Surveillance capitalism's new normal: lure unsuspecting consumers to give you their photos with warm and fuzzy branding & then use those photos without informed consent to train face recognition tech you market to police and military.
"Pivot"
Olivia Solon:
Tags: big brother, computers, conspiracies, corporations, doomed, mpegs, security
3 Responses:
Up on the rooftop
Clop, clop, clop!
Down thru the chimney
Come the slaughter bots!
Amazon has been sponsoring a number of footraces in the San Jose area. At each race so far they've partnered to give away race photos. (Which is weird, as race photographers gotta eat, right?)
But the catch is that it's not hard to find photos that only could have been associated with the runners via facial recognition - not just OCR from their race bib number. It's ingenious: you have a training set with recognizable bib numbers, then a test set where you ignore the bib numbers but know the faces must be somewhere in the other half.
Each run produces data on thousands of distinct faces, each of which has a dozen or so photos in various natural contortions due to running. Oh, and the photos are taken in daylight, so your model trains against the environment in which it will most likely be used.
But free photos!
You can just buy access to Amazon's facial recognition system, they're not doing the race for face recognition R&D. https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/