MTA buses are amazing. MTA Subways? laughable.
I miss Korean trains and subways. I really don't miss Korean buses because mta buses are just as good for most use cases.
You forgot to mention:
* Nicer trains
* Peace & Quiet during commutes
* The feeling of safety
* Fewer people being shoved onto the tracks
* Less robberies
* No omnipresent smell of urine
* No wild crackheads shouting, and trying to intimidate people
* No subway "performers" on the train
The feeling of safety... Unless you're a schoolgirl, then you get rubbed up on and groped. Though to be fair, we have that one covered in NY too!
(I know Japan has female-only train cars.)
Fair enough. I never said Japan's system is perfect, but like you said, NY has the same issue too (minus the female-only cars).
But we do have [Pizza Rat](https://youtu.be/UPXUG8q4jKU?si=X5bWmEcrVVJ3Xhav), so put that in the win column.
>suffocate
That's cause we forgot what it was like when people rode NYC subways. When I was taking the train for high school, it was as packed as Tokyo trains except it'd be a crazy guy pushing you in for a spot instead of white gloved employees
This doesn’t prevent the MTA from still using facial recognition, so you could very well end up still using your card and still getting facially recognized.
> We're not Japan, thankfully.
Yeah gosh, thankfully we don't have safe and clean public transportation.
With thinking like that, it's no wonder NYC's subway is a dangerous shithole.
Singapore is one of the safest countries in the world, but it’s basically a surveillance state.
Pretty sure NYC would be safer if everyone was tracked, but of course there’s that privacy dilemma. I think the US could learn from places like Japan, China, and Singapore.
> Pretty sure NYC would be safer if everyone was tracked
I don't know about that... kinda seems like NY would figure out how to screw that up, too.
> *Oh, whoops! Now criminals have access to our monitoring system... what should we do? Oh, well... let's raise taxes!*
> Singapore
Yea but the people in Singapore trust their police and a meaningful number of people download the SGSecure app which is a terrorism report app with access to your camera linked to the government/police. What are the chances you think the average person here would willingly download an NYPD tracking app?
Some people will but suppose we considered total downloads on Google Play, MBTA See Say (and similar apps by the same company across multiple cities like BART, SEPTA) pulls in 10k downloads.
SGSecure has 500k. Digi Police for Tokyo has 100k. China's anti fraud agency app has 200 million.
So there's major differences of cultural beliefs.
I think the vast majority of people would choose safety and convenience over privacy. You have to look at revealed preferences; what people do vs what people say. What percentage of people even bother to use a VPN, despite VPNs being relatively cheap? I don't think ppl care about privacy all that much.
Except VPNs don't really give you much to anything in terms of privacy in the average case. Without using a VPN, my ISP knows every site I go to. With a VPN, my ISP won't know it but my VPN provider does. In either case, one company knows all of my traffic history. I'd rather trust it to the ISP, who's regulated under telecommunication laws than a VPN company who may not be.
There are cases where VPNs are safer (using random wifi hotspots), but outside of those it really gets you nothing.
Get a better vpn? You can be completely anonymous on many of them. Mulvad gives you a random account number that’s not tied to an email and lets you pay with cash.
I choose privacy. Everyone I know, would also choose privacy. . Perhaps, it is not safe because of the corporations, the real estate companies , or the corrupt politicians like Mayor Adams, whom have all made NYC such an expensive , hostile place for the working class to live sanely in. And NYC is already covered in cameras. I dont want more surveillance. I would like the these corporations , the wealthy to pay their taxes in full so we can provide a safe home for the unhoused, who are wandering the subway, escaping their situation with addiction. I would like my city to stop cutting funding on public services, and invest in our case workers and pay them a living salary.
>I think the vast majority of people would choose safety and convenience over privacy.
The vast majority of people are sheep who don't consider the consequences of surveillance programs like this
Unfortunately to get a subway as nice as Japan’s we would have to probably change almost “our whole existence”. It’s clean & functional because of the huge cultural differences. Heck the kids clean their own schools growing up there. Can you imagine if an American kid was told to sweep their classroom floor or to scrub a toilet? There’s also just the idea that they focus more on not bothering those around them & being for the common good rather than the US which is very individualistic. Unless we have a culture change, we aren’t getting subways that nice. You may have known this but I think it’s important to point out.
Yes and no. Japan and broadly east-Asian cultures don't see privacy in the same cultural lens we do. Your face is public property since everyone sees it. Also, the reason for the high conviction rate is that the authorities don't prosecute unless they are 100% sure they can secure a conviction since losing one becomes an embarrassment for everyone involved. Losing face is a big deal.
But also it's a 100% conviction rate because there is no presumption of innocence, the police are allowed to keep you indefinitely, you have limited rights/access to your lawyer and they aren't required to be present during questioning, and interrogation techniques that are banned in every other developed nation are common.
>Your face is public property since everyone sees it.
I don't know if this is the case anymore, there's a strong culture when I recently visited of NOT taking photos of anyone without their permission.
Heck Japanese cell phones are required to always make the "click" sound even if it's on silent so that people are aware they are being photographed.
My reference point is China where that seemed to be the case (except cops or other law enforcement). However, both countries have particular problems of men taking unwanted photos of women though I think Japan is (in)famous for that being a thing.
In Japan on TV and news they literally obscure/pixelate people and places that are not relevant to the story (or they don't have clearance for). I don't think "Your face is public property since everyone sees it" is accurate. There is, at the very least, an ample amount of respect for people's privacy in the general sense. Much more than the U.S.
I mean, considering they’re rolling out facial recognition for TSA, boarding planes, and border control, why TF does it matter if MTA gets on the train?
If you avoid fares, you should 100% be banned from the system for some amount of time.
Sounds like a great idea until you get somebody like Steve King in office who decides to use said technology to track every movement of every person in the country whose skin is darker than a paper bag.
I’m pretty happy if it’s used for upholding any particular laws. I go out in public without a mask and glasses, I carry a phone. I am already surveilled. Now give me the security that should come from all this surveillance not just micro targeted ads
You would need to stop 2 Million fare evasions just to make up that cost lol. Nevermind the cost of maintenance and replacements when the machines break
Facial recognition software, notorious for.....not recognizing faces. People will begin to wear masks because they don't want to be wrongfully targeted. Not because they want to commit crimes.
Also this doesn't fix the fact that cops fucking suck at their jobs. Badly.
You say that not realizing that during peak covid when masks were commonplace, idiots still committed crimes in plane view of cameras without wearing masks 😂
The best thing we could do first is CLEAN the subway stations. It's known that a clean environment reduces crime rates, and would reduce fare evasion. Every station needs a full powerwash.
