> The band deployed live facial recognition technology that captured and analyzed attendees during their recent performance.
I think more drama has been created around this than is necessary. Based on the video, the real-time projected visitor's faces were not analyzed. They were simply shown with a random description flag attached, such as "energetic," "compassionate," "inspiring," "fitness influencer," or "cloud watcher." It seems to be an artistic provocation showing what a real people analysis could look like.
The fact that people were uncomfortable with simply having their pictures taken and shown without their knowledge gives lie to the idea that "You're in a public place—of course you have no right to privacy." It's great to be given the chance to face your principles.
Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be. However, that doesn't mean your likeness can be used for just any purpose.
The laws for this were written when "public photography" was someone with a film camera. It was maybe valid in the digital camera era.
But now I can point a camera at a crowd and It will:
All this with consumer gear I can carry with me, no government level spy gadgets needed. All live at 2-20fps depending on how much hardware I throw at it.With some extra work I can then find each of them on social media, grab their real names and other information from public sources and now I have a surveillance database. (Illegal where I live, but who's gonna check?)
This makes "public photography" a whole different thing from what it used to be.
If the tech is there, in the long run the only question is: Do you want government to have it, or everyone to have it? Privacy may have been a temporary phenomenon - a side-effect of the anonymity of cities/large crowds. You didn't have it in the mediaeval village, and you probably won't have it in the global village.
(David Brin's been beating this drum for about three decades now - I doubt I could say anything he hasn't already said. https://www.davidbrin.com/transparentsociety.html)
> Do you want government to have it, or everyone to have it?
That is a strange dichotomy, "government vs everyone". You miss the much more important large private organizations.
Government can at least be held accountable, if voters are willing. What the private orgs do you don't even have a chance to know about without a (tragic doomed person) whistleblower. Even the "evil" government actions heavily uses those unaccountable private entities for much of the dirty work.
Also "everyone" is useless. What use is any of it to individuals? Weapons or information. The fight is among deep complex organizations. Individuals - unless part of some network - may as well not exist. The individual with a firearm as a protection against government comes to mind, even in groups they'll be blown away anytime the organized large groups even sneeze towards them.
Another example is who uses the law: Any large company or even the government is much much MUCH more effective, no matter how much an individual has law on their side, at least when the large organization is willing to drag out the fight until the individual or small group runs out of resources.
If you want to achieve something, ORGANIZE! Otherwise you just throw yourself into the grinder, at best even providing reasons and justification to the other side.
> unless part of some network
Totally agreed. Even if that network is as simple as posting something to social media and watching it go viral, it's still a network.
I thought about breaking commerical interests out separately in my post, but didn't want to overcomplicate. An example would be the V888 form in the UK, which allows you to request the details of the licenced keeper of a vehicle, as long as you can show "reasonable cause". The reasonable causes are, of course, mostly commercial.
Even normal POS units have been discovered to have facial identification like that years ago.
You're tapping and paying and the system stores your purchase under "male, 35-45, hispanic, anxious"...
Creepy as all hell.
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In Switzerland, you have the right to privacy including in public.
This means you can not make a photo/video of a person in public without their consent if they are the focus of your image. They also have the right to revoke consent anytime in the future.
The only exception is at large gatherings like for example the Street Parade where the expectation of privacy can not be expected especially since the event is televised.
This is also why you can not put cameras on your home that film public streets etc. They need to be blocked off or facing the other way.
Eh. These laws exist in DACH area but the result is that when someone's committing a crime, you can't film them in order to create evidence, because that would breach their right to privacy. Someone stole shit from your front porch? Someone broke into your car? Someone pulled an insurance scam on you? Well, tough luck, it's illegal for you to provide film evidence.
In more sensible countries the law says that it's legal to film, but it's not legal to publish videos and photos of people without their consent.
You can record your own property and you can submit this to the police. However you need to put up notice on your property that you are recording.
Dash-cam footage is a gray area since the video is generally deleted automatically and not publicized. If the crime is severe enough the footage is permitted in court.
Criminals do not just get away just like that. There is a lot of public cameras run by for example the SBB (national train company). These cameras have strict rules as to how long the footage is stored and who has access. The footage will not be posted publicly unless in very very rare cases where the severity of the crime outweighs the privacy of the criminal.
