The picture your app takes isn't identification, it's excluding the people who can't produce a face image.

I'm aware of my identity, but KYC often fails my face.

(using he as gender neutral here)

he didn't say he didn't want to have photos on licenses and passports, indeed it seems to me as the support is for standard ids that he would want these things as they are part of the standard id set.

He said he was against computer vision identifying people, and gave as a reason that they are a computer vision engineer implying that they know what they are talking about. Although that was only implied without any technical discussion as to why the distrust.

Then you say they trust a piece of paper you hand them, which they never claimed to do either, they discussed established processes, which a process may or may not be more involved than being handed a piece of paper, depending on context and security needs.

>You can't be serious.

I sort of feel you have difficulties with this as well.

I love how you're contrasting the credibility of demonstrably-proven-to-be-unreliable face recognition tech against MERELY government-issued documents that have been the basis for establishing identity for more than a century.

Perfect? Of course not, nothing we make ever is. A damn bit better than racist security cameras though.

That is, generally, how it works in most contexts, yes.

> Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports

To protect against trivial theft-and-use, mostly. Your mention of licenses, in particular, was interesting given how straightforward it is for a relatively-dedicated actor to forge the photo on them (it's tougher to forge the security content in the license; the photo is one of the weakest pieces of security protection in the document).

> So I hand you a piece of paper saying I'm so and so and you just take it on face value? Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports?

We have photos on licenses and passports so that if you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and you present an ID with a photo of a black man in his 70s, we can be confident that this is not you.

If you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and there is another ethnic Russian in their 20s on some kind of list, that is very much not conclusive proof that you're them, because there could be any number of people who look similar enough to each other to cause a false positive for both a person looking at an ID and a computer vision system.

It’s ALL security theater of varying degrees until we’re using public/private keypairs as identities.

Having worked in this space (ID verification of live-humans to ID documents), yes, I absolutely think people are better at the 1:1 person:document yes/no question than I think an AI model is at saying which of 200M people this face is. Just having a prior of a physical document with their name and likeness on it already makes up 1 factor of the N-factor authentication.

Are you saying that a computer should be trusted without human intervention? If so, I have a computer right now that says you should be banned on the Internet.

It's likely the TSA employee's five year old child is better at facial recognition than a computer, too.

Stop presenting your opinion with no evidence as obvious facts on the ground that people need to argue against with sources.

People are exceptionally good at facial recognition because of the Fusiform face area, which is a specialized portion of the temporal lobe optimized for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusiform_face_area

Yes.

It’s more complex than that- initial drafts of the declaration of independence were more explicit about literally covering all people, and even had a rant about how slavery was unethical, and they compromised by cutting these in order to get enough consensus to make it happen at all. Thomas Jefferson himself was a hypocrite- he wrote a lot about how slavery was wrong and should be ended, all the while owning slaves himself.

Anyways, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to nowadays take that philosophy and apply it universally. Just because it was done unfairly and hypocritically in the past is no excuse for us to also be hypocrites nowadays.

Thank you for prefixing your comment with the quality we should expect.

HN would appreciate you not making low quality comments in the first place though. The broader view of your comments on this post seem to be ideologically instead of curiosity driven

In a bleak sense I suppose I can understand, it's not as though they can have a big, "By the way, we greedily assisted the Nazis with the worst act of industrialized murder in modern history, profited from it, were never held to meaningful account, and we're still successful," room.

And examples such as "de-Baathification" in Iraq show that even the best-intentioned actions can have wide-reaching and truly devastating unintended consequences. I won't pretend that I have some neat and clean answer to any of this, but there's a persistent sense of moral outrage that feels earned around all of this.

If this kind of thing interests you, you could do a lot worse than picking up Edwin Black's 'IBM and the Holocaust'.

Turns out IBM had a rather... Uh, pragmatic attitude towards the uses the nazi regime found for IBM equipment.

I think you're confused about civil versus criminal violations. Just because a violation is civil does not mean it can't have serious consequences.

JP Morgan was sloppy in it's mortgage approvals contributing to the financial crisis of 2007. Do you think that's not a serious matter? That was entirely a civil, not criminal matter.

And overstaying a visa has serious consequences. It's not a fine and you can go on living in the US illegally. You will be deported and receive a 3-10 year ban on re-entry. Reenter again and it's criminal matter.

But you're also ignoring the numerous criminal violations that occur with illegal immigration. Illegal entry, reentry after deportation, immigration fraud, using fraudulent documents, human trafficking, recieving social services reserved for citizens. All of these are criminal violations.

And no, investigating a possible civil or criminal matter and detaining people while you conduct your investigation has nothing to do with due process. Police and immigration officials need these limited powers to do their job. Each of these people detained will either be released or stand in front of a judge, which shows they received due process.

Ok, I'll revise it to "no due process is regularly being denied".

I'm willing to give ICE a little extra leeway right now because of the dire situation we face in terms of losing our nation by being swamped with uncontrolled immigration. The previous Administration sure had a big plan that they were very successful at executing. The mass influx has ruined two school districts in my area--they have had to spend ridiculous amounts of money on interpreters, the quality of education has fallen, and our state keeps coming up with more ways to tax us into oblivion while pandering to people who aren't even citizens! It all needs to stop for at least 10 years. If not, we will probably hyperinflate the currency (and may do so anyways--the damage is largely already done). I very much resent the Maoist approach to "tear everything down in order to seize control" type of power play. It is obscene and inhumane and uses poor people as pawns in a gambit to amass total control. That is not "democracy" that is anti-democratic in every possible way. They have continually chipped away at a citizen's franchise here in the US and now we are being taxed and inflated to death.

> I find it hard to keep these discussions separate.

...because they're not separate discussions at all. There is no example in history of mass deportations being done according to a coherent rule of law. These two things are not of the same impetus; mass deportations are a power-grab, and the rule of law interferes with that.

The only way that a nation gets to a point where mass deportations are plausible (in the sense that there are a sufficient number of people who have entered or stayed without going through a state-prescribed process) is that there is already relative domestic tranquility (otherwise, the "problem" would have been noticed decades earlier).

In our case (in the USA), we have plenty of room, plenty of resources, a wonderful and diverse array of immigrant cultures, and the capacity to defend ourselves against bad actors on an individual and/or community level. There is no need whatsoever for a government thousands of miles away (whose authority is decreasingly recognized anyhow) to tell me who my neighbors can be.

It's borderline farcical.