211
The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine (www.wired.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 0 points 1 month ago (3 children)

We don't know better, we just hate you because YOU helped build this problem.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] -1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    You have no idea what I did.

    The company I worked for built firearms detection for facilities that prohibited weapons, and facial recognition for access control systems. We even built a version of our facial rec system for a school that had a problem with an alarmingly high amount of sex offenders living in the immediate area. So that system was built explicitly to keep sex offenders away from the school.

    Our system was literally built with security and privacy in mind. We insisted on air gapped networks for the architecture. We were asked by several clients if we could make the system accessible via "the cloud" and we said no. We were asked if we could build a function to catalogue all faces seen to build up a database and provide insights if someone at a later point caused an issue and the historical data could be reviewed to see what they did in the past. We said no.

    The company doesn't exist anymore (covid killed us, we were a very small company and not US American), and our IP stayed with us. I also know for a fact that no one else has implemented some of the cutting edge methodology we used.

    So no. I didn't help build "this problem", because nothing I've built is being used anymore. And if anything, we helped hold the tide on some of the stuff used today. If we had a different ethical approach we probably could have gone farther and faster with the company, but we didn't.

    And as a side point: you basically admitted that you used the downvote button as an irrational emotional outlet instead of actually reading what I said as valuable insight. I pointed out that a photo of your face literally counts as "biometric data", and that it's something people should be more guarded about. The mathematical model generated from your face is frankly irrelevant. It's worthless outside of the system that generated it, and actually worthless without the photo of the person. Because without the photo, there's no way to validate the detection.

    So good job with your baseless hate. We certainly don't have enough of that going around.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] -1 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Sounds like a Lotta copium to me lol

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    None at all. I know what we did and how we went about it. And I know we put a lot of effort into making things as privacy respecting as possible.

    The truth is I doubt we would have been able to survive the landscape because there are many other companies that have zero qualms about building un-ethical software.

    The funny thing is that in one of our deployments there was one local who kept making a massive fuss about our stuff, and quite literally making up lies about what we were doing and how our system worked. Now that we're gone from that scene, other companies have stepped in who gladly do all the stuff we refused to do.

    And I gave a very high level description. There's a LOT of stuff I won't (and can't) share details of. All I will say is that there was a military contractor that was very impressed by our stuff and wanted to drop a lot of money on us (this was after covid started and our sales opportunities died due to travel restrictions). After we asked questions about the intended use, we said "no thanks" and walked away from the deal. We did that because it was clear to us that our software would absolutely be used in one way or another in the process to hurt people.

    So like I said, not a drop of copium.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent