> EU digital and antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager is expected to present her proposals next month.
She has been such a force in the European Union during her short time in the Commission. I'm glad she's still spearheading stuff like this even if she didn't become president like some thought she would when Macron started promoting her.
The funny thing is that she was also officially second in command when she was in the Danish coalition government a decade ago, but somehow the government's official policies were much closer to _her_ party's ideology (Social Liberal) than the ideology of the much bigger Social Democratic party that they were in a coalition with.
Yet another big example, where tech literacy is probably a barrier to getting good policy. Layered onto the bureaucratic & political challenges that always apply to rule making...
There are two operative components: cameras & software. They don't need to be on the same device or used by the same person. Increasingly, if the cameras exist, the "data" is likely to go through software at some point.
Facebook, Apple, Google or whatnot... they do facial recognition & other classification by default. Any publicly available pictures can be crawled & analysed by aggregators... or whoever wants to. Most people use services that analyse image content, make images public, or both.
These aren't just theoretical loopholes. There are tons and tons of private cameras out there. These will continue to "do facial recognition," or lead to it.
This can probably only be a ban on certain users: police... maybe some classes of regulatable businesses. This might be ok, but I don't get the impression decision makers know this.
Does anyone else think total bans on this technology are excessive? Why not enact strict controls on the collection and use of face/location data, yet still leave room for obviously useful applications like (for instance) arrest warrant subject recognition at bus stops, airports, train stations, etc.?
It just seems ridiculous to have officers scanning CCTV for the FBI's Most Wanted when algorithms could effectively and responsibly assist them.
Having the means in place for total surveillance and thinking it will be kept in check with "strict control" is a total delusion. Who determines what constitutes proper grounds for using the captured data? The government, I suppose? And if you want to automatically recognize certain individuals it must by design mean everyone gets scanned.
We have nuclear weapons, but only certain people are allowed to use them. The IANA has root key-signing keys, but their use is strictly controlled and made highly transparent. If we approach facial recognition technology with an equal sense of caution and respect, I’m sure we can (for example) help police catch rapists, murderers, and child-abductors without building or maintaining a database of every innocent citizen’s movements.
I sincerely hope it happens. I'm tired of seeing privacy eroded in the name of safety and I hope nobody falls for the "we need to keep up with the US and China" argument that is inevitably going to be brought forward.
We don't need to compete with others on technologies whose primary purpose is diminishing the rights of our own citizens, that's not an arms race we need to be part of and it seems to be increasingly the rhetoric tech companies adopt as well.
One piece that I read recently that I found particularly disturbing talked about aerial surveillance of US cities.
In all of human history, as soon as people get fed, they turn into a group dick measuring contest. Well meaning people who are totally nice starts waving the banners at the sidelines. Politicians dress up impeccably and speak beautiful language at the center stage - to conduct this dick measuring contest.
One of the big reason I like computers and software is that it seemed to be borne out of genuine interest than out of dick waving necessity.
> One of the big reason I like computers and software is that it seemed to be borne out of genuine interest than out of dick waving necessity.
Couple of observations:
1. Large amounts of open source projects which seem to ego-driven (i.e. done not to provide genuine improvement, but done for amusement and promotion of the author).
2. Same for conference appearances (speaking at a conference to be able to say one spoke at a conference).
3. Commercial software in sorry state in order to maximize company profits, i.e. increase dick size of the owners.
It's impossible to escape our nature, no matter what field.
> done not to provide genuine improvement, but done for amusement and promotion of the author
I'd argue that if done for amusement, it's rather self-fulfilment than dick waving. Spinning the metaphor, some of us are not open-sourcing their project to put their external organs in other's face, but rather publish "just in case" someone may be interested in bootstrapping another project from here.
> Large amounts of open source projects which seem to ego-driven (i.e. done not to provide genuine improvement, but done for amusement and promotion of the author).
While that kind of thing does happen, many of the participants in older active projects seem to be driven by a genuine desire to improve things for our fellow people.
I speak at conferences so that I can say I speak at conferences so that I can earn more so that I can afford to pay for my kids to go to university. Does that make me a dick?
Sadly, one of the things that is killing my interest in software is that a large part of the efforts I have spent have been on building things that already exist and that all that collective brain power would be better spent on other problems.
I guess I should start working for an open source company.
Finding an entirely new foundational problem and solving that by designing a generic, reusable solution is incredibly hard. Only very few people luck out and succeed in doing that.