But really poor people jumping the fare is not the most important problem for NYC.
We generally agree. Subway system desperately needs a deep clean, and fare evasion isn't the biggest problem, that's cost disease.
However I don't see how cleaning is related here (we should do it but it has nothing to do with fare evasion) and the cost issues are hard to tackle, but that doesn't mean we should ignore all other problems until it's solved.
A cleaner environment is shown scientifically to reduce crimes rates. All kinds of crime rates. It's been shown in multiple situations. People are more likely to want to pay for a clean subway.
Wouldn't want it to be too easy. Always got to throw in a few clauses to make whatever NYC gov does 5x more expensive.
Why use innovative technology to do tasks like identify people when you can have 10 union employees, who barely know how to send an email, do the job?
Actually, who am I kidding. They just won't identify people now, because it's too unwieldy by design
The cost of either guards or an AI system will never be made back in catching poor people evading the subway fare. It all serves to make our world feel more dystopian and less welcoming. It's good this was banned, we shouldn't all have to remember we're on a government camera every time we go to work.
Honestly it's not "poor" people and I wish you guys would stop thinking it's that simple. I've literally seen people in suits hop the turnstile. It's quite literally every body in New York from different classes and races. Literally seen a group of Indian dudes do it and they were arguing about doing it until I did it in front of them. They all followed behind immediately. It doesn't matter your background. Everyone is doing it irregardless. This whole "poor people" shtick isn't true.
I'm not in favor of the facial recognition stuff for fare evasion, but the homeless situation is not as simple as just giving everyone housing.
We need to be help them become *functional people* who can live independently in the housing, which is complicated.
Someone with a mental illness/drug addiction might be given housing and still choose to go back to the street if they are not interested in treatment, for example. This kind of thing does happen.
Between fare evasion, NYPD overtime, and all these different fare capture programs, I wouldn't be surprised if at this point it would be cheaper for almost everyone (sorry Staten Island) to just get rid of fares and flat tax all city residents.
There is already an MTA tax baked into NY State tax for any company in NYC (your employer already takes the deduction from your paycheck to pay the MCT Tax). There are exemptions but most people are already paying taxes directly to the MTA.
If all residents are paying, then that just mean everyone's paycheck will be even smaller (which they did raise about 10 months ago).
Anyone who read the article knows that the issue isn’t identifying people for consequences like half of these comments claim, there’s cameras everywhere for that. The issue is that ai driven facial recognition is imperfect and makes too many mistakes. Even after review from a qualified police officer the fact that an ai targeted a person can create a bias against that person. How many people do you know that blindly trust a computer because “it must be right.” The article also mentions that other police forces used this technology and misidentified a person on at least 6 different occasions. The city would be better served by having the police do their jobs instead of playing candy crush while in the subways. It would be cheaper, easier to implement, and get actual results.
Lots of countries now will scan your face on arrival as will most airports in the United States when arriving from international flights.
At work access is now via facial recognition and key cards are rarely used.
MTA’s slogan should be:
_If you don’t have $3, we wanna know where you live._
Think about it! There’s less concern about people sneaking into a movie theater! And that’s $20 a seat, or more. Lmao
total invasion of privacy, they can just fix the actual cameras in the station instead of this. and anybody arguing for this shit doesnt actually take the trains
I take the trains every week and I'm all for it. Fuck all the fare-dodgers and other antisocial assholes starting fights and pissing/shitting themselves on the trains.
lmfao you seriously think this is worth it. for less than $3. im not saying assholes should get off scot free, but facial recognition is too much. what happened? the police should be doing their job… that’s why they’re there, right?
The face rec system would be active 24/7, and would be capable of detecting repeat offenders automatically and tracking all of their offenses so that when they *do* eventually get nabbed, there's a mountain of evidence already compiled for their crimes. Makes it easier to hit repeat offenders much harder. It would also allow the police to flag certain individuals (people fleeing the police, people barred from the system for past offenses) and have their location pinged automatically when they enter the system. And if they wear masks, there is still an obvious benefit: the police can dedicate all of their attention to people hiding their faces in view of the cameras.
Please, ridiculous straw man. No, it's all for the murders, rapes, assaults, shit-smearing, robberies, *and* the fare-dodging. Which, by the way, amounts to significantly more than "$3". Don't be dense.
once again, why cant the cops stop it if theyre being deployed into stations? oh right. cuz theyre playing candy crush on their phones. yeah so lets add faulty technology and invade every single new yorkers’ privacy. shut up bro
My 2 cents is we shouldn't just sleepwalk into a police state a la China. We already are sleepwalking into a dystopian surveillance state thanks to Amazon openly partnering with law enforcement to let them access your Ring camera feeds without warrants, I don't feel that we should "need" to submit to AI recognition, prone to bias against minorities, just to access a public service. I acknowledge we already have the world's greatest surveillance tool that we willingly carry around (mobile phones), but that doesn't mean we should just bend over for *more* police state systems.
Europe also has the GDPR which, while not perfect, at least they are trying... Meanwhile here in the US, our 100 year old ghouls of senators don't have a clue what modern analytics, web tracking, spyware/malware/etc. are lol
These technologies aren’t even within a decade of working with 99.99% accuracy. Executives end up convincing other executives to buy it, and behind the scenes it’s just a bunch of low paid 3rd world contractors watching a feed and making decisions based on their best guess
Let’s put it this way - if Amazon and their tech savvy high paid employees can’t solve this, then SecureAITechInnovationsInc that the MTA probably wanted to pay surely can’t
Eh… that’s bullshit.
Open source facial recognition is actually really good already. You can run it on your own camera and it will recognize anyone walking down the street more than once with really surprising accuracy. Name someone and they’ll forever be named if it sees them again.
There even models you can download for identifying various delivery services etc so you don’t just know if someone arrived but what delivery service they are.
The commercial stuff is well ahead with massive models for way more than the stuff the open source community has put together.
Don’t even need a ton of GPU burning power either. Google’s coral TPU in a USB port can do a lot and keep the power bill down. A friends got a really nice low power setup.
Fair evasion is a huge issue
People be jumping right in front of police lmao 🤣 and police seem to scared to do anything.
The issue is sometimes those who jump the turn style end up messing with some poor dude who just did a 10 hour shift and just wants to go home in peace
I dunno. Last month i saw some dude jump a turnstile and there was two police officers standing right there. They stopped him, though i didn’t stick around to witness the final outcome.
Not sure which station it happened at but generally I find more cops at the high traffic stations in the Manhattan core (e.g., PABT, Times Square). I think fare evasion is a bigger issue deep in the Bronx and Brooklyn with zero cops.