How many innocent people have faced the wrath of the public because of false identification in the US when some grand event occurs? Does anyone remember Richard Jewell[1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell
There are explicit exemptions in Swiss law for the kind of situations you're describing.
https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/24/233_245_233/en#art_28
> Someone pulled an insurance scam on you? Well, tough luck, it's illegal for you to provide film evidence.
Are you looking at this from a US perspective where illegally obtained evidence is not admissible in court (fruit of the poisoned tree)? At least in Norway this is not the case, nor is it absolutely forbidden in the UK.
See, for instance, https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/commentary-and-opinion/fruit-fr...
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> Public photography is not a crime, nor should it be.
IDK about shouldn't. Public photography not being a crime comes from a time where one could still be generally expected to remain anonymous despite being photographed. Just like how you can be seen by strangers in the street while walking and still remain anonymous. Yet stalking is a crime, and facial recognition seems to be the digital equivalent. Facial recognition is something that can be done at any point by someone with your picture in their hand.
Yes. There’s also something about the sheer volume of recorded media & ease of distribution which feels like we crossed a qualitatively different threshold. The laws around photography were set in an era when it cost money to take a photograph, the cameras were easier to notice and slower, and when someone took a photo it was highly unlikely that they’d share it widely. Now it’s basically impossible to avoid cameras, people take far more pictures than they used to, and anyone’s photos can reach large audiences and often easily linked back to you. There was nothing like the way random people could see someone having a bad day, post it, and half an hour later a million strangers have seen it - a newspaper or TV station could do that, but their staffers usually ignored things which didn’t have a legitimate news interest.
This feels kind of like the way you could avoid having extensive traffic laws & control systems in 1905 when only a few people had cars.
Private persons snapping a few shots here and there in public capturing someone’s likeness is a drop in the bucket compared to all the automated surveillance photography and video out there. Let’s address that first so we are not straining out gnats but swallowing camels.
It shouldn't, you wouldn't be able to photograph candid moments in public of your own family/group of friends if anyone's else face showed up in the picture, that's not a world I want to live in.
It would also completely kill any form of street photography, even if you don't appreciate the art it would kill documenting times and places for posterity, for what benefit exactly?
This is programmer thinking, laws aren't algorithms.
The laws regardless this almost always make a distinction between intentionally surveillance and by chance background noise. Taking a picture of the street with people on it doesn't matter, recording the street 24/7 probably does, and purposefully singling someone out and photographing them definitely matters.
We already kind of have this. Think about it - stalking is illegal, but you've walked behind people right? You've glanced into someone's window before, right? You've taken a picture of a random person before, right?
So why aren't you in jail? Because laws aren't algorithms
Laws have non-binary options - for example, most countries have laws controlling industrial-scale air pollution which do not prevent you from grilling at home.
In this case, I think it would be interesting to think about the most concerning area: linking a person in a photo to their real-world identity. It seems like there could be restrictions on how face-recognition databases are built and accessed, possibly incorporating intent to harass or intimidate as an aggravating factor, and possibly linking across time and place. If I take a picture of some guys playing basketball or chess as I walk around town, I don’t need to identify them in my art exhibit entry and I certainly don’t need to link one of them to a different time and place without their permission.
Strengthening of your right to privacy against an entirely new paradigm of state and individual surveillance. It is a new world.
I actually don't find it hard to sacrifice the recreational photography of strangers, but I do have a hard time balancing it with the need to photograph crime and government entities overstepping their authorities.
I don't have a good answer for it all.
> I actually don't find it hard to sacrifice the recreational photography of strangers, but I do have a hard time balancing it with the need to photograph crime and government entities overstepping their authorities.
We would not only lose an art form but also the recording of the past, a candid photo of today has a lot more value in 50-100 years, rather absurd to lose this. It wouldn't even guarantee anything, bad actors would continue to do so covertly.
I find it pretty hard to sacrifice it, it's a freedom, making society at large less free to fight tyranny doesn't seem the way to solve anything, e.g.: EU Chat Control bullshit.
I don't have a good answer either but I lean on the camp of seeking solutions that are smarter than a sledgehammer.
This is an erroneous blanket statement. Photographing people in public is illegal in plenty of places, depending on what exactly you're doing. Taking a picture of a big crowd is usually fine. Singling out individuals sometimes isn't.
