As Moore's Law and AI advance inexorably, more and more less specialist individuals are going to apply more outside the box mechanisms to use big data. Hacker News discusses the recent release of a facial recognition method for comparing social media pics with porn whose maker has claimed over 100k identifications to date. For some reason there's a lot of upset over this, with some even calling it dystopian. I think rather the reverse myself.
I have for some time responded to plaints about the loss of privacy with this very prophecy: by using facial recognition technology and individually owned surveillance data stored on publicly auditable blockchains free people can establish far greater control of society, government, and their own property. Covert ops and crime are going to be more and more difficult to get away with, and not just secret porn careers funding college educations.
Have a look at the state of decentralized big data today, and consider the better future to come as a result.
See how far this technology will be used against ordinary citizens and not the people you are hoping it will be...
https://steemit.com/share2steem/@techwizardry/techwizardry-1559245760897-new-york-tenants-fight-as-landlords-embrace-facial-recognition-cameras
It's important to note that landlords are ordinary civilians, and that it's true that tech first empowers the best capitalized. The fact remains that the trickle down effect in tech dispersal is real and historically demonstrable. The best defense against facial recognition is a good offense using it. Vault 7 teaches us that even the most protected cybertools are hacked and become publicly available.
This tech is already available and the OP reveals that it's been marketed via an highly effective technique. Little is easier to market than porn. Once this is widely available, it's adoption for the specific reasons that I point to is facile and trivial, and the benefits of doing so are demonstrable and very profitable.
It's always darkest before the dawn, but when the dawn comes, we rejoice in the bright, warm day.
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I can't believe you'd be for this type of thing. I know my sister wouldn't, she's a "cam" model or so she calls herself, she has enough problems with weirdo's without them being able to specifically identify her, potentially stalk, harass or even murder her. I don't agree with what she does but it's her life.
Regardless of the consequences of our actions for which we are personally responsible, as you point out, the fact is that my grasp of this story indicates greater power coming to individuals as a result of technology, in this case facial recognition. Long have covert thugs been able to conceal the authors of our abuse, and this tech enables us to identify those perps. While it's presently focused on popular amusements, the implications are profound for oppression and freedom.
I have long advocated for seizing the means of production, not by taking them from centralized walled gardens protected by thugs, but by innovating personal manufacturing, and this is a highly public advance that brings that potential empowerment of individuals into mind for normies. Ending criminal people farming is going to increase our productivity and enable us to retain the profits of our production. That simultaneously erodes the parasitism of financial vampires dependent on us for their power to oppress us.
In that way, for those reasons, I strongly support this. Sorry if that seems somehow abusive. You may note that I maintain pseudonymity to the degree I am able, and it is because vampires have long had power like this over us. Our attainment of that power as individuals is precious as a means of resisting depredations of profiteers. There are consequences to our freely expressing our lives. Failure to reckon exposure to those consequences is a mistake in my understanding. I hope you and yours aren't harmed by this increase in our ability to protect ourselves from predators.
It never ends up that way, in the end, as always, they'll find a way to suppress the technology by criminalizing it's use, in the meantime only those in trades like this article represents will be hurt by their free choice to engage freely expressing their lives as they choose.
To the contrary, it always ends up that way, and institutional controls (making it illegal) are temporary at best, and completely useless most often. I don't think you'd feel this way about this broad dispersal of facial recognition tech if it didn't impact your family negatively in the short term. I hope you will soon personally experience the benefits of this tech becoming available to you and your community, and the temporary discomfiture that it may cause your family - simply by causing potential responsibility for actions they've undertaken - minor and of little import.
You are naive to think that this system benefits the average person. It will never be used against the powerful but will end up being a tool that will benefit the powerful further against average citizens.
I don't think anything, including the use of this software could have stopped my sister from engaging in her current occupation. My perspective is from the same standpoint as denying her the ability to use my IP to conduct her business while she is here staying with me for awhile after reaching an emotionally breaking point while living down south. I do not desire the kind of advertising that will start to show up on my computer let alone the same bunch of weirdo's that participate/engage tracking my IP and messing with me thinking I am her, therefore I would not appreciate it either to have my name, location, etc., put out there as a place that engages in porn activities so why would someone such as I suffer the consequences of something I am not engaged with...she is my family and she needs my help right now, granted her occupation, which she doesn't yet or hasn't yet come to grips with the reality is doing her more harm then good, someone reaching out to her shouldn't be tarnished across the internet. I think this tool would for the most part be helpful when it comes to trafficking or may make a college student think twice about engaging in such behavior but the internet generally doesn't hold the compassion/understanding between those seeking to reach out to someone versus those who are engaged for profit. There's just to much potential for abuse, slander, miss-identification, etc.