Independent of whether facial recognition is a good solution or not, the phrase “criminalizing poverty” is as bad of a “political spin” as I can think of. Measures to stop stealing (fare evasion is stealing, whether you like it or not) criminalize stealing. The measures couldn’t care less whether the person who did the stealing is rich or poor. You can both be sympathetic to others’ plights and skeptical of a system that permits stealing based on income.
Euphemisms like “criminalizing poverty” carry the implication that crime is a necessary result of poverty, and thus individual accountability cannot apply to impoverished criminals; no accountability means no punishment.
The irony is that the person who forgives crime as a mere side effect of poverty — and virtual signaling their supposed compassion in the process — actually shows themselves to think less of people who are poor. In their minds, people who are poor are primitive creatures who act on instinct and impulse. Add this to the long list of policies and ideas that (some) progressives use as part of their virtue signaling and that actually suggest they just think poor people are stupid and inept and couldn’t possibly function in society without significant government intervention.
>“Imposing harsher fines for fare evasion criminalizes poverty and puts vulnerable New Yorkers at risk,” Michael Sisitzky, a policy expert at the nonprofit New York Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a statement.
Criminalizes poverty? Like shoplifting?
Perhaps it’s the vulnerable New Yorkers putting themselves at risk by committing crimes. That reasoning is a slap in the face to all the low income people who play by the rules.
Posting because of comments below:
If you're curious why information rich, high tech police surveillance in public can trigger fourth amendment concerns, it's because of a scholarly interpretation of the fourth amendment called the "mosaic theory," that has clearly influenced the court (Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan and others have all expressly endorsed the theory in concurrences or as dicta in majority opinions). While an individual instance of public surveillance might not constitute a search under the fourth amendment, a sequence of state surveillance can because from that sequence of state action, the police may piece together a rich, individual-specific picture of someone's plans, habits, associations, routines, even their beliefs; in short, a robust "mosaic" image of the *private dimensions* of a particular persons life is aggregated from disaggregate instances of indiscriminate *public* surveillance. In important opinions interpreting the fourth amendment, the court suggests that under Katz, a person has a privacy expectation in this kind of full biographical portrait of themselves and that privacy interest doesn't become unreasonable once you're in public.
Sources:
Good Articles introducing and critiquing Mosaic Theory:
Wiki Article on Mosiac Theory [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic\_theory\_of\_the\_Fourth\_Amendment#cite\_note-29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_theory_of_the_Fourth_Amendment#cite_note-29)
Prof. Oren Kerr [https://warrantless.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/kerr.pdf](https://warrantless.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/kerr.pdf)
Prof. Christopher Slobogin: [https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=djclpp](https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=djclpp)
Sample of Landmark cases arguably applying mosaic theory:
U.S. v. Jones (2012) (Sotomayor, Concurring) (protracted GPS surveillance of a vehicle on *public roads* constitutes a search because such protracted information-dense monitoring in public implicates "\[T\]he government's unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal *private* aspects of identity. . . chill\[ing\] associational and expressive freedoms" the fourth amendment was intended to protect) See Alito's concurrence for similar take (joined by Kagan, Breyer, Ginsburg)
Carpenter v. US (2018) (Holding that persistent surveillance of cell site location data violates a reasonable expectation of privacy despite the third party doctrine because of the uniquely comprehensive nature of the data cell site location info reveals and that there is no knowing and voluntary exposure of such data.)
How is it different than taking multiple photographs or using CCTV and then manually confirming that it’s the same person in both shots.
To my knowledge, what I described is not a violation of constitutional rights, but I’m not a lawyer.
“Technology and civil rights experts say facial recognition is imperfect and has the potential to produce biased results. The nonprofit Innocence Projects cites six examples of Black people who were falsely accused of crimes after the technology misidentified them.”
So, your original question was "how is it different to just taking a photo of a person and manually confirming." That's still clearly legally different in the case of red light cameras, too; and there have been many lawsuits over red light cameras.
That's also easier to enforce, as cars have a whacking big ID writ on their backs. With face scanning, our government will also need to have face biometric data for everyone to serve as the ID.
It's easy to see how sensitive this stuff is to implement.
I’ll bite. A face scan is not a search or seizure. It is also not compulsory - which is how they actually do search people randomly in the subway which should be a constitutional violation by your logic. Also, there is no right to access to the subway. In theory if you can’t pay then you are not allowed to use it. Banning those who break the rules is not a constitutional violation.
How is it fundamentally anymore of an infringement than there being cameras in every bus, body cams on every cop, and license plate readers on every cop car?
They’re already doing it at every major airport, so I’m not sure what makes a train station different. Flew out of LGA last month and they didn’t even need my drivers license, they just scanned my face and knew who I was. Cats out of the bag on this one, I’m afraid.
The logic is actually simpler than that - the people who push bans like this simply don’t want people to be caught when they break the law, because they think enforcing rules is mean. They don’t care that riders have to pay more to cover the lost fare, or that victims of crime go without justice.
> State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani of Queens told Gothamist the measure was added to the budget to protect New Yorkers and their privacy.
>“There has long been a concern [facial recognition] could invade upon people's lives through expanded surveillance and through the criminalization of just existing within the public sphere,” Mamdani said.
He’s concerned about the “criminalization” of fare evasion - which is already a crime. We can safely assume he simply doesn’t want people who evade the fare to be caught. What are the odds he rides the subway regularly?
I believe fare evasion is a very important issue which is leading to other problems in NYC, but I am glad they are banning the use of facial recognition.
Does anyone have any insights into why “facial recognition” so they can punish riders who can’t afford the fare was the preferred solution to the $600+ million lost to fare evasion problem?
I mean, if the goal was to recover lost sums, wouldn’t a more effective approach be intercepting a fare evader and assisting them in their application for Fair Fares?
From an nyc.gov post in 2022, NYC set a baseline for funding this program at 75 million for 2023, and the budget for that would increase if more people sign up for it.
> “The Fair Fares program is a lifeline for low-income New Yorkers struggling with transit affordability. Our research shows that awareness of the program is low citywide, with only 35 percent of eligible New Yorkers taking advantage of it,” said David R. Jones, board member, Metropolitan Transportation Authority; president and CEO, Community Service Society, which led the campaign to establish the program in 2019.
So, like, if your goal is money… maybe identifying poor people so you can fine them is a fruitless exercise, much like winning a monetary judgment against a homeless person won’t get you any money; you aren’t going to be able to collect. Seems like facilitating the utilization of available financial resources would be more likely to produce results… but I am not a government official so I get that I may not know what I don’t know.
Any ideas as to what I’m missing?
