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).
For any scenario short of studio lighting, there is objectively much less information.
You’re also dramatically underestimating how truly fucking awful phone camera sensors actually are without the crazy amount of processing phones do to make them functional.
No. I have worked with phone camera sensors quite a bit (see above regarding evaluating facial recognition software…).
Yes, the computation is a Thing. A bigger Thing is just accessing the databases to match the faces. That is why this gets offloaded to a server farm somewhere.
But the actual computer vision and source image? You can get more than enough contours and features from dark skin no matter how much you desperately try to talk about how “difficult” black skin is without dropping an n-word. You just have to put a bit of effort in to actually check for those rather than do what a bunch of white grad students did twenty years ago (or just do what a bunch of multicultural grad students did five or six years ago but…).
It’s not racist to understand physics.
It’s exactly the same reason phone cameras do terrible in low light unless they do obscenely long exposures (which can’t resolve detail in anything moving). The information is not captured at sufficient resolution.
Rhetorical question (because we clearly can infer the answer) but… have you ever seen a black person?
A bit of melanin does not make you into some giant void that breaks all cameras. Black folk aren’t doing long exposure shots for selfies or group photos. Believe it or not but RDCWorld doesn’t need to use nightvision cameras to film a skit.
You’re not wrong. Research into models trained on racially balanced datasets has shown better recognition performance among with reduced biases. This was in limited and GAN generated faces so it still needs to be recreated with real-world data but it shows promise that balancing training data should reduce bias.
Yeah but this is (basically) reddit and clearly it isn’t racism and is just a problem of multi megapixel cameras not being sufficient to properly handle the needs of phrenology.
There is definitely some truth to needing to tweak how feature points (?) are computed and the like. But yeah, training data goes a long way and this is why there was a really big push to get better training data sets out there… until we all realized those would predominantly be used by corporations and that people don’t really want to be the next Lenna because they let some kid take a picture of them for extra credit during an undergrad course.
You okay?
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.
In private you are correct. In public it is a lot more complicated.
No, it is not. Keep your camera out of my face.
Stay home. 🤷♂️ When you are in public, people can see you. You don’t get to tell me what I can and can’t look at or take a picture of. (Note that I said this was complicated, and this is where the complications start - I should be able to record you in public if I am not specifically monitoring or harassing you, or trying to obtain pictures of things under your clothes, for instance, which IS a violation of your privacy. But just walking around in public recording things? You can’t take my rights away just because you think you should have complete privacy even when out in public.)
I do that as much as I can anyway, but even I have to go and buy groceries about once per week. And yes, I literally do get to tell you not to record me, because it is very much illegal to record people without their consent here. Cry about it if you want.
I’d be interested in hearing more about what law you’re referring to (or you could point me at a.similar example, I don’t need to know where you live). My understanding is that even in two-party consent states you can record in public as long as you aren’t recording conversations and/or the people being recorded have no expectation of privacy (no one should be recording anything in public bathrooms, changing rooms, etc. - you do have an expectation of privacy there even though you are in public, for instance.)
I don’t get that emotional about online stuff, but thanks for your concern.
My country is easy to figure out and not really a secret and generally known for individual privacy laws. You can publicly record something, but only for as long as it does not violate the personal rights of someone - and yes, that still includes their privacy rights. The above example of directly recording or let alone profiling someone through “AI” is not legal without consent, and there’s also further laws regarding AI surveillance within the entirety of the EU. The same goes for publicly sharing such recordings online. You generally have to blur people’s faces and even license plates of public recordings. There’s also laws regarding “hidden recordings”, which I’d place this under since I could not tell if your glasses are recording me or not.
