Spooking of neural nets and image recognition...

[andrew m. boardman <amb@cs.columbia.edu>]

   A much more serious situation will arise when convenience stores, gas
   stations, and the like adopt the same camera systems--maybe they already
   are--and begin to compile customer dossiers, purchasing preferences, etc.

Insofar as monitoring passage of people, I noted a few hours ago a new
installation of cameras at the tollbooths on the George Washington
Bridge, positioned to be under a meter from people's faces when they stop
to fork over their $4.00.  The police density at this toll plaza makes
additional surveillance of would-be toll booth robbers unnecessary; while
traffic analysis on the matching of facial patterns is probably out of
their scope right now, it *is* a precedent, and food for thought...

(Cameras in concenience stores, BTW, are entirely normal around here.
FYI, the George Washington Bridge carries much, probably most, of the
traffic into Manhattan and New York City...)

andrew m. boardman
amb@cs.columbia.edu