The vast majority of modern technology are mainly improvements on past solutions. And the process is entirely darwinistic: only those improvements that come with the least amount of friction will be adopted by a large enough number of users.
The same is true for science. Few people get to crack truly foundational problems. Most people work on different ideas and approaches that refine existing solutions, until the scientific community converges around a new incumbent solution or idea. Then the cycle begins again when a new idea or solution enters the domain. Rallying our collective brain power towards a few or even a single idea or solution will slow that feedback cycle.
So, working on a variation of an existing thing isn't necessarily bad. Your execution may be better then the incumbent solution and uproot the status quo.
There are also other reasons why working on an existing problem may yield benefits:
You learn more about the process. For instance, a simple todo application isn't interesting in itself. But going through the process of building one and finding out how to do that efficiently: that's where you'll find value. Those experiences and lessons you take to the next project which may be your own or part of a bigger mission or vision.
If you work with other people, you are practicing your communication skills and your people skills. Both are hugely valuable as well. The most impact you can have isn't necessarily through writing code on your own, but by coaching and supporting others; clearing impediments and clarifying problems by reframing them.
If you cling on to the notion that building something entirely new is the only relevant measure of success, you set yourself up for failure.
I think that is what makes me most sad about Linux distros. So much time spent just to create a pleasant desktop experience or find yet another way to organize config files.
It's tough, because the variety and freedom is the whole point. But it feels wasteful.
Macroorganizational dick measuring isn't an automatic outcome of the needs pyramid at all. Far more wars have been fought to distract from domestic problems than because there were no other problems left unsolved.
> One of the big reason I like computers and software is that it seemed to be borne out of genuine interest
A genuine interest in artillery trajectories and cryptoanalysis? I don't think so.
What's wrong with that? Glory is a powerful motivator and encourages people to do genuinely impressive things. Instead of decrying the desire to excel, you should channel it in productive directions. There's no shame in doing something wonderful for the recognition. There's only a problem when society is dysfunctional enough that people can't get recognition by doing productive things.
The desire to excel and the desire for glory are two different things.
I'm not on board with those who say the desire for glory is automatically a bad thing, though (although I admit that it is something that I don't really understand).
I would say you’re right, but your implication (that this only has negative effects) is wrong. There are a lot of positive things that people trap themselves into first as platitudes they speak, but then identify with, and then feel that they must defend as part of their identities.
For example, it is a long-standing hypothesis of mine that countries become more democratic precisely because democracy is a nice thing for a government to claim to support—and then, two generations later, everyone running the government was brought up to think that their country was “democratic”—and so acts under the assumption that it is democratic, applying concepts like “rule of law” and “constitutional rights” and so forth, because they know that those are what democratic nations do.
One would prefer to have innovation without killing millions. Electronic calculators are a thing before that. It’s a natural progression, WWII just made it a little bit faster, at the cost of about a hundred million souls.
And I'm tired of people imposing arbitrary limitations on technology in the name of "privacy". It's become another one of these ideas that you just can't question without becoming a bad person in some circles. Why? Why can't we ask whether "privacy" is so precious that we should preserve it at any cost?
Much of the supposed loss of privacy comes from technological development normalizing the exceptional. Now everyone can have an unblinking ever-watching doorbell. So what? You can't roll back progress. What you can do is embrace new technology, accept its downsides (almost always over-played), and figure out how to use new capabilities to make life better. (For example, we can lower crime.) These people beating the "privacy" drum don't acknowledge that there are real regulatory and opportunity costs coming from the measures needed to preserve this "privacy" and that ordinary people might prefer not paying these costs if they were fully aware of the trade-offs.
What specific and concrete unjustified harm has ever come to someone as a result of public facial recognition?
>> What specific and concrete unjustified harm has ever come to someone as a result of public facial recognition?
The harm is to peoples' expectation of privacy in a public place, which is non-zero. For example, if I'm walking around town talking to my partner, I don't expect random strangers to keep pace with us and eavesdrop on our conversation, because, even if it's in a public place, it's a private conversation.
In the same way, I don't expect private or public organisations to watch my every move and keep track of where I go, what I do and whom I speak to, every single day, which is possible with facial recognition technology and is, by its indiscriminate nature unjustified.
