One result of doors being controlled by facial recognition -- or any other kind of biometric system -- is that you have to get permission from someone whenever you have a regular visitor. You can no longer give your girlfriend, boyfriend, dog sitter, relatives, or whoever you wish a key or access card to your home. You have to enroll that person in the facial database. And whoever is doing the enrolling can ask for lots of further information about your visitor, or take that opportunity of enrolling to impose restrictions on your visitor, or just say no -- you're not allowed that visitor. Wonderful surveillance and control society we're building one piece at a time.
This is already accomplished by having difficult-to-duplicate keys or fobs for the building entrance, which is a pretty standard feature of apartment living. And yes, some management companies are very stingy with extra fobs, as a control against having extra people in the unit who are not on the lease, or Airbnb, or whatever. You can tell you are in a building with a lot of illegal extra tenants when the keyfob-controlled gates are always propped open, or there are always people waiting to tailgate through them.
I've yet to meet an apartment key fob I haven't been able to clone with a 'universal' RFID cloner gadget I bought in Shenzhen for $150 a few years back and some blank cards of various frequencies. You can also link it to a Aliyun/Tencent Cloud account for compute power to crack some older/low-end encrypted tags. I even managed to successfully clone a HID badge from work that was supposedly clone-proof...
Most landlords, in my experience, don't invest in the high-end RFID systems that have real security.
If nothing else: there's a market for fighting back against this. KeyMe kiosks (usually found at US supermarkets, pharmacies, etc.) have had RFID fob/card cloning capabilities for a while now. You scan the fob/card at the kiosk, then they clone it to a sticker and send it to you via mail.
To be honest, not a lot, they only let you past the building door. So as a thief, I can:
A. Scrub through a hypothetical leak of all that data, or
B. Tailgate someone (even in security-conscious buildings this isn't much harder than following someone while carrying a box in both hands)
Interesting. I wonder if they have actually productized the security research on HID iClass, etc. or if they are only supporting simpler credentials with no cryptography.
In theory, it could. Depends on whether the particular RFID standard used is supported by KeyMe or not. At a glance, they didn't seem to have much info available on what is/isn't supported.
Most RFID keyfobs simply contain a serial number (possibly encrypted or signed) and nothing more. There's not a lot of use in stealing a random number. They'd have to be in cahoots with the people running the lock software to gain anything by it.
In San Francisco the rent ordinance allows tenants to petition the rent board to lower their rent due to a substantial decrease in services if a landlord denies a request for a spare key.
This seems like a reasonable policy that other cities with renters might benefit from, if they don't already have something similar.
Presumably the landlords then don't deny the request... They just make the process horrendously long and complex...
"Please fax this handwritten form to this foreign phone number and then you can collect the key from this office on the other side of town only at 3pm on a tuesday. Oh - now you've shown up we need ID, and we only accept birth certificates."
An SF landlord has 14 days to provide a key after being asked in writing. It's acceptable to deny the request for unlawful occupancy, but not for giving a family member, houseguest, or service worker access to your home.
If they claim unlawful occupancy, you can invoke the Kim 2.0 amendments of the rent ordinance which basically prevent an SF landlord from denying you the roommates of your choice.
If a landlord denies a roommate under the Kim 2.0 amendments, you can almost certainly get your rent cut in half by petitioning the rent board.
In every apartment I've lived in with such difficult-to-duplicate keys (such as magnetic locks and what not), I've been ask whether I want a second set; and/or the owner told me to ask them should that ever be the case.
Not quite sure what's different with that situation from before, other than slightly cheaper keys.
GP was talking about the entrance to the building, not the apartment. Having your own keys to the apartment doesn't help much if you only have one key to get into the building.
In parts of the US I have lived in at least, not letting the landlord in under certain conditions allows the landlord to evict you or go after you for damages. There is no way to never let them in
Some buildings (or just the owners?) keep the copy for cleaners in a realtors lock box. Doesn’t stop a sophisticated attacker, but probably does the job when you want to fire the cleaner.
Face recognition will not allow anyone other than the tenant EVEN if they carry the very original key. Forget about duplicate keys, which may be it's own problem, but nothing compared to this.
Do Americans not get extra keys for their rental apartments?
Granted, I've only rented out an apartment once, but it was from a big local rental agency and I got three keys despite being the only tenant in a single bedroom apartment. My current studio apartment (although not a rental) also has three keys.
> Do Americans not get extra keys for their rental apartments?
Mine didn't though I'm sure I could have gotten extra ones if I just asked.
I've been tempted on many, many occasions to give the neighbors a dollar to get a duplicate key made so they aren't knocking on the door/window at all hours because they obviously don't have enough keys for the amount of people living there.
RFID access fobs instead of keys are becoming increasingly common for main entrances because it allows property management to revoke access for one person without making everyone else in the building also change keys.
> it is about tenants rights, not visitors of tenants.
That link is not the best. Quiet Enjoyment does cover the tenant's right to have visitors. A landlord cannot interfere with that right, including by blocking access to the unit by unaccompanied visitors who don't have the tenant's face.
Not sure if legally it would be considered to violate privacy.
My guess would be the mentioned privacy is relating to the dwelling itself, that is, the landlord can’t come hang out in your living room or hide cameras in your apartment.
Plenty of apartments have 24/7 concierge at the front door and monitored entrances. That isn’t considered violating privacy even though the concierge can see you come in and out.