IIRC some countries recently started experimenting with automagically granting copyright to people for their own likeness, I think it was aimed at AI generates fakes, but it's probably more widely applicable.
Anyway, don't be a dick, don't take pictures of people without their consent.
Public photography that focusses specifically on a person requires permission in some jurisdictions, notably France.
See https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/law-regarding-photogra...
Also very often people mistake the right to take a picture with the right to distribute it afterwards.
Well sure but all this is doing is displaying the audience on screens and drawing squares around their faces. I seriously doubt this breaks any law, I saw them in summer last year and they were already doing this, given that the article is about it happening rather than them getting sued, I think it's probably fine.
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I didn't see a location stated in TFA.
Where I live, a concert is not considered "public", unless it's a government-run event on government property.
Otherwise, a concert is a private event, in which case you have no right to privacy. Just like going into a store.
Well, in the US, in a "right to work state", an employer could say "We don't support the views of this band. We saw that you were there and are going to let you go."
Or
"Data shows you hang out in low income areas, we don't think that aligns with our companies goals."
So the "face your principals" is completely fucking arbitrary. That's the fear.
What on earth are you talking about. An employer can do that in any state, not just the "right to work" ones.
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Did you forget where you were?
https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/MsF-optifye-ai-ai-perfo...
What is this?
They’re pointing out that we’re having this discussion on a site funded by a company that also funds a company that makes software to monitor factory worker performance, because it might make some money. Quasi-fascist leanings here shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.
Yeah, I mean obviously discourse is worthless unless it's GNU self hosted in an air gapped Faraday cage fed by sneakernet.
There's a huge planet-sized gap between techno-fascism dystopia and being Richard stallman.
If you want to actively make the world a worse place for everyone be my guest. But naturally, people are probably not gonna like you. People might point to you as an example of what's wrong with humanity.
That's a something you have to live with.
No, the point is those tendencies shouldn't be a surprise. But I'm starting to see where the real issue lies here.
Oh so it isn't even recognition, in that it doesn't identify the people. Just face detection.
The article is deliberately inflammatory by labelling this as biometric data capture without consent.
It’s incredibly common for tickets to big gigs to have fine print along the lines of “by attending you consent to being recorded”. This has been the case for decades. If you’ve ever watched an official recording of a live performance, you’ve seen this in action.
This is just a novel presentation of what is already commonplace recording. And it’s great and it makes a point, but the article is bad.
Apparently this was an artistic interpretation of what airports are doing in reality today.
> It seems to be an artistic provocation showing what a real people analysis could look like.
I that case they should have used descriptions like "gay", "muslim", "poor", "bipolar", "twice divorced", "low quality hire", "easy to scam", "both parents dead", "rude to staff", "convicted felon", "not sexually active", "takes Metformin", "spends > $60 on alcohol a month", "dishonest", etc.
None of the people who actually take advantage of you or manipulate you using surveillance capitalism cares if you're a "cloud watcher" or "inspiring"
> I that case they should have used descriptions like "gay", "muslim", "poor", "bipolar"...
That would certainly better demonstrate the scary dimension of mass video surveillance and face recognition. However, not many people would buy tickets for the next Massive Attack show after being lectured like this.
Their pictures were used in a commercial, for-profit setting without consent.
Being "used in a commercial, for-profit setting" is not a thing.
Their images were not being sold, nor were they being used to promote the concert. Plus, nearly everyone who goes to a concert these days agrees that their image will be captured and possibly used in future promotional material.
That's what caused the "outrage" (perhaps more "discussion", "introspection", ...). And without that, there is no art.
Drama? They were making a point. And it seems like it was taken. "If this outrages you, this isn't even the tip of the iceberg compared to what governments are doing."
Not only governments, all of surveillance capitalism is based on that, not only through your pictures being analysed but across all of your behaviour they can gather and trace back to you online.
Saturday Night Live used to do this with their studio audience in the 1970s.The captions were silly but could have been considered insulting sometimes.
such as "energetic," "compassionate," "inspiring," "fitness influencer," or "cloud watcher."
One season Saturday Night Live did this with its studio audience as a recurring gag.
The one that stuck with me was the couple labeled "Pregnant two hours."