You 're probably not happy with this reply because you have framed the question as "concrete and unjustified harm", which strongly implies either financial as physical harm. But there is concrete and significant harm that can come to persons that is not financial or physical and that is nonetheless recognised by law. For example, Article 4 of the European Human Rights Convention makes slavery and servitude illegal without any precondition that violence is exerted, or the person is otherwise harmed physically or in any other way than being in servitude, i.e. the harm is recognised as being caused by the condition of servitude itself. And you can rest assured that nobody takes slavery and servitude lightly at least in most European countries who are signatories to the treaty.
> You 're probably not happy with this reply because you have framed the question as "concrete and unjustified harm", which strongly implies either financial as physical harm. But there is concrete and significant harm that can come to persons that is not financial or physical and that is nonetheless recognised by law. For example, Article 4 of the European Human Rights Convention makes slavery and servitude illegal without any precondition that violence is exerted, or the person is otherwise harmed physically or in any other way than being in servitude, i.e. the harm is recognised as being caused by the condition of servitude itself.
How does one become enslaved without the threat of physical or financial harm?
And, unfortunately, the threat seems to work pretty well, even if "juju magic" itself of course doesn't.
Additionally, the threat of physical or financial harm is not itself physical or financial harm.
So that's a kind of harm other than physical or financial harm. My assumption was that the "specific and concrete" condition you placed on "harm" in your original comment was meant to mean physical or financial harm.
I have to ask- was I wrong to make this assumption? I apologise if so, but could you clarify what you meant by "specific and concrete" harm?
I disagree with you, but I still don't like seeing you downvoted.
Actually, I kind-of agree with you. The problem isn't data (i.e. lack of "privacy"). The problem is abuse of this data - by governments (foreign and you own) (e.g. being locked up because you're a spouse of a journalist, or being refused at the border for saying the wrong thing), corporations (FB banning you for supporting the wrong party, insurance premiums rising because you're speeding), even your neighbors (perverts jerking off to videos of your kids)! I hope that someday in the future, we can have a world where all (well, most of) your data is used in your best interest. Unfortunately, the current legislation is, to a large degree, made with the idea that it's not going to be 100% enforceable anyways - so many laws have to change to make that happen... from child porn & consent laws (children shouldn't have the rest of their lives ruined for having sex, or messaging naughty photos of themselves), speeding laws (different countries have different max speed laws, so clearly at least some of them are wrong and/or arbitrary), insurance laws ("preexisting conditions" need to be covered, smoking can't be singled out as the only dangerous behavior), free speech laws (you shouldn't be punished even for the most offensive jokes), ... just some example from the top of my head.
A bit off topic, but the argument is 100% correct. We just need to figure out the actual causal factors, all else is bad statistics, leading to bad policy.
> In 2007, the Small Arms Survey found that Switzerland had the third-highest ratio of civilian firearms per 100 residents (46), outdone by only the US (89) and Yemen (55).
> In 2016, the country had 47 homicides with firearms. The country's overall murder rate is near zero.
(Not saying of course that whatever they do in Switzerland is applicable to any other country, in any kind of short- to medium-term. The best short-term solution for the US might as well be banning/restricting gun ownership.)
> Why? Why can't we ask whether "privacy" is so precious that we should preserve it at any cost?
I would suggest opening up one of the many books that deal with the history of various police states of central, eastern and southern Europe of the last 100 years or so. This continent is scarred to the bone by authoritarianism, millions of nameless graves and all that, if that's not a good enough reason I don't know what to say more. Ignorance of the past is deadly.
> What specific and concrete unjustified harm has ever come to someone as a result of public facial recognition?
And what specific real benefit? If they are going to implement facial recognition, then I would like to see real (not just numbers of) prevented crimes, terrorist attacks, caught criminals, etc. I want to see what my liberties were given for.
If there is 100% facial recognition in every public centimeter square of Europe, then there should be not a single "bad guy" on the loose.
PS: why downvoting parent? Even if I don't agree at 100%, in my opinion it's a very valid PoV and not formulated in a trolling/flaming way.
When it doesn't work correctly [0]. But it's easy to think of other scary scenarios, too. Having worked in the public sector (in the UK) I know how useless they are at securing data.
Are you crazy? The persecution of Muslims in china is heavily reliant on surveillance technology. As this technology rolls out, it will make surveillance cheaper, and as a result, will make the job of authoritarian regimes easier.
Saying there aren't good, documented examples of 'concrete', 'specific' harm is akin to saying that hydrogen bombs are not dangerous because they've never been dropped on people.
I'm equally tired of the argument that it's OK to invade people's privacy because technological "advancement" is more desirable.