Would a computerized system that does the same thing necessarily violate the legal definition of privacy ? I suspect it would be hard to tell at this point.
I think once you start documenting and recording exactly who is coming and going and exactly what apartment they're going to you are violating privacy.
No doubt cases like this will be tried as people test the bounds of that legal definition.
I don't think so. I know many gates cominities that have a guard that verifies identity for those comming and going from the subdivision. And logs are kept.
If you can hire a human to do it and it is fine then I don't think any automated systems would be violating privacy.
Also there is no privacy in public places and you can probably conclude that you are in a public place before you enter. Eg. Their is no privacy at the checkpoint.
If this is NY, and the buildings are rent-stabilized, he could already be losing money on some apartments by charging below market if the mandated maximum rent increases did not keep up with the rents increases elsewhere in the city.
So to answer your question - maybe? But most likely not. And it's not necessarily evil.
Rent-stabilized implies individuals that are less successful. This might be because of drugs, or various other distractions. Maybe it's their personal choice. Either way, any time you have rent stabilized, you have increased crime, increased disruption and increased disfunctionality. I think with greater restriction you are actually doing them a favor.
I've lived in dozens of non-rent controlled apartments, and it's almost always hell. You always have some douchebag that is above, or below or next to you who can't manage to respect personal boundaries of noise or space or smell. I would have much more enjoyed the experience if there was some level of enforcement.
> And whoever is doing the enrolling can ask for lots of further information about your visitor
Why are you jumping to the conclusion that is has to go this way? Very possible that a landlord would be happy to simply have someone log a face and then go back to that person if there was a particular and legal reason to know who the face was. Now sure if they wanted maybe they could google image search the face and find out who it was. But per my other comment there is nothing to prevent a building owner (landlord or otherwise) from installing a camera and filming everyone that enters a building and actually even posting that face on the internet for everyone to see. (Would not go down very well of course but it would be legal as it's a public place). If you want to hang out in front of Shake Shack (arbitrary) with your camera all day and take pictures of everyone who enters and buys a burger or a shake you can do that.
Also, keep in mind that in the article, the landlord is already using the cameras to spy on the comings and goings of tenants, and harassing them for meeting to talk about this:
> In order to let neighbors who might not have seen the letter know what was potentially coming, five tenants convened in the lobby of one of the two buildings on a late October morning to spread the word. A few days later, those five tenants — like most of the residents at Atlantic, black women — received a notice from property management with pictures of the gathering taken from a security camera; they were told that the lobby was not “a place to solicit, electioneer, hang out or loiter.”
> New York State law, in fact, grants tenants the right to meet peacefully in nearly any location in a building as long as they are not obstructing passageways. Management maintains that tenants were getting in the way even if the pictures did not clearly indicate that.
The privacy concerns here are huge, but the much more direct issue is from this quote from the article:
> the same programs failed to identify darker-skinned women up to one-third of the time.
A one-third failure rate means that on average, for every three times you try to return home, you are likely to have the system fail to identify you at least once. Being locked out, as a resident, one-third of the number of times you return home, will get very irritating very quickly.
And for the really unlucky, they may seldom have the system recognize them, so they end up locked out a majority of the time.
A 33% recognition failure rate is simply too high to consider door locks to ones home as a good use of facial recognition.
Along the same lines, imagine someone allergic to bees getting stung on the face causing their face to swell, so the system doesn't recognize them and they can't get into their apartment to grab their epipen. This system could literally kill a person
Yup. If the sophisticated facial recognition systems in flagship smartphones can't recognize you with vs. without prescription glasses, I have no hope that whatever el cheapo systems those landlords will be installing can handle a haircut or even bad lighting.
Hair and skin tone is not used in recognition. The points to build the model are taken from eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth. So as long as you don't have hair covering your eyes it won't affect anything.
Also, face recognition technologies are better than described in the comments; you can take a photo of a random person from the street and successfully find their social network account with publicly available sites. Compared to this, recognising just several hundred faces looks like an easy task.
I have to wonder what the legalities would be here of having a handyman come and remove the front door lock after being locked out at night or the like.
I'm pretty sure that would be illegal in most places. What you have to do is call the management company. It sucks, but I would just advise darker skinned people, who this is likely to be an issue for, to rent only in places without this sort of system. Being locked out once out of every three times you come home is not really tenable.
It doesn't care about color. Dark faces reflect less light, making them more challenging to photograph well. If you have less light illuminating a scene, you'll have more noise and less contrast/dynamic range in the image. You need these things to extract features reliably. It's physics, not racial bias.
Yes, but the result – people actually using door locks with a failure rate of 30% for black women — reflects racial bias. If the locks had the same failure for all people they would definitely not be deemed production ready.
Given how hard it is, even with a pretty high-quality camera, to get a photo of our black cat that actually shows her (charming) face effectively, I find this easy to believe.
It's mixed. The issue really is in that the testers aren't 'darker' people, though it's not really their fault either.
In color film photography they chose the CYM spectral sensitivities to best represent US white women in heavy make-up under stage lights. It was the 1920/30s afterall. The spectral sensitivities haven't changed much since then as a result (an example of the Lock-In effect in full swing). CCD and CMOS camera dopants are chosen to represent the spectral sensitivities that are similar to film, though physics does come charging in on those.
To be honest, yes, it's hard to photograph darker skinned people without sufficient full-spectrum light. Darker skin absorbs more radiation at the solar-peak frequency (~550nm, the light green of most plants), as the melanin is evolved to do. That said, if your film/sensor can see far outside of the solar peak, then you'll pick up darker skinned people better. Old-timey tin-type photographs could see well into the UV (notice how there never are any clouds in pictures taken way back when) and darker skinned people showed up just fine in those old photographs as a result.
Fun-Fact: the front facing camera on most mobile-phones does not have and IR filter on it, specifically to help with these issues of darker skin. Next time you are near a handle-less toilet with an IR sensor, you can use the front facing camera to see the little IR LEDs beeping to see if you are there. You can also use the front-facing camera to see security lights and what not, typically those are IR ones too.
UV light could also be used, but it is more damaging over time, and thus lower frequency IR light is preferred.
But we allow that kind of discrimination based on physical characteristics all the time.
Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content?
Because there’s a ton of “one size fits all” products which don’t fit the ends of the bell curve, and reflect the choice of manufacturer to not serve all body types.
I think it’s a poor choice for a door lock, but I’m not sure I a priori think it’s unacceptable for a product to not work for some (~10%) portion of the population — especially when it reflects an engineering reality (skin reflectivity; feature sharpness), and not choice.
> I think it’s a poor choice for a door lock, but I’m not sure I a priori think it’s unacceptable for a product to not work for some (~10%) portion of the population — especially when it reflects an engineering reality
If my employer specifies a uniform, it's their obligation to provide one to 100% of their employees, not the 90% covered by the cheap "one size fits all" company they prefer to use.
If my landlord specifies a locking system, it's their obligation to provide one that unlocks 100% of the time for everyone who rents there.
There's also an issue of scale: an apartment is a fairly major decision with a lot of other factors, that affects a huge chunk of your life. Being locked out by a small, easily changed decision on the landlord's part is unreasonable. Conversely, if you can't wear a "one size fits all" product, there's plenty of other options out there, and you're not potentially creating segregated neighborhoods, locking black people out of living near good jobs, etc..
> If my employer specifies a uniform, it's their obligation to provide one to 100% of their employees, not the 90% covered by the cheap "one size fits all" company they prefer to use.
Only if such clothes are reasonably commercially available — otherwise, they have a bonda fine business reason to discriminate in hiring, and may do so.
I think you’d find you also had a really hard time for suing if they just didn’t hire you on the basis of the uniforms they had not fitting.
So you seem factually incorrect about the height case.
> if you can't wear a "one size fits all" product, there's plenty of other options out there, and you're not potentially creating segregated neighborhoods, locking black people out of living near good jobs, etc..
This is again mistaken.
If you’re at the ends of the bell curve for height, you can’t reliably find work clothes through normal channels, and are thus unable to reliably signal your qualification for a white collar job.
The lack of height appropriate clothing impacts the ability of very tall or very short people to “dress for success”, and hence harms their chances of attaining the best jobs.
Your comments merely reflect your cis-height privilege and implicit heightism.
Further, it speaks to your implicit racism, because you view melanin as somehow biologically more meaningful than height.
Can you provide a citation for tall people being statistically less successful? All the research I've seen suggests height correlates positively with success.
> Why is it an acceptable basis to discriminate on height, but not melanin content?
Because society as a whole hasn't spent hundreds of years literally enslaving short people before deciding that strict moral and legal standards are necessary to prevent it from happening again.
> Because society as a whole hasn't spent hundreds of years literally enslaving short people
Actually, they have done exactly that. For many centuries before appropriate nutrition became essentially ubiquitous, there was indeed a highly-significant correlation between height and social class - and the lowest class often faced near-slavery conditions in surprisingly recent times, especially outside Western Europe. Of course, you're right that "strict moral and legal standards" are rather lacking on the issue. I'm not sure that we would agree on whether that's a desirable state of affairs.
Comparing the unpleasantness of peasant life to literal chattel slavery is disingenuous at best, and you're conflating correlation and causation here, as people in unpleasant lives coincidentally ending up short because of poor nutrition is a far cry from cross-continental kidnapping and selling members of a genetically-short ethnic group on an industrial scale.
Luckily, there’s a technology called a key, which opens a lock, and has no minimum lighting or software requirement for working. If physics is an issue, then doesn’t that mean the technique is fundamentally broken?
They're not really more challenging, they just have different challenges than photographing white people. Most cameras are set up and calibrated on white people.
Also could easily be a result of biased or limited training data.
Lead developer of an FR system here: this issue is dynamic range, darker faces, as well as very pale faces as well as any face that the brightest portions of the face are not far from the darker portions of the face, neglecting highlights is difficult for facial recognition simply because there is less distinguishable detail in faces with less visible feature variation. I see the same behavior in very pale Irish, those from Finland, soft featured Asians, darker than coffee Indians, and Africans. Anyone with very little illumination variation, which is necessary to distinguish their features.
Not an expert in this area, but I believe it's harder for the software to pick out shadows/shades on a darker skin, and it relies heavily on those shadows/shades to recognize structure.
My last contract I worked developing a biometric system to extract a consistent "headshot" from all the various mugshots from arrest records in the US, and I worked with the Kairos system to extract pixel coordinate data from the images.
