Where’s Waldo

Governments have been employing us to use facial recognition to erode the privacy of American citizens: using drivers license photos to turn our faces into forms of government identification. This isn’t all bad, but it sure isn’t all good; why don’t we put our skills to good use?At this point the evidence is significant: undercover cops are intentionally starting violence at protests. However, up until this point, the evidence has been pictures like these.https://ift.tt/2ySJBJa is unacceptable. It’s intentionally disrupting peaceful protest which is all but technically unconstitutional, it’s actively destroying people’s property, and it’s inciting violence which is putting the lives of otherwise peaceful protestors at risk.I, like many of you, have been comfortably working at home, uneffected by covid 19 and the protests. Besides casually posting on Instagram, I have not participated. We need to do better.By now you can see where I’m going with this. By banding together we could easily:-collect sufficient training data of obscured vs not obscured faces -Train a general algorithm to predict similarity between the two sets -use a web scraper to compile regional databases of labeled faces of police officers -Develop a front end website to receive input images.If these things are done, people can take pictures of the eyes of undercover officers and verify that they are inciting violence.Police officers MUST be held accountable for their actions. They can not be directly harming innocent Americans without repercussion due to anonymity. This is unlawful, immoral, and unethical.I don’t have experience building big projects. This is a plea! I NEED people who have experience building projects. I NEED people who have back end AI experience and I NEED people with web development experience. PLEASE SHARE THIS TO TECHNICAL AND PASSIONATE PEOPLE AND PLEASE PM ME.The security implications are obvious. This would generalize to be able to identify obscured faces in any database. This is legitimate, but my rebuttal is as follows.-image based recognition, at this point, is a widely studied field with plenty of solutions. This is not a new idea, the power is in the implementation -police officers, by their very nature, should be a public servent. While this technology could potentially undermine certain police operating in certain ways, it’s clear that anonymity is generally not conducive with ethical policing to begin with.I think this is the right and just thing to do. If you have the skills to back me up, and you think it’s worth doing, PM me u/warlax56 on reddit. Please share this with other subreddits. via /r/technology https://ift.tt/2XPePcJ