But the issue is really more fundamental than that -- why should others be able force me to live a worse sort of life just so they can have cool gadgets?
This is the ensure influence on the technology that they indeed plan to use. That might be good if you trust in your influence on the work of the commission. I am skeptical here, so I don't really feel too euphoric about this.
There's no way this ban will apply to governments though. Just like that right to remove PII, governments are exempt. The article already mentions exceptions for security.
Governments aren't exempt from all privacy laws; in fact, just last month the Data Protection Commission in my EU country blocked the police from installing cameras in public places.
That said, I can see some countries vetoing such an EU-wide ban if it applied to all law enforcement.
At least in the Netherlands there’s the same loophole as in the US: the police can give a camera to a private party, point it to the street and get access to the feed.
Not sure how you’re going to hang up a Ring doorbell then. And the police surely doesn’t mind if you ‘accidentally’ capture ‘part of’ public space, as long as you share your images with them.
This matches precisely none of the practical experience I've had. The police is the police, they're going to be evil bastards when they can get away with it - but in this case I'd like to see some legislative proof that this is actually true.
Here's a weird request: any video-recording device, when activated (shooting or ready to shoot), should be required to emit a low-power radio signal. So your own device (e.g. cellphone) can listen for that signal and let you know what is recording you and from where.
Maybe it's silly or infeasible but I'd be curious where that could lead. Consider that in some cultures you're not allowed to film/photograph people in public without their consent. So this is a small step toward a technological infrastructure that could enable that social convention.
>Consider that in some cultures you're not allowed to film/photograph people in public without their consent.
That's the exact case in Austria and it's not always a good thing though as most of the times it ends up protecting the wrong doers.
For example as a cyclist you're not allowed to use a dash/action camera because you'd be taping people without their consent so if you get hit by a car and have no witnesses then it's your word against his in court and who can afford the more expensive lawyers.
If you did use an action cam to tape the accident then the driver's lawyers could have the footage dismissed as it was obtained without his consent and he could even sue you and ask compensation for it. Sad world.
Austria just got Google Street View last year as the previous strict privacy laws that were blocking this were relaxed.
>
If you did use an action cam to tape the accident then the driver's lawyers could have the footage dismissed as it was obtained without his consent and he could even sue you and ask compensation for it. Sad world.
That's not the case. It still can be used, but compensation is also possible.
You don't get to put that genie back in the bottle. If you normalize tracking, by giving it even tacit approval, then any "tacked on" privacy laws or regulations simply become a cost of doing business.
The GDPR has serious teeth - by there are still a large number of companies that flaunt the regulations. Like OATH.
Anything the user says to try and opt-out will be used as nothing more than an identifier to continue to track them.
We've already seen all this play out in the websphere. We do not want this to happen the same way in the real world.
I moved recently to London and one of the things that I find surprising is that surveillance is seen as normal. In fact, last Sunday there was a facial recognition deployment in Cardiff during the football match. There was a group of fans concerned about this technology--they were being targeted after all. But a lot of people just saw this as normal.
Or in the increasing number of public spaces that are privately owned. If advanced facial recognition is being used, does it really matter who owns the cameras? Especially once that data is put up for sale...
Not really, no. If it's in a shop, it'll be operated by the shop. If it's in a supermarket car park, it'll be operated by the supermarket. If it's in a public park, pedestrianised street, or government building, it'll be state-operated.
I understand your feeling. If I can share a different point of view, that’s a regulation that can be done at the level of the country, it doesn’t have to be imposed by a supranational organization. The main benefits of sovereignty is to be able to take that kind of decision without negotiating with and convincing other countries (so you can in theory be faster).
What I want to say: the UK doesn’t need the EU to protect their citizens privacy.
But I understand what you say: the UK doesn’t seem to care about privacy, if it were in the EU it wouldn’t have a choice but to follow the rules.
> I believe we also have the most CCTV cameras per person in the world - or at least we’re the ‘most watched’ by sone other measure.
I'm very (culturally?) surprised (and was a bit refreshing) that this is something considered negatively.
In our country there's always this pressure to add more CCTVs to make the country safer, and CCTVs are generally seen as good, not bad.
I don't really know about UK, but maybe it's the difference of the trust on the government that they won't surveil? Does anybody have pointers on reasons of the difference of the view?
