at all. They&amp;#x27;re trying to get it regulated so they can be creepy without fear. One of the first &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; uses listed was finding 3000 children. &amp;quot;Think of the children&amp;quot; is a common rallying cry for evil. Nothing else mentioned was really relevant.&lt;p&gt;The line IMHO needs to be drawn at anything that you&amp;#x27;d call stalking if it were done by a human. If a store wants to recognize me as a prior visitor, that&amp;#x27;s fine because an actual employee might do the same. But when my presence (just my presence, not even my purchase history) is shared among more than one location, that&amp;#x27;s like someone following me around. Stalking. This tracking of people and creating databases about them is at its essence a form of automated cyber stalking and should be illegal. The &amp;quot;societal benefits&amp;quot; of this are nothing more than claiming what&amp;#x27;s good for corporations is good for society. It is not. Please stop pretending this shit is OK.</text></item><item><author>geephroh</author><text>This is a laudable first step in advocacy for real regulation of a technology that already has huge impacts on privacy and civil society. I was in the room for one of the meetings with Microsoft&amp;#x27;s senior leadership as a representative of a Seattle-based civil liberties group. While our coalition would like to see MS go further, it was quite clear that they take their commitment to corporate responsibility and ethics around the AI issue very seriously. In particular, they seemed to understand our concerns about how facial recognition technologies can magnify existing biases in our criminal justice system.&lt;p&gt;This stands in stark contrast to the meeting I attended on Tuesday with Amazon&amp;#x27;s general counsel regarding their Rekognition service. There was a near complete rejection of the idea that mass deployment of surveillance technologies in today&amp;#x27;s largely unregulated environment posed any danger to civil society. He also denied that Amazon had any responsibility for the negative impacts of their AI&amp;#x2F;ML technologies, or role to play in industry efforts to self-regulate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ukulele</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;quot;Think of the children&amp;quot; is a common rallying cry for evil.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not familiar with this line of reasoning -- can you elaborate, or are there any good examples?</text></comment>