Thursday, February 04, 2021

Here’s a Way to Learn if Facial Recognition Systems Used Your Photos

 “Be like a postage stamp — stick to one thing until you get there.”

– Josh Billings 



I ADMIT I DID NOT SEE THIS ONE COMING: Scientists have taught spinach to send emails and it could warn us about climate change.


What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters Dan Froomkin, Press Watch



Here’s a Way to Learn if Facial Recognition Systems Used Your Photos

 The New York Times – “An online tool targets only 

a small slice of what’s out there, but may open some eyes to how widely artificial intelligence research fed on personal images. When tech companies created the facial recognition systems that are rapidly remaking government surveillance and chipping away at personal privacy, they may have received help from an unexpected source: your face. Companies, universities and government labs have used millions of images collected from a hodgepodge of online sources to develop the technology. Now, researchers have built an online tool, Exposing.AI, that lets people search many of these image collections for their old photos. The tool, which matches images from the Flickr online photo-sharing service, offers a window onto the vast amounts of data needed to build a wide variety of A.I technologies, from facial recognition to online “chatbots.” 

People need to realize that some of their most intimate moments have been weaponized,” said one of its creators, Liz O’Sullivan, the technology director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy and civil rights group. She helped create Exposing.AI with Adam Harvey, a researcher and artist in Berlin. Systems using artificial intelligence don’t magically become smart. They learn by pinpointing patterns in data generated by humans — photos, voice recordings, books, Wikipedia articles and all sorts of other material. The technology is getting better all the time, but it can learn human biases against women and minorities. People may not know they are contributing to A.I. education. For some, this is a curiosity. For others, it is enormously creepy. And it can be against the law. A 2008 law in Illinois, the Biometric Information Privacy Act, imposes financial penalties if the face scans of residents are used without their consent…” 

 

Trust in the media is down, and this chart does not help 

RollCall – “Good data is only part of the challenge; using it correctly is important too. I’m under no illusion that trust in the media is waning, but a recent chart on the topic was one of the most ridiculous visuals I’ve seen in a long time. Trashing the media is obligatory for conservatives, Republicans and former President Donald Trump, and there’s evidence that distrust in journalism is becoming a bipartisan affair. I’m just skeptical that the drop is as precipitous as it appeared in a chart published by Axios last week.  With the ongoing discussion about the challenges of polling and usefulness of public opinion research, this is a reminder that having good data is only part of the challenge. Using it and analyzing it correctly is important too. The chart, titled “Percentage of Americans who trust traditional media (2012 to 2021),” showed a couple of peaks and valleys, a dramatic rise in 2019 followed by an even larger drop in 2021, to where the data point nearly falls completely off the chart. According to Edelman’s U.S. Country Report, the source Axios used to populate the chart, trust in the traditional media dipped to 46 percent this year, which is down from 59 percent in 2019. My problems with the chart are that the graphic makes it look like trust in the media has nearly fallen to zero, as it almost reaches the bottom of the chart. In reality, the bottom of the y-axis is 45 percent, and the entire y-axis spans just 15 points (from 45 percent to 60 percent). That exaggerates the drop.  If the y-axis were a typical 0-100 percent, the movement would appear much less dramatic…”


  1. Medieval Theories of Conscience, Peter Eardley.

Revised:

  1. Internet Research Ethics, by Elizabeth A. Buchanan and Michael Zimmer.
  2. Perceptual Experience and Concepts in Classical Indian Philosophy, by Monima Chadha.
  3. al-Farabi’s Philosophy of Society and Religion, by Nadja Germann.
  4. Mysticism in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, by Mehdi Aminrazavi.
  5. The Philosophy of Computer Science, by Nicola Angius, Giuseppe Primiero, and Raymond Turner.

IEP   ∅

NDPR   ∅

Wireless Philosophy  ∅

1000-Word Philosophy  ∅

Recent Philosophy Book Reviews in Non-Academic Media

  1. On The Suffering of the World by Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by Eugene Thacker, reviewed by Michael Dirda in The Washington Post.
  2. Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society by Firmin DeBrabander, reviewed by Evan Selinger in The Los Angeles Review of Books.
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