While I do appreciate your present concerns which are of far greater import to you today than those I consider, I believe that those concerns are blinding you to historical reality. This is not unique to you, and I have similarly been constrained in my considerations heretofore.
First, facial recognition already constrains the powerful more than average folks. Paparazzi taking pics of famous people far more strongly impacts them than you or I.
More generally, you can consider the industrial revolution, which has been a massive change in personal liberty and practically created centralization, as an example. As it began families were broken up and children sent to school until able to be exploited in factories, because this freed parents to work in factories, as well as destroyed the craft industries people previously conducted with their kids to produce the economy that supported them and competed with factories. It is hard to see that event as beneficial to those families. They certainly didn't like it, and Luddites were one expression of that opposition.
Yet, if you look back on seemingly unrelated matters but peripherally affected, people's lives were dramatically improved as a result of industrialization, if only after first causing horrific disruption and harm. Hygiene, science, and transport were all products of industrialization, and no one can deny the huge benefits in health, mobility, and knowledge people today have realized as a result, even as centralization has dramatically decreased the relative wealth of families versus their rulers.
Today, decentralization has already begun to decrease the parasitism of individuals that created the economic disparity industrial centralization drove. The ability of individuals to employ means of production to avoid parasitism and keep the profits of their production to themselves continues to grow across all industry, and this is the inevitable result of industrialization itself. Physics has mandated that improved efficiency attained with decentralization, and this ultimately returns civilization to the dynamic of the crafter society that industrialization replaced, while retaining the benefits that were derived from it. All the various decentralized mechanisms are not possible to stuff back in the lamp. Those genies, myriad of them, have been summoned by physics and become the base for the next 'best thing' that will follow.
Centralization is incapable of addressing decentralization in toto because of how it works. Concentrating the power of many individuals in an institution also limits their diverse attention and necessarily deploys that power on limited matters. If it does not, the advantage of that institution is eliminated. One or few of the decentralized mechanisms can be overpowered by institutions deploying centralized advantage, but all of them cannot, because they are individually deployed, rather than centralized in institutions. An action undertaken by a million people can be countered by an institution of some thousands, but a million different actions undertaken by a million people cannot.
Facial recognition tech will affect society in unexpected and seemingly unrelated ways, as individuals adopt it as a result of this iteration. You mentioned harassment and problems that have come from people stalking your sister. None of those problems stem from this technology. Some stalkers physically act to do harm, and your possession of facial recognition tech may well save your life, and that of your sister by enabling you to head them off before they do harm. More broadly, general possession of facial recognition tech will strongly discourage such physical and potentially violent stalking, greatly decreasing the risk you and yours suffer as a result. More broadly yet, nefarious institutions that use gang stalking, unlawful surveillance, and various criminal activities that harm free people will be far less able to project force without consequence after broad dissemination of facial recognition tech.
It is my sincere hope that any problems you suffer as a result of this advance in the power of individuals and our technological arsenal are completely overcome by benefits it will bring. Nothing is guaranteed, nor perfectly predictable. Facial recognition tech did not create the problems you have noted, and I don't see it can increase them significantly, despite your reasonable fears it will. Conversely, objectively considering how this technology will improve your personal, community, and national security strongly suggests you will personally benefit, if not from this particular iteration, but from that iteration's promotion of the technology broadly throughout the populace.
Corrupt cops, burglars, car thieves, rapists, stalkers, and an unending list of criminals will be more constrained from acting to harm you and your sister by you and your community deploying facial recognition, and you will be more free and secure as a result. It is not naivety that causes me to think so, but objectively viewing history, and considering reality today.
I am grateful for your views and the discussion you have made possible by honestly expressing them. I hope your alarm and circumstances don't prevent you from understanding my response, nor that nothing I say is intended to denigrate or harm you and yours in any way.
Thanks!
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I think you fail to realize that big brother couldn't be happier that people are freely willing to install this technology that if they themselves were to install everyone would be calling foul. You just think it will unfold for the good of society but ultimately it will lead to big brother watching over your every move more so than you think it will be watching over theirs. You are fooling yourself with this decentralization bullshit, this whole decentralization site is a laughing stock as we can now see with the many lawsuits moving through the court systems where people have been robbed of millions of dollars, safer more effective....I can hardly stop laughing. Moving back into a craftier lifestyle....lol, craftier at what?...stealing each others fortunes.
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@valued-customer have you perhaps read the last page of the Steem whitepaper.. page 26.. it says in black and white that "Steem is an experiment.." I already knew it in my heart. This confirms my beliefs are founded in something very real. My logic could not deny what my eyes could so plainly behold.
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Curated for #informationwar (by @wakeupnd)
Ways you can help the @informationwar!
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