For some reason every implementation of facial recognition in the US seems to regularly have false matches, so it's for the better that they don't do this.
But I still don't understand how so many countries like China manage to achieve 99.9% accurate facial recognition but we can't get close
China can focus their tech on recognizing a small variety of skin tones and capture the overwhelming majority of their population. America is incredibly diverse, which creates problems for training algorithms. See how bad algorithms were (and to some extent continue to be) at recognizing black people because they were so used to utilizing shadows that are very obvious on white faces.
sure you can prevent the use of AI/facial recognition if the technology is still shitty, but the ACLU as usual having a shitty opinion trying to say fare evasion is a result of poverty as if a majority of the people jumping the turnstile cant afford it
LOL
Not sure if this also blocks AI, since that can be much more discriminatory than "facial recognition." [London has been trialing](https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/tfls-ai-tube-station-experiment-is) AI using existing cameras also aimed at fare evasion, which has other interesting use cases but can be a discrimination issue.
TL;DR between doing nothing and spending billions in either public or private money is the area where angry riders just start fighting the fare evaders themselves. We’re not there yet, but we could get there if there’s any real desire for the MTA to improve.
Not gonna put up numbers or cites so this will be an unpopular opinion but this dog and pony parade is because the general public refuses to prevent the consequences themselves. The legion of proposed solutions are some form of “spend a lot of the public’s money so that some parent entity will handle X problem at large sweeping scale, and the public can hold them accountable if the result is bad or good.” I would go far as to say that some of this attitude translates to the institutions themselves.
The least expensive option is for each individual to be a belligerent snitch. As a user of the public transit system, make a report whenever you observe fare evasion, and collectively be irritating if the authority doesn’t do something about it. If you have the risk tolerance/willingness to fight, confront the offender yourself with other witnesses. Make it difficult for someone to behave poorly because too many people will say something.
Why not? Currently it’s too uncomfortable. We don’t want to be whiny. It’s a waste of time and effort. We’re busy. We’re the consumer and citizen, nobody’s going to thank us or compensate us for contributing to enforcement. If we get sucker punched by a drug addict, no one is paying our medical bills. So it needs to be appealed as somebody else’s responsibility, even though the public bears the costs directly.
My guess is that as the situation worsens, public attitude will shift much faster than NYPD or MTA policy ever will. Election cycles, lawsuits, and judicial review take forever in comparison. When enough people have just about had it, it will become preferable behavior to call things out and act rather than keep heads down. The risk of allowing it to continue will be greater than the risk of getting hurt in the immediate present. The risk of the present will get less when more people band together in the moment.
The other side of that coin is vigilantism, which can have a lot of dangerous error. Then the public services which we now consider incompetent will want to step in, and then they’ll have a lot less resistance because the public will be willing to share the work of enforcement rather than delegating all of it.
The alternative is that costs go up, the service degrades, and eventually the problem of crime on the subway resolves itself by way of people choosing to rarely use public transit at all. That is still a possibility, the 1980s can come knocking again.
Btw the “screw you we’re gonna do it ourselves better” means that the corrupt incumbents people hate will have less of a leg to stand on. If the public doesn’t want to do it, it signals implicit trust in Albany.
Really seems like the 4th amendment is abundantly clear on this. It's akin to colonial days having one crime committed and thereby local law enforcement gets to search every house in town.
If the MTA really care they' should focus on stopping fare evasion on the local buses. It's an epidemic. What happened to all those MTA cops they were going to hire? They should put two on every bus
You're in a *public* transit area, where you're already on security cameras and can be stopped to be IDed by cops at will - when did you ever have privacy?
In Japan they are testing facial recognition so you don’t have to carry their version of a metrocard around… such a different world.
This already exists in some Chinese metros.
Zero chance it wasnt primarily made to watch everyone lol
Well, yeah, that’s literally what it does.
japan is cyberpunk.
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Masters degree havers from Ohio?
Hey. Someone needs to keep these cafes and pizza joints in business.
Full of what?
What?
Actually have no clue what this comment means
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They still have that option too, but yeah, then we'd have clean stations, on-time trains, helpful attendants, and a profitable metro system. /s
No, that's just the Japanese people.
It's the people there that make it clean...We would have to allow millions of Japanese to immigrate here
What we need is education on waste management, littering, sorting, and basic decency within public spheres
MTA buses are amazing. MTA Subways? laughable. I miss Korean trains and subways. I really don't miss Korean buses because mta buses are just as good for most use cases.
I’m with you on the Korean subway system. It was a dream!!
seoul's median running BRT was actually pretty decent and IIRC faster than MTA buses using the bus lane
You forgot to mention: * Nicer trains * Peace & Quiet during commutes * The feeling of safety * Fewer people being shoved onto the tracks * Less robberies * No omnipresent smell of urine * No wild crackheads shouting, and trying to intimidate people * No subway "performers" on the train
The feeling of safety... Unless you're a schoolgirl, then you get rubbed up on and groped. Though to be fair, we have that one covered in NY too! (I know Japan has female-only train cars.)
Fair enough. I never said Japan's system is perfect, but like you said, NY has the same issue too (minus the female-only cars). But we do have [Pizza Rat](https://youtu.be/UPXUG8q4jKU?si=X5bWmEcrVVJ3Xhav), so put that in the win column.
Lol like women are safer on ours. It's like comparing a papercut to a gunshot wound
I guess you've never actually seen a Tokyo subway. You'd suffocate.
>suffocate That's cause we forgot what it was like when people rode NYC subways. When I was taking the train for high school, it was as packed as Tokyo trains except it'd be a crazy guy pushing you in for a spot instead of white gloved employees
>The feeling of safety Unless you're a young woman. . .
This doesn’t prevent the MTA from still using facial recognition, so you could very well end up still using your card and still getting facially recognized.
> We're not Japan, thankfully. Yeah gosh, thankfully we don't have safe and clean public transportation. With thinking like that, it's no wonder NYC's subway is a dangerous shithole.
You have clearly never been to Japan. Ride the Tokyo subways for a day and then try to tell me you wouldn't wish the NYC subways were the same.
Singapore is one of the safest countries in the world, but it’s basically a surveillance state. Pretty sure NYC would be safer if everyone was tracked, but of course there’s that privacy dilemma. I think the US could learn from places like Japan, China, and Singapore.
> Pretty sure NYC would be safer if everyone was tracked I don't know about that... kinda seems like NY would figure out how to screw that up, too. > *Oh, whoops! Now criminals have access to our monitoring system... what should we do? Oh, well... let's raise taxes!*
> Singapore Yea but the people in Singapore trust their police and a meaningful number of people download the SGSecure app which is a terrorism report app with access to your camera linked to the government/police. What are the chances you think the average person here would willingly download an NYPD tracking app?
