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's a scaling potential with automated surveillance that needs to be kept in check beyond simply the legal limits of physical surveillance).
Microsoft's stance is a pretty good one "in a perfect world." The problem is that it isn't a perfect world, and we'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.
What doesn't help is that Hollywood has already normalized a lot of surveillance tech so that most of the public assumes things are already legal/implemented in much broader ways than they are, so it's normalized the very idea of the surveillance state that we are growing into.
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.
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.
Ironically, a "race to the bottom" 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.
Yeah, you're talking about human stalkers, but OP's talking about capturing your image with many cameras, logging your presence into databases and sharing that information with other organisations.
I don't think Microsoft and their partners are interested in building a warrants-only surveillance system. Businesses already have camera systems and one could run face recognition on stored video after something has happened. Nobody is talking about that. This is all about real-time cloud connected face recognition.
Follow you?
Video tape you?
Video tape an entire public area constantly?
Have Arial footage of an entire city?
All these things exist and are being done. There's good uses for all of them too. But where do we draw the line? Do the good uses outweigh the bad? Personally I'm not convinced. And that's before we include the internet as a public place, which I really don't think people internalize it like that.
Connecting the AI face recognizer to the cloud or any other system is exactly where the line needs to be.
We need a framework for programming ourselves so as to be able to systematically protect ourselves at emotional, mental, and spiritual levels.
Further, any system incentivizing such emotional exploitation needs to leave now. I'm looking at you, capitalism.
I'm not familiar with this line of reasoning -- can you elaborate, or are there any good examples?
> Ethicist Jack Marshall described "Think of the children!" as a tactic used in an attempt to end discussion by invoking an unanswerable argument.[2] According to Marshall, the strategy succeeds in preventing rational debate.[2] He called its use an unethical manner of obfuscating debate, misdirecting empathy towards an object which may not have been the focus of the original argument.[2] Marshall wrote that although the phrase's use may have a positive intention, it evokes irrationality when repeatedly used by both sides of a debate.[2] He concluded that the phrase can transform the observance of regulations into an ethical quandary, cautioning society to avoid using "Think of the children!" as a final argument.[2]
So now they have an excuse to get all of thus unsightly severely maimed Civil War Veterans reduced to begging out of the way. It isn't that we don't want to provide for them at all or have to look at them but it is for the children!
That bit of stupidity got left on the books until the 70s - mostly since it got forgotten until it came up as an excuse for the police to be dicks. Then there are the similar rationales of 'we have to discriminate against gays because they are all sexual predators'.
It’s not the same. That employee is not always there, not always paying attention and he doesn’t keep a log.
A machine on the other hand is very efficient and it’ll recognize you every single time.
Perhaps I'm jaded, but I don't agree at all. They're trying to get it regulated so they can be creepy without fear. One of the first "good" uses listed was finding 3000 children. "Think of the children" is a common rallying cry for evil. Nothing else mentioned was really relevant.
The line IMHO needs to be drawn at anything that you'd call stalking if it were done by a human. If a store wants to recognize me as a prior visitor, that'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'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 "societal benefits" of this are nothing more than claiming what's good for corporations is good for society. It is not. Please stop pretending this shit is OK.