The API calls gave me a lot more then just pixel information, and one of the data points was skin color and it was correct like 98% of the time.
Now, of course, it's possible that posed mugshots deliver a much more consistent image quality then surveillance cams would, but 33% seems suspiciously high to me.
As a computer engineer, I get excited to see latest technology being applied to our every day lives. I can't wait to see a facial recognition system in action somewhere.
On the other hand, it is hard to disagree with this article. Getting photographed everyday or perhaps several times in a single day could quickly start feeling like a huge violation of privacy. All the security cameras in this building make things even worse because with an access to your facial data and your identity, they can now easily track everywhere you go inside your building. And then NYPD could theoretically subcontract a firm that interfaces with this building to track its occupants through the neighborhood with similar accuracy.
I now view this outcome as inevitable. Such systems are already being trialled on the streets of london. However our privacy is not just about face recog - we leave myriad digital traces thousands of times a day (payments, phone, search, maps, likes, car plates, emails, phone calls, store cameras) which can already be used to trace out our lives in excruciating detail. Just one of these factors gives a lot of colour; together they deliver a very detailed profile of every facet of our lives.
Who has this power? At the moment only lawless spy agencies and politicians who control them.
It may be better to legislate for all this data to be open to all rather than trying to legislate it out of existence. Laws likely won't work due to power imbalances meaning it is used by the state with impunity anyway, as is the case at least to a limited extent now - the limits on the likes of GCHQ are technical, not legal, as they have demonstrated recently.
Perhaps a truly private life is now impossible, but if it is we should make sure that is the case for those in power as well as the little people who scurry about beneath their gaze.
>Who has this power? At the moment only lawless spy agencies and politicians who control them.
And all of the people working in these institutions. We know that they are willing to blatantly abuse these surveillance systems for personal stuff and they get away with it.
Doesn't that make it preferable to give access to all? The other alternative means those who can access to all that footage in aggregate have huge power over those who only have access to a few cameras.
Surveillance will always be subject to authority-flavored selective availability and interpretation unless the collected information is freely available to all legitimately interested parties.
This has only ever directly affected me once, in a stupid argument with my apartment administration over a $250 fire exit sign, but it was enough to make me aware of how much power the person holding the footage has. Extrapolating to victims with less soft power and more at stake is not a comforting proposition.
Complete transparency for everything is better than only some entities having all the power. Obviously, we’re not going to be able to achieve privacy, so the only other option is to have everything be transparent.
Actually, this outcome is far from inevitable - it all depends on the society and the political will. The problem with loss of privacy is that it can influence the voting body, and thus political outcomes. In the arms of power-that-be, it is not difficult to imagine an outcome where this technology is used to protect the ruling party from losing their power. In other words: 1984.
I like to think that this is the reason behind EU's GDPR and other privacy initiatives. Ironically, I think people of continental EU remember better what the loss of privacy meant in WWII, much more so than the rest of the world. It is telling that England (while it certainly had lots of casualties) was not invaded, so maybe this is why they put up with all the cameras? It certainly is not a place I would want to live in, or near. It creeps me out.
Relatedly, does a landlord have the right to know when you are in your home? Because that's a side effect of this (which could already be possible by monitoring things like electrical usage). Asking in both legal and ethical senses (which I expect are different).
The article mentions this is to replace a "key-fob". "Key-fob" implies some kind of RF read of the fob, and a potential computer behind the scenes checking if fob serial X is authorized entry at this time.
So the landlord likely already knows which fob's have entered the building at any given time. Presuming that most of the fobs are with their rightful owners, then the landlord knows mostly who is in the building at any given time.
The fob is not read on exit, so no. You can make inferences from frequency of entry, but you can't tell the difference between someone who is away all weekend vs. holed up in their apartment all weekend.
Keeping your name on the lease and then subleasing it under the table is one of the classic scams when rent control is involved. I can understand where the landlord would want to know who is actually using it.
This is a problem everywhere in the world, not just with rent controlled apartments. (Of course, those are a lot more lucrative.)
However, I'd wager courts would side with tenants that their right to privacy and ability to distribute a key are more important than the landlord's ability to fight subleasing this way.
Nothing to prevent owner of a building (landlord or other person/entity) from installing a camera and taking a picture
of everyone entering the building (outside the door). [1] Inside (legally) maybe the same no expectation or privacy in the lobby of a public building.
The end result of the landlord knowing when you are in your home does not change that.
[1] Same principle that allows you to photograph the police out in public or really anyone else.
If you have a camera that has any publicly available (not just public, also private-but-unfenced) place in it's FoV, you must register with your local data protection office and fullfill all the requirements (you must prove, how you use, make available, securely store and dispose any recordings).
If you don't have any publicly available space in your FoV, you must have a written permission from all the co-owners (e.g. in an apartment house).
So basically it is only easy if you are sole owner of the property and only you (and your family) are using it. Anywhere with a shared space, it is an issue. For a landlord, that would get no-go quickly.
I didn't investigate this further beyond my use-case (many co-owners, asking them to agree to anything is like cat herding). Given the protection the renters are getting, I wouldn't be surprised if such a permission would be difficult to get, and the common areas would be considered publicly available.
But you do not imagine that people will compile a profile of all your random photos where you are just background.
(maybe google does, but that would be extremely creepy too)
Right. We do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in public for a given location but we do have an expectation of privacy in public in the aggregate (the alternative is called stalking).