Blindly trusting one's government ain't a good recipe for long term freedom and happiness. It might look OK or even justified now, but nobody knows what happens in the future and this is sort of one-way road. Imagine social credit system in China and go further. Sooner or later somebody craving for absolute power and control will start abusing it, be it in intelligence or government (or both).
And in top politics there are tons of imbalanced folks who have pretty messed up views on the world and what is right and wrong (normal decent folks wouldn't stand long all the machinations and backstabbing happening constantly)
> Blindly trusting one's government ain't a good recipe for long term freedom and happiness.
Of course I'm not advocating blindly trusting the government, but we generally do trust the government until it reveals otherwise.
After all, CCTVs are really just a tradeoff; they are for citizens safety, and accessing it is very restricted for privacy reasons.
> this is sort of one-way road [snip]
> Sooner or later somebody craving for absolute power and control will start abusing it, be it in intelligence or government (or both).
I'm not sure if it really is; democracy is there for a reason. (We have impeached our president in 2017 for various reasons - which for many people in our country, was a living example that sometimes politics work after all :-))
I'm not really sure where I stand on this, but I'm starting to fear the "if surveillance is outlawed only outlaws will do surveillance."
The issue I see is that surveillance is because so miniaturized and easy that I'm not sure if it will be possible to enforce these laws against "the bad guys".
Ideally we should deploy technological countermeasures that prevent anyone from doing mass scale facial recognition. But failing that it may really be better to just have a free for all.
When this actually becomes a widespread problem we can revisit the ban. Indeed, if mass-surveillance becomes so cheap that ordinary citizens can deploy it it makes sense for police & governments to also have access to it. Until then, don't.
Hate to break it to you: it is that cheap. I an looking at a $99 Intel Compute Stick driving a build of the enterprise FR software I write, connected to a $21 ELP IP camera. Total cost of hardware is less than $150, and the software is of course expensive. There is no reason a button or embedded-in-a-screw camera would not work just fine. Pandora's Box is open kids, and it is not closing.
Deploying and powering all of it at scale, not to mention getting bandwidth (so you'd need to set up a mesh network or get very cheap mobile data) is still out of reach of most. When that is sorted we can revisit.
Hate to break it to you again: the cameras and connection networks are already there. Also any real estate property of note had a traditional camera surveillance network added sometime over the last 30 years, and modern FR systems are designed to piggy back on them. Just add the less than $150 worth of hardware per camera, perhaps you only need 1-2 FR systems and ability to switch camera feeds and you're operational.
The original comment was about criminal gangs setting up their own surveillance systems to keep an eye on the police (among other things) and the argument was that if the bad guys can do it then why not allow the police to do it as well?
Property owners doing so on their own land is a whole different matter.
I just don't see it happening at a widespread scale yet. On the other hand if you give police the right to use these technologies you can bet you'll see police (and other government agencies piggybacking off them) deploying this everywhere very fast.
This isn't enough - a ban on spreading public pictures would be needed, because otherwise it is open for anyone to mine public image sources/"open surveillance" and running facial recognition themselves(!)
>Although the installation of cameras might be justified for security purposes, the timely and automatic deletion of footage is essential. The EDPS requires all EU institutions to have clear policies regarding the use of video surveillance on their premises including on potential storage.
This is something of a distraction from the total surveillance currently provided by everyone carrying a mobile phone. As I read people's concerns, a good majority of the concerns also apply to mobile phone tracking, yet that completely globally operational and in place system is ignored?
In Berlin they have a voluntary facial recognition zone at one of the train stations. Passengers can opt in and be part of the pilot program or just go through the non-facial recognition entrance. I'm guessing most in privacy-valuing Germany don't go through facial recognition.
Actually, the Ministry of the Interior is seeking to get that tech from trial into production just now:
> Germany’s Interior Minister Horst Seehofer plans to use automatic facial recognition at 134 railway stations and 14 airports, according to a news report published on 3 January.
if EU seriously considers privacy, the only tool that citizens can have is encryption. e.g. mandate E2E on every text-messaging communication. banning FR, while this:
> Exceptions to the ban could be made for security projects as well as research and development, the paper said.
So does this mean "using facial recog. tech on video footage taken in a public area (post capture)"
OR
"only banning integrated video + face recog. tech"...
Hardly seems likely they'd ban all video cameras; So sending footage off to a remote location (possibly diff country) to process the file for faces is a trivial side step... Would love to think there's a comprehensive solution to this but it's a difficult thing to just say 'it's banned'.