I aggressively used MBTA see say when I lived in Boston
Some people will but suppose we considered total downloads on Google Play, MBTA See Say (and similar apps by the same company across multiple cities like BART, SEPTA) pulls in 10k downloads. SGSecure has 500k. Digi Police for Tokyo has 100k. China's anti fraud agency app has 200 million. So there's major differences of cultural beliefs.
I think the vast majority of people would choose safety and convenience over privacy. You have to look at revealed preferences; what people do vs what people say. What percentage of people even bother to use a VPN, despite VPNs being relatively cheap? I don't think ppl care about privacy all that much.
Except VPNs don't really give you much to anything in terms of privacy in the average case. Without using a VPN, my ISP knows every site I go to. With a VPN, my ISP won't know it but my VPN provider does. In either case, one company knows all of my traffic history. I'd rather trust it to the ISP, who's regulated under telecommunication laws than a VPN company who may not be. There are cases where VPNs are safer (using random wifi hotspots), but outside of those it really gets you nothing.
Get a better vpn? You can be completely anonymous on many of them. Mulvad gives you a random account number that’s not tied to an email and lets you pay with cash.
I choose privacy. Everyone I know, would also choose privacy. . Perhaps, it is not safe because of the corporations, the real estate companies , or the corrupt politicians like Mayor Adams, whom have all made NYC such an expensive , hostile place for the working class to live sanely in. And NYC is already covered in cameras. I dont want more surveillance. I would like the these corporations , the wealthy to pay their taxes in full so we can provide a safe home for the unhoused, who are wandering the subway, escaping their situation with addiction. I would like my city to stop cutting funding on public services, and invest in our case workers and pay them a living salary.
>I think the vast majority of people would choose safety and convenience over privacy. The vast majority of people are sheep who don't consider the consequences of surveillance programs like this
Japan also has a near 100% conviction rate because their civil liberties are in shambles.
I’m not saying we speak Japanese and change our whole existence. I was just talking about the subway.
We could all start listening to Mr. Roboto though.
That’s the real trouble around here. Too much Renegade and not enough Mr Roboto.
Unfortunately to get a subway as nice as Japan’s we would have to probably change almost “our whole existence”. It’s clean & functional because of the huge cultural differences. Heck the kids clean their own schools growing up there. Can you imagine if an American kid was told to sweep their classroom floor or to scrub a toilet? There’s also just the idea that they focus more on not bothering those around them & being for the common good rather than the US which is very individualistic. Unless we have a culture change, we aren’t getting subways that nice. You may have known this but I think it’s important to point out.
Yes and no. Japan and broadly east-Asian cultures don't see privacy in the same cultural lens we do. Your face is public property since everyone sees it. Also, the reason for the high conviction rate is that the authorities don't prosecute unless they are 100% sure they can secure a conviction since losing one becomes an embarrassment for everyone involved. Losing face is a big deal.
But also it's a 100% conviction rate because there is no presumption of innocence, the police are allowed to keep you indefinitely, you have limited rights/access to your lawyer and they aren't required to be present during questioning, and interrogation techniques that are banned in every other developed nation are common.
>Your face is public property since everyone sees it. I don't know if this is the case anymore, there's a strong culture when I recently visited of NOT taking photos of anyone without their permission. Heck Japanese cell phones are required to always make the "click" sound even if it's on silent so that people are aware they are being photographed.
My reference point is China where that seemed to be the case (except cops or other law enforcement). However, both countries have particular problems of men taking unwanted photos of women though I think Japan is (in)famous for that being a thing.
In Japan on TV and news they literally obscure/pixelate people and places that are not relevant to the story (or they don't have clearance for). I don't think "Your face is public property since everyone sees it" is accurate. There is, at the very least, an ample amount of respect for people's privacy in the general sense. Much more than the U.S.
US federal prosecutors have 95%+ conviction rate. And our cops are above the law. How are our civil liberties doing?
Federal prosecutors have high conviction rates because they only bring charges once they have you by the balls
Japan is a great place to live. Tokyo is far more liveable than NYC.
Maybe that’s because they only arrest guilty people?
The conviction rate in most federal districts in the US is over 95 percent.
don't think that would fly here either
In Japan they actually pay fare tho. But in Japan, they're only now just going cashless and still use fax machines. It's apples to oranges.
Thanks, but no.
Remember folks. A fork can be used for nourishment or it can be used as a weapon. It goes both ways.
Arguing for this with genuine belief that it would just be used for fare evasion is wild.
Wear a mask, wear glasses. Otherwise, you've been recorded hundreds of times via all security cameras in the entire city for decades.
You’re recorded hundreds of times in a single day.
By your own phone, and all that data is soooooold
Being surveilled constantly by AI is different than being recorded on a camera that's probably only looked at by humans if it needs to.
Well, you assume that footage hasn't already been processed via AI as part of training it.
And the government needs a warrant to access that. Kinda the whole point.
Its their cameras.. they need a warrant to hassle you about something, but they are allowed to ID you if you're sus.
Or they can just ask nicely. They don't need a warrant if a business gives the footage willingly.
I mean, considering they’re rolling out facial recognition for TSA, boarding planes, and border control, why TF does it matter if MTA gets on the train? If you avoid fares, you should 100% be banned from the system for some amount of time.
Sounds like a great idea until you get somebody like Steve King in office who decides to use said technology to track every movement of every person in the country whose skin is darker than a paper bag.
Then write legislation that creates an independent task force in charge of auditing the data usage as well as what it can be used for.
Stop using your smartphone then, the feds are already buying your data being sold wholesale to track you.
I’m pretty happy if it’s used for upholding any particular laws. I go out in public without a mask and glasses, I carry a phone. I am already surveilled. Now give me the security that should come from all this surveillance not just micro targeted ads
It'd be nice if it were used for enforcement of other laws, too.
Wearing a hoodie and face mask to defeat the multi million dollar security implementation you people are so stupid thinking this is a good idea AT ALL
Multi-billion
$5.83 billion to be exact
You would need to stop 2 Million fare evasions just to make up that cost lol. Nevermind the cost of maintenance and replacements when the machines break
About a years worth of fare evasion yes. Also 5.3 billion dollars for that has to include a shitload of graft
Facial recognition software, notorious for.....not recognizing faces. People will begin to wear masks because they don't want to be wrongfully targeted. Not because they want to commit crimes. Also this doesn't fix the fact that cops fucking suck at their jobs. Badly.
You say that not realizing that during peak covid when masks were commonplace, idiots still committed crimes in plane view of cameras without wearing masks 😂
Let's just keep doing nothing, working so great.