The LinkNYC monoliths have cameras[0]. If they're not already selling or planning to sell this data for exactly this kind of aggregation, I would be very surprised.
(They swear they have a privacy policy but frankly, I just don't believe them).
Even if they had a privacy policy, if the data leaked, that policy would be irrelevant.
This is an additional problem on top of the obvious problems with mass surveillance. You have to trust the Observer to have an appropriate intent. You have to trust that they can secure the data. You have to trust that they will not hire a malicious person Who will misuse their access to the data. You have to trust that they won't be sold to a company that will revoke all of the above considerations.
This is far too much to trust, and none of it is in the control of the observed.
This is almost surely about catching "unauthorized" tenants (e.g., medium/long-term guests) and finding grounds for eviction.
One of the many sorts of ubiquitous lease provisions that landlords are more than happy to turn a blind eye to for "desirable" market-rate tenants who pay on time each month, but will vigorously enforce against others.
Actually, I would guess catching people that try to Airbnb their rent-stabilized apt (short-term guests).
Honestly, I agree it is would be kind of messed up for someone to have the fortune of winning a below-market luxury apartment and turn that around and illegally rent it out for a massive markup on Airbnb.
It's interesting to see that Airbnb is where the HN mindset goes; it reflects a certain degree of privilege that an entrepreneurial opportunity is the first use case surfaced.
Cramming extra family/friends into an apartment who aren't officially on the lease (e.g. the adult son who's lost a job or is on parole, or the parents who can't afford assisted living and are helping raise the grandkids) is actually far more common among low-income, rent-stabilized, and minority tenants. Stopping short-term Airbnb leases isn't particularly controversial; it's going after the medium/long-term unauthorized tenants that really has a disproportionate impact on the underprivileged.
I wouldn’t have a problem with unauthorized family members staying in an apartment. At least they are known by the tenants.
I would have a problem with unknown, unvetted, random AirBnb users coming in an out where the host doesn’t really know anything about the person and won’t be there.
Rent-stabilized tenants are receiving implict or explict taxpayer subsidies. Why is it unreasonable for restrictions to be placed on their use of the property, when the government places restrictions on the landlord's use of the property (through rent-stabilization laws)?
I'm not "so sure", though I think gaming the system with a long term sublet would be pretty unlikely because how likely are you to find a legit tenant who would go through you as the landlord instead of the actual landlord for a luxury rental. It's more complicated than actually living in the unit and then staying with a partner or friend if you can rent it out a few days/week when you can command a good rate.
> I'm not "so sure", though I think gaming the system with a long term sublet would be pretty unlikely because how likely are you to find a legit tenant who would go through you as the landlord instead of the actual landlord for a luxury rental. It's more complicated than actually living in the unit and then staying with a partner or friend if you can rent it out a few days/week when you can command a good rate.
But it's arbitrage. The market rate is $4000 but the current tenant is paying $1000 and subletting for $3500. The inconvenience is worth $500/month, and you can't just go directly to the landlord to cut a better deal because the apartment is already "occupied" by the tenant paying $1000 who the landlord can't remove.
ok - i mean it doesn't have to be one or the other. If I were subleasing a place I wouldn't want a tenant who had terrible credit either though. But could be both. I'm just hypothesizing like everyone else.
If you’re subletting the apartment under the table, it is a lot easier to kick them out if they don’t pay the rent. It’s not like they can go to court for an unlawful eviction. Even in my relatively landlord friendly state, it can take two or three months to get rid of a tenant.
In New York, a subtenant in a rent-stabilized apartment can sue the prime tenant to recover overcharged rent. They can also report the prime tenant to the landlord, who will probably evict them. The subtenant can even take over the lease in some cases.
Take from someone whose been on the landlord side. It’s not worth the trouble of going through a lawsuit and trying to collect damages. The lawsuit is the easy part. Collecting is the hard part.
It sounds like you're talking about collecting from delinquent tenants. They can be hard to track down and rarely have the money.
I'm talking about a subtenant retaliating against a prime tenant who kicked them out. Getting the prime tenant evicted is easy. On average, they're easier to find and collect from. Suing to take over the lease is hard, but collecting from the landlord is easy.
haha i mean if we're talking about a situation where someone has bad credit, or a criminal history or whatever how many people with that background will have the funds to pay upfront (or want to)?
Having subleased to a legitimate person before, it's already annoying/stressful enough to be a sublandlord since you are taking on a lot of credit risk as is. If I'm in a position where I'm going to shadily rent out my below market apartment I'm not going to rent it out to someone that a normal landlord otherwise wouldn't pick.
Yes, but surely this if fair right? There is a real problem with people subletting rent stabilized apartments. This helps to keep the apartment for those that are supposed to benefit.
> There is a real problem with people subletting rent stabilized apartments.
Is it a problem that could be solved with regular cameras? Is it a problem that costs more than this system? Are the potential problems brought on by this system worth incurring to attempt to solve the other problem?
If I had to guess at what's really going on here...it's that the landlord suspects the residents of some of these units aren't the people they're supposed to be. Sometimes if someone has a rent-stabilized apartment, they might want to move somewhere else. Ordinarily this would cause the unit to lose rent control status, but if they simply let someone else (e.g. a family member) take their place without notifying the building, they can maintain that status. Just a guess, but maybe this is the underlying motivation for adding this technology.