> Hardly seems likely they'd ban all video cameras
Maybe for reference, NAL but that's pretty much already the case here in Germany. Save for some exceptions, that are relatively narrow (such as for law enforcement - and even there it's not whilly nilly), you can't just legally place video recording devices in public areas, even moreso if you don't own that space and provide obvious notice. Sending that data off to some remote country would be an even worse, though relatively unrelated, legal nightmare.
> sending footage off to a remote location (possibly diff country) to process the file for faces is a trivial side step
That's probably a break of the GDPR so it will still be against EU law and they are taking the GDPR pretty much seriously, so getting caught is going to be a real risk.
I'm sure there will be at least some attempts, but the legal framework to stop those exists.
I can understand the impulse behind it, but just downright banning it will mean that after 5 years they either are prolonging the ban or will have to buy the tech from the US, China or Russia.
Even if they prolong, every tech that might be a morally less questionable offshoot, will also come from said countries.
I think the smarter way would have been regulation, that makes its more transparent, more controllable but keeps a window open for technology to be developed in Europe.
There are still a load of applications for facial recognition that don't involve use in public places. There's no reason why EU companies can't stay involved in developing the tech.
That is my point though: The "load of applications for facial recognition" doesn't need to include public space use. But nonetheless those companies that yield the ai models out of their public place usage over five years will be almost unbeatable.
Wouldn’t apple’s face unlock fall under the purview of such laws? This seems fairly capricious since there is no real justification in relation to what the problem is exactly. It might be better to introduce some penalties for wrong doing before introducing an outright ban.
So as I see it is that they ban it temporarily until they can regulate it as now it can be used wrongly. I don't think it will ever get banned for good.
In EU/Europe usually a public space is stree common areas and all spaces when someone can enter at their own will legally (read shops, transport systems, cinemas, etc.).
So, anything that is not a restricted space, e.g. a manufacturing plant, is an open space.
This, the GDPR and California's Bill No. 37 [0] make me feel that there is still hope for humanity and that governments do favor civilians over companies, at least from time to time.
The sad thing is that these progressive ideas seem to come from the ivory tower of the EU, and are then pushed onto the member states, sometimes against their will.
Whilst these are great ideas, this is not really democracy. I think it's also the source of much anti EU sentiment. I wish more of this stuff would be decided in public debates. I wish elections had more of an effect on the EU.
At the moment it feels like policy is being made by academics and beurocrats. And whilst it is good policy, it still feels wrong. I am afraid we are keeping it this way because we think otherwise we would have shite policy.
Literally every single part of the EU apparatus is democratic. Every single bit.
The European Council consists of the Heads of Government of the EU states. If your Head of Government isn't democratically elected then you're already fucked and the EU isn't making anything worse.
The European Commission is chosen by the European Council, so derives its mandate from that.
The European Parliament is literally elected.
The Council of the European Union is basically 'all the agricultural ministers' or 'all the finance ministers' or 'all the defence ministers' etc. Obviously these people all have democratic mandates in their home countries, thus the body as a whole has a democratic mandate.
By no means in any way is there any possible justification for describing the EU has undemocratic. It's actually much MORE democratic than many of its members.
Agreed, but there are differences between the GDPR per members country, for example, in the Netherlands we are not free to use data derived from people that specifically said their data would be usable for science (data like tumor gene expression values). You need to ask for consent again. Or if you can't, you need to prove you can't and then you need to publish everything you derive from the data. This is different in the UK.
Even in countries where your share of taxes and social security fees approaches 50% of your salary, most of it goes to your national state, not the EU.
If you reside in a country where those laws apply, that is.
Meanwhile in Australia, government agencies can obtain your phone and internet ‘metadata’ without a warrant and (ISPs^?) DNS servers are required by law to blacklist certain domains.
^ I assume ISPs because I have no issue with blacklists while using CF/Google DNS.
You don't need TOR to get around DNS blocks (assuming that's how your ISP is blocking TPB). I configure my router to use Google's public DNS server 8.8.8.8 and that completely circumvents the "block".
Your point is correct and fair based on then way I wrote the comment but it wasn’t my intention to mislead. I need to learn how to ragetype better.
I do think it’s super interesting that the additional gambling site bans happened reasonably quiet last week.
I say reasonably as I play poker, and care if poker is banned, but agree banning gambling is a net positive. Even then I didn’t hear about the ban until 4 days after it happened.
