[wpietri]

In some sense I'm not worried too much about FR tech on its own. A few generations ago, most of us lived in small-enough contexts that human facial recognition served to identify us all the time anyhow. What I do worry about is the degree to which the video data and facial profile data is centralized.

Look at current surveillance cameras in the US as an example. There are a lot of them now, but data is held by a wide variety of people and institutions, and most of them just don't care about it unless something criminal happened.

If an individual school or workplace adds FR to their cameras such that they alerted to strangers in restricted areas, I wouldn't worry about that at all. If they own the data and have their own FR profiles, that's cool by me.

But that's very different than China's effort, where they're clearly working toward complete coverage of 1.4 billion people, with strongly centralized control. Now that they have president-for-life Xi, that's a lot of authoritarian potential.