I no longer know what to do about this problem. I'm convinced surveillance is here to stay and that making it illegal will only serve to hide the microphones. I'm still extremely grateful for those who fight for privacy, is just that I don't see how we can win.
Not knowing how to treat the cause, I'm at least trying to treat the symptoms. We might not be able to stop them from seeing our secrets, but we might very well stop them from making us feel ashamed and from blackmailing us.
> surveillance is here to stay and that making it illegal will only serve to hide the microphones.
Certainly it's here to stay, but so is murder, theft, fraud, and many other things. We want to maximize the leverage and tools people have to fight it.
Unfortunately you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I don't think there's a real way to fight this in the age of networks and cameras in every pocket.
There are many good uses for the ability to instantly recognize and identify anybody from a crowd, as well as bad ones.
Probably the easiest way to frustrate these things would be the simplest; only go out in public with substantial facial features obscured or altered.
The degree to which tools with diverse uses, some of which may be bad, should be regulated is always a matter of serious controversy (cf. firearms). Whether it's legal or not, this tech will be used, so we need to get people to accept that and learn to recognize and frustrate its usage, instead of trying to deprive the populace of the tools that provide the function, which is ultimately futile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_ban_on_face_covering ('The key argument supporting this proposal is that face-coverings prevent the clear identification of a person, which is both a security risk, and a social hindrance within a society which relies on facial recognition and expression in communication.')
I don't know how well obscuring facial features will really work. There might just be too much information. Partially obscured face, body dimensions, clothing, location, time... I think it might be a loosing battle.
Who wants to do that every day? Also, how long before we can out-calculate it? Right now we can already match things like gait patterns and multiple biometrics (eg height, relative length of limbs) well enough for many purposes using probabilistic systems (eg your metrics match 3 people but the other two are on different continents so I'm 99% certain it's you).
I don't think there's a real way to fight this in the age of networks and cameras in every pocket.
Sure there is.
For one thing, a similar level of technology to the capture and processing applications could also be used to automatically detect and obscure faces where storing them isn't necessary, probably with imperfect but highly reliable success. Consider how Google's Street View wound up hiding car licence plates for a lot of places after the privacy complaints, for example.
For another thing, the problem with a lot of modern privacy invasions is asymmetry: large, powerful organisations like big businesses or governments can do a lot more to you with lots of information than you can do to them in return.
This could be solved for businesses by imposing rules and meaningful penalties for violating them. Facebook isn't going to be processing anyone's face for dubious reasons if it's subject to compulsory scrutiny on account of processing a high volume of personal data and the penalties for repeated breaking of the rules escalate as significant percentages of annual revenue. For deliberate violations, you could remove the corporate shield from the responsible executives as well, as with other criminal conduct.
Governments is harder, because right now the governments of the West seem to be more hostile to their own people than to foreign surveillance. Ideally, our governments would actually be on our side, and the vast resources they seem to be devoting to invading their own people's privacy would instead be devoted to protecting it. Imagine how much safer we would all be from things like fraud, identity theft, commercial espionage, and worse, if instead of trying to exploit vulnerabilities and limit secure communications, organisations like the NSA and GCHQ helped to close vulnerabilities and promote safe and secure use of technology by everyone. Like everyone else, I don't know exactly what the real threat from terrorism is, but I'm pretty sure the potential savings to our economies alone from safer technology would run to many billions.
Yes, those are all valid concerns as well. I was just demonstrating what is technically possible, not asserting that current practice is sufficient.
If Google applied that same fuzzing to its own internal copy of the images, it would not have records of everyone's licence plates any more. I don't know whether they do this today, but we could empower the official regulators to investigate such things in reasonable ways, for example by mandating greater disclosure of working practices or some sort of inspection regime for organisations processing high volumes of personal data.
I'll let the NSA surveillance me because I don't have the power to stop it on my own.
I will not let a corporation/individual do the same if
I can spot the devises they use, or the hear they are surveilling me.
The small changes I made are: I don't shop at Home Depot as much as I used to. I walk out of any store that has too many cameras. I don't shop at stores that a require membership picture. I never had a big presence on the Internet, so I didn't need to delete to many real name/identifiable ip accounts.
I think their are small ways we can fight. The problem I see is most people think, "I'm not doing anything wrong, I really don't care."--with the exception of HN members.
I have actually looked into ways to defeat facial recognition, but everything I looked into might bring more attention to myself than doing nothing. I do understand the big hoodie though. To be honest, I've never liked my picture taken. As a Photographer, I don't take people's pictures like I used to; it just rude, and shows poor manners these days. (I did look into a hat with IR lights on the brim. It seems to work now, but looks like new cameras will be able to defeate the lights, and there's always the establishment that says no to hats?)
I think that it has to get worse before it gets better. In the UK there is so much apathy and general fear of the nebulous 'terrorists' that surveillance is broadly supported. I hope that our children's generation will be able to free themselves from the terrible world we are building them.
As much as I hope this is wrong, I think the logical consequence would be a transition from an imbalanced one-to-all surveillance society to an all-to-all surveillance society, i.e. everyone knows everyone else's secret. If we can't take the surveillance part back, all we can do is to equalize it. I don't know myself if this is dystopian or not. I'd just feel very uncomfortable, but maybe that's what a society really is.
Not knowing how to treat the cause, I'm at least trying to treat the symptoms. We might not be able to stop them from seeing our secrets, but we might very well stop them from making us feel ashamed and from blackmailing us.