The motivation suggested by the article doesn't really make sense to me. Why would high income individuals want this?
Even if there is no violations, installing a surveillance might add a motivation for tenants to move out. Make their life as unpleasant as possible within the law.
Any good faith I had for the landlord walking into the article was obliterated when I read about how they reacted when tenants met in the lobby to discuss the upcoming change:
>In any event, the letter went on to say that while some tenants complied when a security guard asked residents to disperse, at least one did not: “Ms. Johnnie Mae Robinson stated this was her building and she will stay there. Let me make something clear, this is not your building, you are a resident of our building.”
Law says tenants can hang around in lobbies all they want. Whoever the landlord is, is an asshole, and I wouldn't trust their motives further than I can throw my own head.
My sister works as a lawyer in NYC on these kinds of cases.
I can tell you that when landlords have a financial incentive to get rid of a tenant (as is very often the case in rent-stabilized housing), they can and will do anything in their power to do so, including every possible form of harassment.
A system that allows landlords to track their tenants' activities with a computer, lock out whoever they want individually, whenever they want, is not a good idea.
The balance of power is already crushingly in the landlords' favor.
The problem starts when a landlord has a "financial incentive to get rid of a tenant". At that point it's a non-consenual business relationship and it's no surprise when it becomes toxic.
Sure there are bad landlords in NYC, but there stereotype of the small cheap landlord trying to harass rent-stabilized tenants has not been my experience or that of others I've talked to here. In what way are these landlords harassing tenants? I believe NYC law is one of the most favorable to tenants.
The balance of power doesn't necessarily mean all the power. There are many times a landlord wants to get rid of a person that pays their bill monthly and is still under contract. The landlord can tell them to leave, but they don't have to. So at that point the landlord can go in to asshole mode with little legal recourse unless you are very very good at documenting their behavior.
I get where it’s coming from. I know a guy who’s been subleasing a rent-controlled studio in Nob Hill for years. It’s not a money grab, I think he’s just passing through his own cost. He’s just holding onto it as a backup.
I know a guy who calls himself an "environmental consultant" subleasing three rooms in his rent-controlled four room Nob Hill apartment. Cycled through a second subtenant in one of the rooms while I was there and raised the rent $400.
Maybe I'm misreading your tone, but you seem to find this distasteful. If this guy was stopped from doing this, and the landlord evicted him, the landlord would just capture that value. The distinction I don't understand is, why is it might be acceptable for the landlord to try to want market rate for the apartment, but not acceptable for the tenant to want market rate for a room when a new subtenant starts?
Perhaps in general, you'd like people to support themselves with work, rather than rent-seeking. I agree. But surely that view should produce at least as strong a criticism of the landlord as of the tenant?
We find it acceptable for people to benefit from their property by default. Economists would also add that having the owner benefit encourages investment in the property.
> why is it might be acceptable for the landlord to try to want market rate for the apartment, but not acceptable for the tenant to want market rate for a room when a new subtenant starts?
Huh?
kaycebasques does not give any opinion on the landlord either way. Unless their comment was substantially edited, you're making a lot of assumptions about kaycebasques' views.
I feel the same way about most of rent-seeking society. The lack of affordable housing and the friction involved with buying and selling housing raises the costs dramatically and promotes both an in-efficient market and a disparity of class between the have (owns housing already) and have nots (rents).
I don’t have many beliefs in common with the person who said this, but I do believe the following to be true:
“Liberty means prohibiting biometric data bases or any other type of human designation. There is no difference in principle between sophisticated biological marking and tattooing an ID number; both turn our identities into the property of a third party. In both, we lose our freedom. Simply put: We have one God above us, and we should not be enslaved to another person or mechanism.”
I live in a building with plenty of shady-looking people coming and going and I wouldn’t mind something like this. I’m sure the tenants who have kids wouldn’t mind it either.
All this door tech is just not in my MO. I don't need a camera in my doorbell, I don't need third parties keeping track of my visitors, I don't want my door to open for the package deliverer, and I don't want it to be my face that opens my door. "Hey Mom, here is my face, go right in, I'll be just a moment longer."
What I'd like to see is a self-contained home door lock that can use NFC or RFID, and even that just because of the convenience value in not having to get keys out with hands full of groceries. No Internet functionality, no Bluetooth or anything with a range over a couple of inches. Unfortunately, everything on the market that fills that want seems to be either completely unreliable, or hilariously insecure in either technological or physical senses.
This is actually not that big of a deal, most of the issues with more control like this is that they are enabling enforcement of terrible rules. Those rules were previously tolerated by society at large due to lack of enforcibility, so nobody is sticking their neck out for something thats not a problem.
Now that with better enforcement, it will spark new conversation about if those rules need to be challenged. Also, not all the rules are bad, sometimes they are simply regulating one kind of behaviour (I.e. airbnb) in favor of another (long term rental).
This is an absurd misunderstanding of FR and biometric security. I am a lead developer of a leading FR system, and whomever is designing this deployment does not know what they are doing. First off, for public access, FR is not secure because it does not prevent someone being forced through FR security, and in some opinions will encourage such coercion. Extra measures are required for piggy-back access behind the FR enabled entry, and at that point you may as well have a minimum wage human security guard. FR for doorway access makes sense inside a secured space, but not for access to the secured space. The secured space needs to be completely enclosed, and have 3 passive biometrics collected or something such as a key or a human guard to access to the secured space for the creation of a secured space ready for FR within that space. Are they even at that level of security yet?
