All: please don't turn this thread into an ideological flamewar. It's an interesting story and it's possible to have a curious conversation about it, so let's do that instead.
How does this apply to something like Facebook scanning someone else’s photo and detecting my face in it?
So for an entity present in Portland they cannot run facial recognition in a public place in Portland. But what if entity A is partnered with entity B. Entity B procures images of people in public in Portland city limits and places them on a server in another state. Entity A, which is conveniently headquartered elsewhere takes the data from the server and runs facial recognition. This is clearly facial recognition of persons in public in Portland. But it’s not by a Portland business and the computing isn’t done in Portland either.
There's a specific exception for social media applications:
> 34.10.040 Exceptions.
> The prohibition in this Chapter does not apply to use of Face Recognition Technologies:
> A. To the extent necessary for a Private Entity to comply with federal, state, or local
laws;
> B. For user verification purposes by an individual to access the individual’s own
personal or employer issued communication and electronic devices; or
> C. In automatic face detection services in social media applications. [1]
That seems like it would include what Facebook is doing -- but the ordinance never defines a "social media application" and also uses face detection and face recognition interchangeably in some places, so it's hard to say for sure what it allows.
> But it’s not by a Portland business and the computing isn’t done in Portland either.
Then it's not illegal. Portland's jurisdiction only extends to the borders of Portland. Even when it makes logical sense, you can't have agencies in Portland exercising executive control over organizations and people that don't live there. That way lies madness.
But it's a pretty easy loophole to close - just make it illegal to share images of people in public in Portland for the purposes of facial recognition. Now you can keep sharing images the way you used to, but it's a huge liability to try to do this to skirt the law.
At the end of the day if someone really wants to use facial recognition on (against?) someone in Portland, there are legal ways to do it even with explicit prohibitions like this. And the more nefarious the actors, the more likely they'll just use an illegal way.
For one, the lobbyists and pro-tech groups that are against the ban, have nothing to say about what happens when the tech is wrong. They're painting a perfect world where the tech is solid and used for things like identifying missing children.
The podcast describes the high level of false positives in the algorithms. They say "top performing" algorithms are pretty good, but generally speaking ... no. Not good.
And there's the implementation. How does this get rolled out? Who's responsible for breaches? Who can access the data? Will anyone be able to sell access to the data?
But I always come back to: what happens when it's wrong? And I don't expect perfection. KNOWING that this tech is flawed, it's important to ask "what level of flawed is acceptable?"
This is an extremely concerning point, and one that a lot of people (myself included) wouldn't even think about. If you search for "dmv" on this site, there are several posts within the last year about DMVs all over the country selling personal info. I really doubt police departments wouldn't do the same with this data.
I can certainly get behind anything that lowers the amount of surveillance that is happening. Good on Portland for respecting the rights of regular everyday people instead of over-policing government and corporate entities.
Does this have that big an impact on surveillance though? You can still set up all the cameras you want to record in public spaces (which i think is a good thing, I.e. this allows people to film police just as much as it allows always-on surveillance that can be used by police).
I don’t really understand why the law needs to take such a strong form. If it said something like “you cannot convict someone on purely a facial recognition match”, that would be a reasonable law and protect against the kind of bias in AI that people are rightly worried about. You still need a human witness, or need the whole jury to agree that the face in a video is the suspect. Maybe the law can even make sure that a facial recognition match in a video is not even admissible evidence in a trial.
But really facial recognition is just an automation tool. So this is a law that says you’re not allowed to make use of a more efficient tool to solve problems. Instead of doing an automated scan of available video footage to look for a suspect’s face, we’ll just pay police officers for a hundred hours of overtime to pour over footage manually until they find a match. (And of course, if bias is the concern, there will continue to be bias in which cases the police and DA feel are worth investing those resources in, and in manually identifying a match).
I just don’t see how this kind of law that basically says “everyone must pretend this ubiquitous technology doesn’t exist at all” is such a clear win. And of course enforcing it as it becomes more and more ubiquitous will be near impossible.
This is absurd. If taking a photograph in a public place is protected 1st amendment activity (and it is), then this amounts to telling me how I am allowed to think about what data I already have a right to have.
I have a lot of respect for Hardesty (and I vigorously volunteer in PBEM NET, a department she oversees), but I also notice that this comes on the heels of local efforts to use facial recognition tech to identify abusive police officers, who have been authorized (!) to cover their badge numbers here.
How does the first amendment protect your right to photograph others, and even if it does somehow, how does it protect your doing whatever you want with that photo?
