[Karunamon]

Heh, I figured this would come up, but I think where we disagree is in degree, rather than action.

In your above scenario, I'd start calling for the metaphorical heads of politicians somewhere between "installing scanners on every corner" and "public searchable real time database".

The example we're speaking of here, Facebook has collected the information that the GP poster exists and looks like this. Already publicly and digitally accessible information. Nobody's privacy has been violated by saying that person X exists and looks like Y, nor could that information be used against them. I certainly hope you understand that a live database of car positions is fundamentally different...

On top of that, the genie was unbottled ages ago. You may be able to make some kind of privacy argument re: the plate scanners now, but as the tech advances more and becomes cheaper and it becomes trivial for anyone to do the same thing (I recall an article about someone who set up a scanner in his front yard with some open source toolkits and relatively cheap gear), the arguments that "anyone can do it, except these people, because reasons" start sounding more and more arbitrary and out of touch.

[hacker_9]

But I don't have access to all the photos the Facebook neural net does, because of private profiles and the fact I'm not friends with everyone. So really now the machine has far more information that I do, and it can make predictions I can't. Like, where anyone is likely to be at any time, by analyzing photos and matching locations between those photos. Think of what you could do when you can map out the daily lives of millions of people?

We haven't seen the full force of what this means yet as it's still early days, but with for-profit companies behind the wheel like Facebook who make money from selling your information, this is an unprecedented level of big brother-esque invasion.

[cortesoft]

I think you are quite wrong about the "Nobody's privacy is violated by saying that person X exists and looks like Y."

For one thing, you are leaving out the part that says "and doing Z". There have been lots of cases of people having tagged photos be used against them. While you might be fine with the cases of someone being tagged at a baseball game when they said they were sick from work, but what about when someone is tagged at a gay pride parade and they live in a homophobic area? Or being tagged in a picture of a protest when they live in an oppressive country?