We have a face recognition lock in the office, there is one guy for whom it simply doesn't work, and there is absolutely nothing special in his look. He says that phones with facial recognition unlocks also have hard time with him.
It would be easier to believe that this wasn't a grab for more power over residents, had they not seemed to pointedly use (other) video surveillance to intimidate/threaten the people who tried to raise awareness in the lobby.
Which locks the building down? I've lived in two buildings with a key fob entry system and a loss of power means the doors are locked until someone exits and props them open. Management didn't care since you could get out in case of a fire.
I "rescued" the owner and waitress of the restaurant I live above last week.
Unusually, the power went out at about 00:15. I got home at 00:30, and saw them in the courtyard. They'd taken the rubbish out, but couldn't get back into any part of the building with their RFID fob.
It is always interesting to me to contrast the presence of laws, which enforced feel like privacy violations. At least in SF, I have to give my landlord notice if someone is going to stay with me longer than 2 weeks. But, my landlord and I have a great relationship and I never see him. Technically, I am violating the lease if someone stays too long, but he would never find out or care if someone did...
Seems like the solution is to give up on unenforceable laws, or get comfortable with surveillance. The status quo of rules and laws that are not really enforced is more like an option than a contract. And I have a feeling that the excersize of those options asymmetrically hurts certain people.
I’m rent controlled, from about 7 years ago, and am at about 60% of market for my neighborhood. However, I’m handy and have been pretty good about fixing/improving the house on the cheap for him.
Still, my own landlord aside, the enforceability of contracts that require intimate knowledge of my day to day life seem to rely on surveillance or over reporting.
What is my motivation for investing in property if I can’t charge market rates? Would you be okay if the government controlled the amount of money you could make instead of the market?
That got us where we are today. Market rate housing is good but there are limits to what a community can tolerate. It's why we have these places with cute little 1950s houses but nobody can afford to live near their work.
That doesn’t answer the question. Businesses that need software developers could just as easily say that they can’t afford to pay software developers so the government should oppose salary caps on them and not let FAANGs pay as much as they do.
Someone obviously can afford to live near where they work or the prices would come down. If companies couldn’t attract workers because of the high cost of living they would locate to cheaper places or be forced to pay more.
The difference is that software developers dont even appear on the hierarchy of needs. And of course the answer markets not working is government regulations.
Public service workers like teachers, policemen, garbage collectors, etc. All of those jobs are in demand all across the U.S. If they can’t find jobs in San Francisco (just as an example), they will go to a part of the country where they can find a job. Let the cities compete for them by offering a better salary vs cost of living equation. Once San Francisco can’t get enough qualified people, they will have to pay them more and the taxpayers will have to pay more in taxes - instead of putting it all on landlords.
For private employees, they will have to pay enough to attract workers to either entice workers to work for them, or the potential business owners will see that the numbers don’t make sense and set their business up somewhere else.
If the citizens of San Francisco can’t get the jobs or have the services they want, they will move somewhere else and as the demand for housing decreases, the prices will go down.
For example let's say there is lots of local demand for a lunch for $4.99. As a restaurant I can't afford to pay a living wage and still serve lunch for $4.99, but on the other hand, there is a supply of poor, desperate people who will live in substandard, fire-hazard accommodations, or two hours drive each way that will take the job. This person will be miserable and unhealthy. Does our community let that occur on a widespread basis, or do we say, sorry, more density, affordable housing and transit must occur in parallel? What happens without regulation is more and more of the former, which we are seeing now.
So you want your restaurant business to be subsidized by forcing landlords to take below market rates?
If you can’t profitably make a business work at the prices that people are willing to pay, you would start your business elsewhere. If business can’t afford to hire people because the cost of living is too high, they will start locating elsewhere. The people and the jobs will move.
Why does everyone have to live in San Francisco. Companies are already “rural sourcing” to cheaper parts of the United States where the cost of living is lower. There is no reason that software development and the startup ecosystem in particular has to be on the west coast.
When I previously mentioned Google will put these systems into their housing project in Toronto, I got downvoted, but it's clear this tech will be ubiquitous in major North America just like it already is in large cities in China.
The article probably is right that the landlord might just want evidence to evict the tenants that pay a low rate. For example, the cameras might determine the exact number and the indentities of visitors and find that someone is staying for too long. Also, the landlord might be worrying that some of the tenants might secretly sublet their apartments or let their friends or relatives live there for free. And even if there is no violations, it can make tenants' life little less pleasant and motivate them to move out.
It is interesting that while Chinese government wants to be able to control its citizens' lives using surveillance, capitalists and businesses have similar wishes. They want to be the dictators at least within their property.
The biggest problem with this is going to be the iPhone-style inconvenience of lining one's head up properly to unlock a door. When the technology gets streamlined and unobtrusive it will be adopted by everyone but career criminals and severe paranoids. Ease of use is the issue, if the new system takes more work and is a pain in the ass people are going to dislike it and complain about 'privacy' because that's the popular topic.
44% of NYC apartments are rent-stabilized. If it had that many "crime-infested shitholes" it would be way higher in the crime rate stats compared to other cities than it actually is.
