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Re:New Yorkers Want to Stop Landlords from Using Facial Reco... by dylan604 on Thursday May 04, 2023 @01:23PM (#35818991)
>Typically the algorithms used work great

I hope you let the word "typically" do some stretching before you used it, because it's doing a lot of heavy lifting there. You have no idea what algo was used by each system. Assuming some landlord is going to install the top of the line equipment using the most advanced software with these algos that "work great on all populations" is just so generous that I want to see take advantage of that generosity.

Facial recognition is at best a parlor game. Yes, it can be super helpful for personal use in sorting through your own private library. If facial rec messes up in that situation, no harm is committed. When someone is denied access to their building, harm is committed. When someone is mis-identified and arrest warrants issued on an innocent person, harm is committed. To even begin to think that facial recognition is bullet proof in all instances is just folly.

Re:New Yorkers Want to Stop Landlords from Using Facial Reco... by fwlr on Thursday May 04, 2023 @02:30PM (#35820009)
Respectfully, I do have a much better idea than most people about what is being deployed and used, as I built some of them.

I am not saying it is bulletproof. I am saying it will reliably pull 10 photos of the same person out of 100,000,000 total photos, for any given person, based off a single new photo it has never seen before. That’s the kind of scale and accuracy we’re talking about here, it’s not parlor games. And that 100M was small fries compared to bigger players - who I am sure were into the billions, with even better precision than we had.

I still don’t understand the multiple objections I see relating to “top of the line equipment” or advanced expensive software. The mental model you should have is something like Copilot or GPT3.5. The landlord is just buying access to a nice UI that makes API calls.

Re:New Yorkers Want to Stop Landlords from Using Facial Reco... by vgb2k18 on Thursday May 04, 2023 @04:44PM (#35821795)
I'm with you all the way on your points so far. I think at this point it will be important to refer to a specific product, one that's available to landlords.

I think in the minds of commenters there is an idealised version of "face recognition", so in a way, everyone is arguing past each other.