Let's agree to disagree, I still consider Google a repeat offender, nothing has changed. The amount I found reported goes under cost of business and not deterring fines anyway.
Article itself is behind paywall so i cannot comment much, but i would really hope if such ban would be implemented that it would be permanent one, along with other forms of tracking.
On the other hand it is EU tackling it, so we can expect something as dumb as content filters or as good as GDPR..
EDIT: thankfully someone posted non-paywalled link :)
Yes, please! Stop that ridiculous surveillance. I am appalled at our minister of justice in Denmark that seems to see every week in power as a possibility to wreck havoc on our privacy.
And unfortunately whatever Germany does, the rest of the EU countries later copy because if Germany does something then it must be good, right, because German efficiency or something.
Please don't copy/paste comments on HN. It lowers signal/noise ratio and is a big pain when we go to merge duplicate threads.
Edit: instead, if you see a duplicate thread, letting us know at hn@ycombinator.com is helpful. Then we're sure to know about it, and can also make sure that your comment makes it into the merged thread.
Sorry about that, but I didn't know there were any attempts to merge threads. I just saw there were two threads with 5 minutes between them and didn't want to comment in the one that would die. Will keep that in mind in the future.
Thanks! Btw, if you see that in the future, letting us know at hn@ycombinator.com is helpful. Then we're sure to know about it, and can also make sure that your comment makes it into the merged thread.
I don't know how big a factor it was, but I suspect the desire of the security services to violate privacy let them to support Brexit. Certainly Richard Dearlove (former head of MI6 "C") was out there campaigning for it.
As some that lives in a part of the country that voted for Brexit and actually knows a lot of people who voted Brexit: I can guarantee that nobody who voted for it did so because they wanted more privacy violations.
Your link is inserted in such a way that it looks like it should support the assertion that the security services supported Brexit, but it does not. Do you have a source for that?
The security services are supposed to be both secret and impartial, which makes it difficult to directly find out what they want, but campaigning against ECHR has been a common theme of Home Secretaries for years and Brexit is a necessary precondition for leaving ECHR.
And of course, what people wanted from Brexit and what they're going to get are two almost completely unrelated things.
Nobody — almost nobody — is a moustache-twirling villain who wants to eliminate privacy for its own sake. I doubt many people voted for a 10% devaluation of the pound either, yet since then I’ve seen different people looking at the same graph saying “it’s gone back up” and “going down is good”.
But…
…one of the big bug-bears of the newspaper and politicians whom I associate with Brexit is how the Human Rights Act stops the British criminal justice system from doing whatever it wants, including violating the privacy of anyone suspected of Being A Wrong’n.
I know Human Rights Act/European Convention on Human Rights/European Court of Human Rights are different things from the EU. I bet you know that too. Do your neighbours know it? Do they even know what the HRA says or do they say something about Abu Hamza?
Everyone I’ve seen who supports Brexit sees the EU as somewhere between “greedy and incompetent” on the low end and “the unholy spawn of Hitler and Stalin” on the high end (paraphrasing). I am aware that could be Nut Picking on my part, so I’m open minded about how wrong I could be about how other people think.
There are many ways to profit from the devaluation of your currency, if you know it's going to happen (enough) in advance. I'd be surprised if there weren't some people who campaigned and voted for Brexit for this reason, though I doubt it was a motivating factor for many.
As an EU citizen in the UK having to often go around that private development north of King's Cross that used facial recognition tech[0] I also would welcome this so that it wouldn't become normalised. Oh well.
I have to walk through Cardinal Place in Victoria (a shopping area) to get to work and they have "greeters" with cameras strapped to their chest. Feels a bit inhuman for those poor workers and uncomfortable for people walking by.
“To work out how to prevent abuses”. I read this as: “to ensure only the EU and top government can have access to such data.”
I believe their end goal is centralization of power. In this case, by ensuring control on who can access such information. And it won’t necessarily be by people appointed by those we voted for. Maybe it’s the same with GDPR. I’m not so sure any big government has the pure intention to simply “protect its citizens”.
"public spaces" may include shops and other private property open to the public. Shop owners may want to use it for marketing and blacklisting known shoplifters.
You're suggesting that shop owners use a Howitzer to shoot flies.
Using such technology for this purpose is a massive overkill and prone to abuse.
I already resent some of the tracking techniques used by shops today (i.e abusing my cell phone for their tracking). I hope that some enterprising citizens (I see organizations like the CCC) publish lists of shops employing such technology.