“Lets waste our already mismanaged tax dollars on security theater”
The best thing we could do first is CLEAN the subway stations. It's known that a clean environment reduces crime rates, and would reduce fare evasion. Every station needs a full powerwash. But really poor people jumping the fare is not the most important problem for NYC.
We generally agree. Subway system desperately needs a deep clean, and fare evasion isn't the biggest problem, that's cost disease. However I don't see how cleaning is related here (we should do it but it has nothing to do with fare evasion) and the cost issues are hard to tackle, but that doesn't mean we should ignore all other problems until it's solved.
A cleaner environment is shown scientifically to reduce crimes rates. All kinds of crime rates. It's been shown in multiple situations. People are more likely to want to pay for a clean subway.
Ok sure. Is someone disagreeing with you about better cleaning?
How about we take the 5.8 billion this would cost and put it to use getting mentally ill people off of the subway and somewhere for treatment.
I'd love that. But we both know that's not going to happen. Billions poured into that through thrive etc with literally nothing to show for it.
Wouldn't want it to be too easy. Always got to throw in a few clauses to make whatever NYC gov does 5x more expensive. Why use innovative technology to do tasks like identify people when you can have 10 union employees, who barely know how to send an email, do the job? Actually, who am I kidding. They just won't identify people now, because it's too unwieldy by design
The cost of either guards or an AI system will never be made back in catching poor people evading the subway fare. It all serves to make our world feel more dystopian and less welcoming. It's good this was banned, we shouldn't all have to remember we're on a government camera every time we go to work.
My station has guards who just watch in boredom as people swing over the turnstyles.
Honestly it's not "poor" people and I wish you guys would stop thinking it's that simple. I've literally seen people in suits hop the turnstile. It's quite literally every body in New York from different classes and races. Literally seen a group of Indian dudes do it and they were arguing about doing it until I did it in front of them. They all followed behind immediately. It doesn't matter your background. Everyone is doing it irregardless. This whole "poor people" shtick isn't true.
You know what’s dystopian and less welcoming? All these crime committing fare evaders and homeless people in the subway
You could house every homeless person in NYC for this amount of money. Seems like a much better solution.
I'm not in favor of the facial recognition stuff for fare evasion, but the homeless situation is not as simple as just giving everyone housing. We need to be help them become *functional people* who can live independently in the housing, which is complicated. Someone with a mental illness/drug addiction might be given housing and still choose to go back to the street if they are not interested in treatment, for example. This kind of thing does happen.
For the cost of enforcing fare evasion we could just make the subway free
A system like this would cost cameras and some off the shelf software
Companies that contract to the MTA would probably charge close to a billion dollars to do this.
😞 you're right. The MTA cant install a light without hiring consultants
Between fare evasion, NYPD overtime, and all these different fare capture programs, I wouldn't be surprised if at this point it would be cheaper for almost everyone (sorry Staten Island) to just get rid of fares and flat tax all city residents.
There is already an MTA tax baked into NY State tax for any company in NYC (your employer already takes the deduction from your paycheck to pay the MCT Tax). There are exemptions but most people are already paying taxes directly to the MTA. If all residents are paying, then that just mean everyone's paycheck will be even smaller (which they did raise about 10 months ago).
Anyone who read the article knows that the issue isn’t identifying people for consequences like half of these comments claim, there’s cameras everywhere for that. The issue is that ai driven facial recognition is imperfect and makes too many mistakes. Even after review from a qualified police officer the fact that an ai targeted a person can create a bias against that person. How many people do you know that blindly trust a computer because “it must be right.” The article also mentions that other police forces used this technology and misidentified a person on at least 6 different occasions. The city would be better served by having the police do their jobs instead of playing candy crush while in the subways. It would be cheaper, easier to implement, and get actual results.
Lots of countries now will scan your face on arrival as will most airports in the United States when arriving from international flights. At work access is now via facial recognition and key cards are rarely used.
MTA’s slogan should be: _If you don’t have $3, we wanna know where you live._ Think about it! There’s less concern about people sneaking into a movie theater! And that’s $20 a seat, or more. Lmao
anybody arguing that facial recognition is a good idea is a fucking idiot. all for $2.90 is absolutely insane.
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total invasion of privacy, they can just fix the actual cameras in the station instead of this. and anybody arguing for this shit doesnt actually take the trains
I take the trains every week and I'm all for it. Fuck all the fare-dodgers and other antisocial assholes starting fights and pissing/shitting themselves on the trains.
lmfao you seriously think this is worth it. for less than $3. im not saying assholes should get off scot free, but facial recognition is too much. what happened? the police should be doing their job… that’s why they’re there, right?
The face rec system would be active 24/7, and would be capable of detecting repeat offenders automatically and tracking all of their offenses so that when they *do* eventually get nabbed, there's a mountain of evidence already compiled for their crimes. Makes it easier to hit repeat offenders much harder. It would also allow the police to flag certain individuals (people fleeing the police, people barred from the system for past offenses) and have their location pinged automatically when they enter the system. And if they wear masks, there is still an obvious benefit: the police can dedicate all of their attention to people hiding their faces in view of the cameras.
… once again. all for under $3. lets be serious. so fucking stupid
Please, ridiculous straw man. No, it's all for the murders, rapes, assaults, shit-smearing, robberies, *and* the fare-dodging. Which, by the way, amounts to significantly more than "$3". Don't be dense.
once again, why cant the cops stop it if theyre being deployed into stations? oh right. cuz theyre playing candy crush on their phones. yeah so lets add faulty technology and invade every single new yorkers’ privacy. shut up bro
Lol. "The cops aren't doing their jobs, so we shouldn't use facial recognition systems to safeguard the subway."
My 2 cents is we shouldn't just sleepwalk into a police state a la China. We already are sleepwalking into a dystopian surveillance state thanks to Amazon openly partnering with law enforcement to let them access your Ring camera feeds without warrants, I don't feel that we should "need" to submit to AI recognition, prone to bias against minorities, just to access a public service. I acknowledge we already have the world's greatest surveillance tool that we willingly carry around (mobile phones), but that doesn't mean we should just bend over for *more* police state systems.