If you take a photo of someone and don’t obtain their permission to use it aren’t you violating their right to privacy, which is clearly secured by the forth amendment?
I'm curious how laws like this would handle jurisdiction. If I take a photo in Portland and send the data to Morocco where facial recognition is used and the results are sent back to Portland, have I violated anything?
iANAL, but I would imagine local laws are applied locally.
For example, I can buy an AR-15 without a pistol grip in California, travel to any free state and attach a pistol grip to that rifle. Doing that I would not violate California law, even though AR-15 with pistol grip is illegal in CA.
"What makes Portland's legislation stand out from other cities is that we're prohibiting facial recognition technology use by private entities in public accommodations,"
Prohibition is too strict. Better would be to allow opt in, so that my hotel, gym, uber, pizza parlor, etc., could recognize me and customize their service accordingly if I consent.
A problem with opt-in data collection is that whenever the law allows a user to opt in, businesses will require the user to opt in.
A ban on facial recognition doesn't mean much if every hotel, gym, and pizza parlor has a shrink-wrap contract or cookie banner [1] forcing you to opt in to their data collection if you want a room or a pizza.
As a practical matter, how could opt in work? Suppose you've opted in and I haven't. We both walk into the pizza parlor. How does the system know that you've opted in without attempting to recognize both of us?
I may be naive and misunderstanding, but if a private entity is using facial recognition on their property, that doesn't appear to be prohibited? Like if a gym wanted to do a face scan to "log you in" that seems like that'd be permissible? I'm not a lawyer. I found the actual draft:
D.“Places of Public Accommodation”
1.means: Any place or service offering to the public accommodations, advantages, facilities, or privileges whether in the nature of goods, services, lodgings, amusements, transportation or otherwise.
2.does not include: An institution, bona fide club, private residence, or place of accommodation that is in its nature distinctly private.
I'm suspicious having seen how the GDPR is effectively being circumvented by making nonessential cookies more or less opt-out, and by making the process so annoying that the average person doesn't care enough to do it. It's a lot easier to enforce "not allowed" than "do it in a user-friendly way".
Plus, in a public place, how do you only apply facial recognition technology to a single person? It seems like in most cases, you must first apply it to everyone else nearby to discriminate them from anyone who opted in.
Good opt-in regulation doesn't exist currently - think of all the click-through legalese and cookie popups/gdpr consent popups etc.
We'd need something like a once in a lifetime registered consent that service providers would be required to respect quietly and provide non-degraded service to people without the opt-in.
Even this would probably require multiple rounds of regulation iteration to fix the loopholes.
This seems unconstitutional. It amounts to blocking photography in public spaces and using those photos as you see fit.
It also seems very untimely. Portland is exactly the type of city that needs surveillance, to identify and arrest criminals who are committing property damage, theft, and arson as part of daily riots.
Where's your constitutional right to photograph me and use my photo on your billboard if you see fit? If you don't believe that's OK, and it's clearly not, then we can agree that there are limits to your right to use photographs you've taken of someone.
Also, I've heard approximately zero people from Portland calling for more police presence, even if it would cut down on the non-Portlanders traveling there to start problems. From what I can tell, they're not asking for or welcoming of that kind of "help".
Do you live in Portland? How about your family: kids, parents, siblings? Do you own businesses here? Have you spoken to anyone involved in the protests, or local business leaders?
All of the above are true for me, and I was born here, and I for one applaud the new restrictions on facial recognition.
If your answer to most or all of the above questions is "no", please reconsider telling those of us with actual lives here here how we should want to be policed and why.
On the contrary. It is times like these in which citizens need protections from those that may not have their best interests in mind. People have every right to protest and should not be surveilled in doing so.
I'm disturbed by the riots as much as anyone but I applaud this legislation.
Facial recognition and citizen movement tracking is a slippery slippery slope I want nobody in power to control.
The thing that confuses me is this is clearly done for the rioters but they're the ones with the ideology that generally results in this type of draconian citizen tracking.
Its an upside down world man.
I do agree that limits on photography are probably unconstitutional though.
And I'm not sure the gain justifies the cost. Not being able to facial rec a robbery suspect is going to have tragic outcomes.
Tell you what: I (a frequent protestor at the JC and elsewhere) will volunteer my face and address, and allow you to perform facial recognition to match my face at any public place in Portland, if every PPB employee will do the same.
Deal?
