On Tuesday, July 16, the Greensboro City Council received a $50,000 grant from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality. While this may seem like a harmless program to many, it may be of great concern to privacy advocates.
The city is equipping some of the city’s recycling trucks with artificial intelligence software and hardware that will use video surveillance, photography and highly accurate location tags to find people violating the city’s recycling rules.
According to documents submitted for the grant, “each truck will be equipped with advanced GPS tools, AI-enabled cameras and on-board computers.”
AI software identifies trash as it is dumped into trucks and determines whether the contents of recyclable bins contain non-recyclable materials. Location tags of bins dumped into each truck allow the city to see exactly which homes and businesses are violating the city’s waste regulations.
In the first phase of the program, the city is equipping three city trucks that collect recycling with cameras and software, but if it’s deemed successful, the Greensboro City Council could expand the program in the future.
AI software has become so powerful and fast that the identification accuracy of this particular waste technology is said to be over 99 percent.
According to information about the program, while recycling violations might be hard for a human inspector to spot “at a glance,” the AI software “inspects the entire contents of the cart.”
So don’t try to scam the city by burying non-recyclable items deep inside your container.
While many think this is a great thing, as it will help pinpoint the source of the problem and alert city waste management officials, those concerned about artificial intelligence’s continuing intrusion into personal privacy may be dismayed to learn that their recyclable bins are now the focus of AI video cameras that can potentially catalogue what a person buys, consumes, drinks and reads.
There’s no reason to think that this is a program to “spy” on residents (other than to catch recycling rule violators), but there’s every reason to believe that this kind of technology effort will expand over the years and end up being used for purposes that it was never intended for.
While Amazon Alexa devices are not intended to store speech to be used as evidence in a murder case, they don’t prevent it from happening.
One current privacy concern is this statement: “The postcards will display an image of the non-recyclable items in residents’ carts along with the campaign message.”
The Rhino Times is currently investigating the details of this practice, but one question that arises is: If a relapsed alcoholic hides this fact from his wife, will she now have to explain to her why she received a postcard in the mail with a picture of an empty glass bourbon bottle in a trash can?
There’s a lot to learn from this, but at least from what’s been written, it seems like a photo of some of someone’s trash being sent in full view from the city to the post office to their home, potentially visible to everyone along the way — any family members who see the mail. People often throw very sensitive materials in recycling bins, so hopefully the city is considering what safeguards they can put in place to mitigate these privacy concerns.
Those concerned about expanding government powers might also be concerned by the fact that many good AI systems can already ingest, recognize, classify, and record any text that passes in front of their camera at lightning speed — this is not something to worry about right now, but it is something to consider in the future.
While that is certainly not the intent of the current program, and there is no reason to think the city wants to spy on its citizens, it is not hard to imagine a situation in which video and photos from the new program could be used to solve a crime by determining when and where evidence was disposed of.
But this year’s plan only calls for the city to use Prairie Robotics Platinum Software’s equipment and software, at a cost of $10,800 per truck per year, to send notices to people violating recycling rules, identify areas of the city where violations are most prevalent and target recycling education campaigns to specific communities.
According to information provided in city documents, “The proposed program is divided into 13-week quarterly campaigns. Each campaign will use insights from contamination flagged by the AI software. Residents will have their recycling inspected by AI approximately six times per quarter (for biweekly recycling collections) and receive personalized feedback on the contents of their recycling carts. The first 10 weeks of each campaign will focus on monitoring the system for quality control. The final three weeks will be spent by staff reorganizing, designing, or editing postcards as needed and planning the next campaign.”
The city also notes that its “Pollution Reduction Outreach Programmes play an important role in informing residents about the impacts of pollution and encouraging behavioural change.”
The City of Greensboro is covering the full cost of the hardware and software, plus providing an additional $10,000 to send postcards to violators’ homes.
The program has now been stepped up with a first-of-its-kind “education campaign” aimed at offenders, which is due to run from now until mid-September.
Other campaigns will then follow, with a program results report provided at the end of June 2024.