Unsurprisingly, this technology, and presumably utilizing the surveillance to find any reason for eviction, is being applied to poor people. You rarely find this being rolled out in luxury apartments. Let's be honest here, poor people are stereotyped as being lazy, sneaky, untrustworthy, and stupid, so they have to be subjective to a more paternalism.
While I mostly agree with your comment, I think that what the landlords are really worried about is poor tenants exploiting the price arbitrage opportunity that presents itself to them, though it may be a violation of their leases.
If anything it's the poors' cleverness that is threatening. If you read through the website of the management company mentioned here, they brag that they have been a force in shaping rent stabilized housing policy. They likely set those policies up to ensure a steady rate of return from the state, in return for stabilized rent for tenants.
Now consider that in the context of the corrupt, borderline criminal history of the NYC real estate development industry, who've not wasted any opportunity to cheat on taxes by undervaluing their assets, among other financial crimes.
Only the wealthy are allowed to play games with finance.
I thought it's not uncommon for luxury NYC apartment buildings to have a 24hr concierge / lobby attendant who's main task is to keep strangers out. (In Hong Kong this is pretty much the norm in all residential buildings, upscale or cheap government subsidized ones alike.)
When I was a kid and we visited my grandmother in her Chicago high-rise, I was amazed that the concierge recognized and greeted us by name the moment we stepped into the vestibule.
To memorize not only each resident's name and face, but also those of their occasional out-of-town guests, is quite a feat.
Exactly. Rich people like Zuckerberg build high walls around their homes and hide details of their private life, at the same time wanting to know everything about their users or customers.
Makes sense for publicly subsidized housing (which is what rent control is, in essence). A lot of people sublet their price controlled housing under the table.
It's not like the facial recognition is resulting in any privacy loss for those that legally live there. The government already knows their permanent address.
> It's not like the facial recognition is resulting in any privacy loss for those that legally live there.
Except knowing exactly when they come and go. And depending on how the camera works, how they're dressed, what they're carrying, how they got there, who they said goodbye to on the sidewalk, etc., etc.
> Except knowing exactly when they come and go. And depending on how the camera works, how they're dressed, what they're carrying, how they got there, who they said goodbye to on the sidewalk, etc., etc.
Where in the article did it state that people's activities were being tracked? Let alone inferring what they are carrying, how they are dressed. The latter things are the stuff of science fiction. I talked with a guy working on posture recognition for the military. It's hard for cameras to figure out when a guy is holding a rifle, let alone make highly subjective judgements like "how did this person travel to the building?" and "is this person well-dressed?".
> Where in the article did it state that people's activities were being tracked?
How about this part, that verbatim says that's what the landlord used the currently-installed cameras for?
> In order to let neighbors who might not have seen the letter know what was potentially coming, five tenants convened in the lobby of one of the two buildings on a late October morning to spread the word. A few days later, those five tenants — like most of the residents at Atlantic, black women — received a notice from property management with pictures of the gathering taken from a security camera; they were told that the lobby was not “a place to solicit, electioneer, hang out or loiter.”
None of that says that the facial recognition system was used to identify the tenants. From what it looks like this happened without any use of the facial recognition system. It looks like a security guard staring at cameras all day saw something that looked suspicious.
Here's a thought: maybe if facial recognition was used, all of the people in the halls would be recognized as tenants and wouldn't have been bothered by management? Is that supposed to be a bad thing?
Why are we bending over so hard to take management's side? This is the management that acted counter to the law and counter to what the security camera was showing:
> New York State law, in fact, grants tenants the right to meet peacefully in nearly any location in a building as long as they are not obstructing passageways. Management maintains that tenants were getting in the way even if the pictures did not clearly indicate that.
A key fob only tells you that someone authorized to a certain apartment entered. It doesn't tell you if it's the husband, wife, kid, mother in law who watches the kids on Thursdays, or friend who's taking care of the plants while you're on vacation, etc.
Hmm, there’s a lot to take exception with in this comment.
“Makes sense for publicly subsidized housing (which is what rent control is, in essence).
In the US, rent control is when the government controls the amounts charged for rented housing - it’s not “publicly subsidized”.
“It’s not like the facial recognition is resulting in any privacy loss...”
Ouy, where to even start. Of course it is. Every time you’re tracked is a loss of privacy.
> “It’s not like the facial recognition is resulting in any privacy loss...” Ouy, where to even start. Of course it is. Every time you’re tracked is a loss of privacy.
This statement is true, every time you're tracked it's a loss of privacy.
That said, you're making an unsubstantiated leap to go from facial recognition to tracking people. Where in the article does it say that people's entry and exit is logged? Where does it say that people's clothing, whether or not they are carrying objects, etc. are being tracked? Unless you can substantiate the claim that facial recognition is being used as a means of tracking people, your comment is not relevant.
From what the article writes, it looks keyed entry systems is being replaced by facial recognition. Unless we have evidence to the contrary, it looks to me that facial recognition is being used exclusively as a key for authentication. This doesn't seem any more tyrannical to me than Apple pushing facial recognition as the default mode of unlocking its latest iPhones.
Except the people doing the tracking already know where you live, and in this case, own the land you live on, so I'm not at convinced that this amounts to any kind of loss.
Guests are tracked in plenty of apartment buildings. Sure, many might not bother with strictly policing guests but effectively every apartment building I lived in reserved the right to manage who comes in and out of the building.