Presently, the only way to identify the police officers who are polluting our town with toxic gasses and brutalizing families who are trying to assemble to protest the existence of their employers, is by their face.
So don't pretend for a second like it's we, the protestors, who are trying to hide.
A stationary camera looking up up peoples faces 24/7 in a huge database is a very different thing to occasional photography by an individual, who only has a limited memory capacity.
So it's the pervasive always-on nature that makes it different.
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. There's no information here. If you wanted to say something specific about how this is like Creative Commons, for example, that might be interesting. But shallow denunciation isn't interesting, however intense you make it.
What makes it simply virtue signalling? And what kind of teeth do you want? It isn't the strongest but allowing individuals to sue[0] is a lot stronger than just saying "please don't do this." It isn't necessarily about defeating the evil forces of facial recognition but it is about trying to get a handle of the situation before it gets way out of control.
It won't be this year, or next, but fairly soon these laws are going to implicitly restrict people who are using Neuralink 2030 from opening their eyes.
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] erentz|5 years ago|reply
So for an entity present in Portland they cannot run facial recognition in a public place in Portland. But what if entity A is partnered with entity B. Entity B procures images of people in public in Portland city limits and places them on a server in another state. Entity A, which is conveniently headquartered elsewhere takes the data from the server and runs facial recognition. This is clearly facial recognition of persons in public in Portland. But it’s not by a Portland business and the computing isn’t done in Portland either.
[+] [-] jonas21|5 years ago|reply
> 34.10.040 Exceptions.
> The prohibition in this Chapter does not apply to use of Face Recognition Technologies:
> A. To the extent necessary for a Private Entity to comply with federal, state, or local laws;
> B. For user verification purposes by an individual to access the individual’s own personal or employer issued communication and electronic devices; or
> C. In automatic face detection services in social media applications. [1]
That seems like it would include what Facebook is doing -- but the ordinance never defines a "social media application" and also uses face detection and face recognition interchangeably in some places, so it's hard to say for sure what it allows.
[1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5967c18bff7c50a0244ff...
[+] [-] pc86|5 years ago|reply
Then it's not illegal. Portland's jurisdiction only extends to the borders of Portland. Even when it makes logical sense, you can't have agencies in Portland exercising executive control over organizations and people that don't live there. That way lies madness.
But it's a pretty easy loophole to close - just make it illegal to share images of people in public in Portland for the purposes of facial recognition. Now you can keep sharing images the way you used to, but it's a huge liability to try to do this to skirt the law.
At the end of the day if someone really wants to use facial recognition on (against?) someone in Portland, there are legal ways to do it even with explicit prohibitions like this. And the more nefarious the actors, the more likely they'll just use an illegal way.
[+] [-] cwzwarich|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OzCrimson|5 years ago|reply
For one, the lobbyists and pro-tech groups that are against the ban, have nothing to say about what happens when the tech is wrong. They're painting a perfect world where the tech is solid and used for things like identifying missing children.
The podcast describes the high level of false positives in the algorithms. They say "top performing" algorithms are pretty good, but generally speaking ... no. Not good.
And there's the implementation. How does this get rolled out? Who's responsible for breaches? Who can access the data? Will anyone be able to sell access to the data?
But I always come back to: what happens when it's wrong? And I don't expect perfection. KNOWING that this tech is flawed, it's important to ask "what level of flawed is acceptable?"
[+] [-] colpabar|5 years ago|reply
This is an extremely concerning point, and one that a lot of people (myself included) wouldn't even think about. If you search for "dmv" on this site, there are several posts within the last year about DMVs all over the country selling personal info. I really doubt police departments wouldn't do the same with this data.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cactus2093|5 years ago|reply
I don’t really understand why the law needs to take such a strong form. If it said something like “you cannot convict someone on purely a facial recognition match”, that would be a reasonable law and protect against the kind of bias in AI that people are rightly worried about. You still need a human witness, or need the whole jury to agree that the face in a video is the suspect. Maybe the law can even make sure that a facial recognition match in a video is not even admissible evidence in a trial.
But really facial recognition is just an automation tool. So this is a law that says you’re not allowed to make use of a more efficient tool to solve problems. Instead of doing an automated scan of available video footage to look for a suspect’s face, we’ll just pay police officers for a hundred hours of overtime to pour over footage manually until they find a match. (And of course, if bias is the concern, there will continue to be bias in which cases the police and DA feel are worth investing those resources in, and in manually identifying a match).