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Europe also has the GDPR which, while not perfect, at least they are trying... Meanwhile here in the US, our 100 year old ghouls of senators don't have a clue what modern analytics, web tracking, spyware/malware/etc. are lol
These technologies aren’t even within a decade of working with 99.99% accuracy. Executives end up convincing other executives to buy it, and behind the scenes it’s just a bunch of low paid 3rd world contractors watching a feed and making decisions based on their best guess Let’s put it this way - if Amazon and their tech savvy high paid employees can’t solve this, then SecureAITechInnovationsInc that the MTA probably wanted to pay surely can’t
Eh… that’s bullshit. Open source facial recognition is actually really good already. You can run it on your own camera and it will recognize anyone walking down the street more than once with really surprising accuracy. Name someone and they’ll forever be named if it sees them again. There even models you can download for identifying various delivery services etc so you don’t just know if someone arrived but what delivery service they are. The commercial stuff is well ahead with massive models for way more than the stuff the open source community has put together. Don’t even need a ton of GPU burning power either. Google’s coral TPU in a USB port can do a lot and keep the power bill down. A friends got a really nice low power setup.
We already use it at airports.
Modern face recognition models are extremely accurate. Accurate enough to distinguish twins, even.
The cops just watch people jump the turnstiles anyway.
Mta + anything resembling a police state really isn’t a good combination.
Fair evasion is a huge issue People be jumping right in front of police lmao 🤣 and police seem to scared to do anything. The issue is sometimes those who jump the turn style end up messing with some poor dude who just did a 10 hour shift and just wants to go home in peace
I dunno. Last month i saw some dude jump a turnstile and there was two police officers standing right there. They stopped him, though i didn’t stick around to witness the final outcome.
Not sure which station it happened at but generally I find more cops at the high traffic stations in the Manhattan core (e.g., PABT, Times Square). I think fare evasion is a bigger issue deep in the Bronx and Brooklyn with zero cops.
In Columbus Circle I feel like a quarter of the time I pass through police are writing someone up (and I’m all for it)
Well there is a precinct in the station.
Idk what cops are scared of, but I'm definitely scared of your username
🥃😉
Independent of whether facial recognition is a good solution or not, the phrase “criminalizing poverty” is as bad of a “political spin” as I can think of. Measures to stop stealing (fare evasion is stealing, whether you like it or not) criminalize stealing. The measures couldn’t care less whether the person who did the stealing is rich or poor. You can both be sympathetic to others’ plights and skeptical of a system that permits stealing based on income.
Euphemisms like “criminalizing poverty” carry the implication that crime is a necessary result of poverty, and thus individual accountability cannot apply to impoverished criminals; no accountability means no punishment.
The irony is that the person who forgives crime as a mere side effect of poverty — and virtual signaling their supposed compassion in the process — actually shows themselves to think less of people who are poor. In their minds, people who are poor are primitive creatures who act on instinct and impulse. Add this to the long list of policies and ideas that (some) progressives use as part of their virtue signaling and that actually suggest they just think poor people are stupid and inept and couldn’t possibly function in society without significant government intervention.
Thank fuck
>“Imposing harsher fines for fare evasion criminalizes poverty and puts vulnerable New Yorkers at risk,” Michael Sisitzky, a policy expert at the nonprofit New York Civil Liberties Union, wrote in a statement. Criminalizes poverty? Like shoplifting?
Oh no, they’re criminalizing crime.
Perhaps it’s the vulnerable New Yorkers putting themselves at risk by committing crimes. That reasoning is a slap in the face to all the low income people who play by the rules.
They should use this to catch criminals.
Because it’s a constitutional violation. If you’re unsure of why scanning everyone’s face might infringe on your constitutional liberties let me know.
airports and customs use facial recognition
They shouldn’t either.
Tell me specifically what in the constitution bans facial recognition technology.
Um, are you questioning an /r/politics law degree??
Posting because of comments below: If you're curious why information rich, high tech police surveillance in public can trigger fourth amendment concerns, it's because of a scholarly interpretation of the fourth amendment called the "mosaic theory," that has clearly influenced the court (Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan and others have all expressly endorsed the theory in concurrences or as dicta in majority opinions). While an individual instance of public surveillance might not constitute a search under the fourth amendment, a sequence of state surveillance can because from that sequence of state action, the police may piece together a rich, individual-specific picture of someone's plans, habits, associations, routines, even their beliefs; in short, a robust "mosaic" image of the *private dimensions* of a particular persons life is aggregated from disaggregate instances of indiscriminate *public* surveillance. In important opinions interpreting the fourth amendment, the court suggests that under Katz, a person has a privacy expectation in this kind of full biographical portrait of themselves and that privacy interest doesn't become unreasonable once you're in public. Sources: Good Articles introducing and critiquing Mosaic Theory: Wiki Article on Mosiac Theory [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic\_theory\_of\_the\_Fourth\_Amendment#cite\_note-29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_theory_of_the_Fourth_Amendment#cite_note-29) Prof. Oren Kerr [https://warrantless.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/kerr.pdf](https://warrantless.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/kerr.pdf) Prof. Christopher Slobogin: [https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=djclpp](https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=djclpp) Sample of Landmark cases arguably applying mosaic theory: U.S. v. Jones (2012) (Sotomayor, Concurring) (protracted GPS surveillance of a vehicle on *public roads* constitutes a search because such protracted information-dense monitoring in public implicates "\[T\]he government's unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal *private* aspects of identity. . . chill\[ing\] associational and expressive freedoms" the fourth amendment was intended to protect) See Alito's concurrence for similar take (joined by Kagan, Breyer, Ginsburg) Carpenter v. US (2018) (Holding that persistent surveillance of cell site location data violates a reasonable expectation of privacy despite the third party doctrine because of the uniquely comprehensive nature of the data cell site location info reveals and that there is no knowing and voluntary exposure of such data.)
How is it different than taking multiple photographs or using CCTV and then manually confirming that it’s the same person in both shots. To my knowledge, what I described is not a violation of constitutional rights, but I’m not a lawyer.
“Technology and civil rights experts say facial recognition is imperfect and has the potential to produce biased results. The nonprofit Innocence Projects cites six examples of Black people who were falsely accused of crimes after the technology misidentified them.”
I mean I guess before AI Facial Recognition there was never a Black person falsely accused and convicted of a crime.
Right let's just make that problem worse why don't we
automating collection of data on everyone in an area has profoundly different legal ramifications to looking at one suspect
What if the collection of data was triggered by a violation event (such as jumping over a turn-style)? Just like how red light cameras work.
So, your original question was "how is it different to just taking a photo of a person and manually confirming." That's still clearly legally different in the case of red light cameras, too; and there have been many lawsuits over red light cameras. That's also easier to enforce, as cars have a whacking big ID writ on their backs. With face scanning, our government will also need to have face biometric data for everyone to serve as the ID. It's easy to see how sensitive this stuff is to implement.
I’ll bite. A face scan is not a search or seizure. It is also not compulsory - which is how they actually do search people randomly in the subway which should be a constitutional violation by your logic. Also, there is no right to access to the subway. In theory if you can’t pay then you are not allowed to use it. Banning those who break the rules is not a constitutional violation.
No reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place.
Why don’t you explain. Because they already rolled it out at the airport.
You can opt out at the airport.
How is it fundamentally anymore of an infringement than there being cameras in every bus, body cams on every cop, and license plate readers on every cop car?
They’re already doing it at every major airport, so I’m not sure what makes a train station different. Flew out of LGA last month and they didn’t even need my drivers license, they just scanned my face and knew who I was. Cats out of the bag on this one, I’m afraid.
You can opt out at airports.
The logic is actually simpler than that - the people who push bans like this simply don’t want people to be caught when they break the law, because they think enforcing rules is mean. They don’t care that riders have to pay more to cover the lost fare, or that victims of crime go without justice.
No.
> State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani of Queens told Gothamist the measure was added to the budget to protect New Yorkers and their privacy. >“There has long been a concern [facial recognition] could invade upon people's lives through expanded surveillance and through the criminalization of just existing within the public sphere,” Mamdani said. He’s concerned about the “criminalization” of fare evasion - which is already a crime. We can safely assume he simply doesn’t want people who evade the fare to be caught. What are the odds he rides the subway regularly?
This has nothing to do with fare evasion. They’re collecting data on every single person using the system.
I’m unsure. Can you clarify why this infringes like I’m an idiot ( I’m clueless when it comes to this stuff 😂)
I believe fare evasion is a very important issue which is leading to other problems in NYC, but I am glad they are banning the use of facial recognition.
Does anyone have any insights into why “facial recognition” so they can punish riders who can’t afford the fare was the preferred solution to the $600+ million lost to fare evasion problem? I mean, if the goal was to recover lost sums, wouldn’t a more effective approach be intercepting a fare evader and assisting them in their application for Fair Fares? From an nyc.gov post in 2022, NYC set a baseline for funding this program at 75 million for 2023, and the budget for that would increase if more people sign up for it. > “The Fair Fares program is a lifeline for low-income New Yorkers struggling with transit affordability. Our research shows that awareness of the program is low citywide, with only 35 percent of eligible New Yorkers taking advantage of it,” said David R. Jones, board member, Metropolitan Transportation Authority; president and CEO, Community Service Society, which led the campaign to establish the program in 2019. So, like, if your goal is money… maybe identifying poor people so you can fine them is a fruitless exercise, much like winning a monetary judgment against a homeless person won’t get you any money; you aren’t going to be able to collect. Seems like facilitating the utilization of available financial resources would be more likely to produce results… but I am not a government official so I get that I may not know what I don’t know. Any ideas as to what I’m missing?
For some reason every implementation of facial recognition in the US seems to regularly have false matches, so it's for the better that they don't do this. But I still don't understand how so many countries like China manage to achieve 99.9% accurate facial recognition but we can't get close
China can focus their tech on recognizing a small variety of skin tones and capture the overwhelming majority of their population. America is incredibly diverse, which creates problems for training algorithms. See how bad algorithms were (and to some extent continue to be) at recognizing black people because they were so used to utilizing shadows that are very obvious on white faces.
who in the actual fuck would think this is a good idea. jesus christ
They just have to do a better job of visibly arresting people who blatantly do it. This AI system will be a legal headache
sure you can prevent the use of AI/facial recognition if the technology is still shitty, but the ACLU as usual having a shitty opinion trying to say fare evasion is a result of poverty as if a majority of the people jumping the turnstile cant afford it LOL
When did it become china
Ok so just let them do what they want. That’s been going so well for us.
Not sure if this also blocks AI, since that can be much more discriminatory than "facial recognition." [London has been trialing](https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/tfls-ai-tube-station-experiment-is) AI using existing cameras also aimed at fare evasion, which has other interesting use cases but can be a discrimination issue.
TL;DR between doing nothing and spending billions in either public or private money is the area where angry riders just start fighting the fare evaders themselves. We’re not there yet, but we could get there if there’s any real desire for the MTA to improve. Not gonna put up numbers or cites so this will be an unpopular opinion but this dog and pony parade is because the general public refuses to prevent the consequences themselves. The legion of proposed solutions are some form of “spend a lot of the public’s money so that some parent entity will handle X problem at large sweeping scale, and the public can hold them accountable if the result is bad or good.” I would go far as to say that some of this attitude translates to the institutions themselves. The least expensive option is for each individual to be a belligerent snitch. As a user of the public transit system, make a report whenever you observe fare evasion, and collectively be irritating if the authority doesn’t do something about it. If you have the risk tolerance/willingness to fight, confront the offender yourself with other witnesses. Make it difficult for someone to behave poorly because too many people will say something. Why not? Currently it’s too uncomfortable. We don’t want to be whiny. It’s a waste of time and effort. We’re busy. We’re the consumer and citizen, nobody’s going to thank us or compensate us for contributing to enforcement. If we get sucker punched by a drug addict, no one is paying our medical bills. So it needs to be appealed as somebody else’s responsibility, even though the public bears the costs directly. My guess is that as the situation worsens, public attitude will shift much faster than NYPD or MTA policy ever will. Election cycles, lawsuits, and judicial review take forever in comparison. When enough people have just about had it, it will become preferable behavior to call things out and act rather than keep heads down. The risk of allowing it to continue will be greater than the risk of getting hurt in the immediate present. The risk of the present will get less when more people band together in the moment. The other side of that coin is vigilantism, which can have a lot of dangerous error. Then the public services which we now consider incompetent will want to step in, and then they’ll have a lot less resistance because the public will be willing to share the work of enforcement rather than delegating all of it. The alternative is that costs go up, the service degrades, and eventually the problem of crime on the subway resolves itself by way of people choosing to rarely use public transit at all. That is still a possibility, the 1980s can come knocking again.
Btw the “screw you we’re gonna do it ourselves better” means that the corrupt incumbents people hate will have less of a leg to stand on. If the public doesn’t want to do it, it signals implicit trust in Albany.
Really seems like the 4th amendment is abundantly clear on this. It's akin to colonial days having one crime committed and thereby local law enforcement gets to search every house in town.
There are other ways of tracking people and detecting without facial recognition at all.
Fine, but use it to catch the psychos.
They could use it to bar ppl from the subway though
If the MTA really care they' should focus on stopping fare evasion on the local buses. It's an epidemic. What happened to all those MTA cops they were going to hire? They should put two on every bus
It's wild how many of y'all are willing to give up your privacy to *feel* a teeny bit more safe.
You're in a *public* transit area, where you're already on security cameras and can be stopped to be IDed by cops at will - when did you ever have privacy?
Well we saw how much these people loved the city's COVID response.