Because I, for one, wil make damn sure that they don't get my business. Not! one! penny!
By "shop owners may want to use it for marketing" you mean large companies that would love to build complete behavior profiles and then sell them?
Edit: Even if this is somehow restricted to small ago owners I don't think they have the right to have my identity because I setup into their shop. I do think a reasonable exception could be carved out to allow monitoring for a specific list of individuals who have been banned from the premises.
Please no. I find it annoying enough that I can't click on random youtube links for fear of being bombarded with viral trash for the next few weeks.
I really don't want to be bombarded by ads just because I looked into a window display for a bit too long.
That means 5 years behind others that will be researching it and actively using and improving the tech. What a rushed decision. And that's how EU did and will always lag behind everyone else.
You'd think by the time much of the cold war ended we would have learned that allowing technology to run away rampantly has vast reaching implications in everyone's life.
I love technology as much as anyone but sometimes we have to slow down and consider the potential implications of what we're creating/contributing to. Not all technology is, in-and-of-itself arguably good for humanity.
I find it funny how "privacy" is a key issue, but other personal freedoms like ownership (say of weapons) or freedom of speech is not.
Privacy is even more detrimental to police capacity to investigate and freedom of speech for you to critize and spread information about any of this, yet most people on HN hand waive these rights away because they are not trendy and there is hostility against them in the media.
It's odd how everyone here has such an odd opinion. It's best to let what be be and regulate it asap. The outright ban just means we'll fall behind, as usual with everything.
On every EU-related article there's always someone commenting about how we "fall behind"... but what did we actually lose out on due to regulation?
Most US-originated tech we widely use today (operating systems, hardware) is US-originated because they were the first to come up with it may decades ago (before EU regulation was a "problem") and it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel, and are now using their monopoly power and network effects to prevent new players entering the market (Apple with iMessage for example).
I don't see new tech we missed out on in the last decade because of regulation, so could you please elaborate with some examples?
Will make life easier for criminals. I would love to have the arsonists who put my home on fire identified and safely locked away by a good camera. they would have had to deal with an 'attempted manslaughter' charge so they might have been prevented from causing other victims trouble for a while. So I'd love it if this exemption for security projects includes surveillance just outside the home.
I was with you for the first sentence, but the criminals I'm afraid of are NSA/GCHQ/FVEY/etc who absolutely would never abide by some silly "ban" on a technology like this.
Of course, secret agents play by different rules. In the EU intelligence agencies generally aren't as intimidating so it's less of a concern. But if you do have reason to worry about this, investing in this technology might help a bit with spotting spies.
>But if you do have reason to worry about this, investing in this technology might help a bit with spotting spies.
This seems really doubtful. If anything the wide availability of commercial surveillance data would be a treasure trove for intelligence agencies to sift through.
I agree with you that crimes like kidnappings would be solved faster but only for a short while, it is like fingerprinting today the criminals know to not leave them behind.
The issue people have with this surveillance is the abuse that always happens by the government or private companies.
For protecting your private property you should be able to film your property and provide the video to the police.
For crime in public places maybe you can have cameras that are offline and that overwrite the video every n hours,if a crime happens then the police can ask a judge for a warrant only for the cameras in the locations connected to the crime, then using that warrant someone can get the physical key to access the cameras video, I think this system can help with crime and make the abuse harder, when I am thinking at abuse I am thinking at police or other employees checking on who they want, find all their movements, find who they talked to and politicians can abuse it to find dirt and blackmail their opponents, journalists and critics.
People can easily be tracked via their mobile phone.
This is just another area where Europe is lagging behind the rest of the world (ie. the USA) and wants to slow everyone else down so its native conglomerates can catch up. Same thing with the recent regulation on autonomous vehicles.
“We can already be tracked by X” doesn’t mean that we should stop caring about the other areas in which abuse can happen. It’s complacency, and it allows for the situation to become worse to the point of no return. We’ve seen so many examples of that in the past decade.
I‘m happy that the EU is considering taking more time to implement things properly (or at least attempting to do so).
She has been such a force in the European Union during her short time in the Commission. I'm glad she's still spearheading stuff like this even if she didn't become president like some thought she would when Macron started promoting her.
The funny thing is that she was also officially second in command when she was in the Danish coalition government a decade ago, but somehow the government's official policies were much closer to _her_ party's ideology (Social Liberal) than the ideology of the much bigger Social Democratic party that they were in a coalition with.