I just don’t see how this kind of law that basically says “everyone must pretend this ubiquitous technology doesn’t exist at all” is such a clear win. And of course enforcing it as it becomes more and more ubiquitous will be near impossible.
[+] [-] kebman|5 years ago|reply
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#The_Butlerian...
[+] [-] AniseAbyss|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jMyles|5 years ago|reply
I have a lot of respect for Hardesty (and I vigorously volunteer in PBEM NET, a department she oversees), but I also notice that this comes on the heels of local efforts to use facial recognition tech to identify abusive police officers, who have been authorized (!) to cover their badge numbers here.
[+] [-] alex_young|5 years ago|reply
If you take a photo of someone and don’t obtain their permission to use it aren’t you violating their right to privacy, which is clearly secured by the forth amendment?
[+] [-] jxcole|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coolspot|5 years ago|reply
For example, I can buy an AR-15 without a pistol grip in California, travel to any free state and attach a pistol grip to that rifle. Doing that I would not violate California law, even though AR-15 with pistol grip is illegal in CA.
[+] [-] hirundo|5 years ago|reply
Prohibition is too strict. Better would be to allow opt in, so that my hotel, gym, uber, pizza parlor, etc., could recognize me and customize their service accordingly if I consent.
[+] [-] lwneal|5 years ago|reply
A ban on facial recognition doesn't mean much if every hotel, gym, and pizza parlor has a shrink-wrap contract or cookie banner [1] forcing you to opt in to their data collection if you want a room or a pizza.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23090393
[+] [-] kstrauser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbotos|5 years ago|reply
D.“Places of Public Accommodation”
1.means: Any place or service offering to the public accommodations, advantages, facilities, or privileges whether in the nature of goods, services, lodgings, amusements, transportation or otherwise.
2.does not include: An institution, bona fide club, private residence, or place of accommodation that is in its nature distinctly private.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5967c18bff7c50a0244ff...
[+] [-] tkzed49|5 years ago|reply
Plus, in a public place, how do you only apply facial recognition technology to a single person? It seems like in most cases, you must first apply it to everyone else nearby to discriminate them from anyone who opted in.
[+] [-] willvarfar|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fulafel|5 years ago|reply
We'd need something like a once in a lifetime registered consent that service providers would be required to respect quietly and provide non-degraded service to people without the opt-in.
Even this would probably require multiple rounds of regulation iteration to fix the loopholes.
[+] [-] kepler1|5 years ago|reply
Because I could see an interpretation in which people filming police activities and the people they arrest as no longer being allowed.
What about that?
[+] [-] nl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throwawaysea|5 years ago|reply
It also seems very untimely. Portland is exactly the type of city that needs surveillance, to identify and arrest criminals who are committing property damage, theft, and arson as part of daily riots.
[+] [-] kstrauser|5 years ago|reply
Also, I've heard approximately zero people from Portland calling for more police presence, even if it would cut down on the non-Portlanders traveling there to start problems. From what I can tell, they're not asking for or welcoming of that kind of "help".
[+] [-] rcoder|5 years ago|reply
All of the above are true for me, and I was born here, and I for one applaud the new restrictions on facial recognition.
If your answer to most or all of the above questions is "no", please reconsider telling those of us with actual lives here here how we should want to be policed and why.
[+] [-] aarchi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waheoo|5 years ago|reply
Facial recognition and citizen movement tracking is a slippery slippery slope I want nobody in power to control.
The thing that confuses me is this is clearly done for the rioters but they're the ones with the ideology that generally results in this type of draconian citizen tracking.
Its an upside down world man.
I do agree that limits on photography are probably unconstitutional though.
And I'm not sure the gain justifies the cost. Not being able to facial rec a robbery suspect is going to have tragic outcomes.
[+] [-] jMyles|5 years ago|reply
Deal?
Presently, the only way to identify the police officers who are polluting our town with toxic gasses and brutalizing families who are trying to assemble to protest the existence of their employers, is by their face.
So don't pretend for a second like it's we, the protestors, who are trying to hide.
[+] [-] argb|5 years ago|reply
So it's the pervasive always-on nature that makes it different.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] alexbanks|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rblatz|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dannykwells|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] markovbot|5 years ago|reply
It is unfortunate that providing people such basic protections from some of the worst evils of surveillance capitalism.
[+] [-] d33lio|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] m-watson|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://onezero.medium.com/portlands-radical-facial-recognit...
[+] [-] randallsquared|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markovbot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scribbles99|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Areading314|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] triceratops|5 years ago|reply