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by notheguyouthink
2905 days ago
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I've never understood why I care who does it, honestly. Companies? The government? A person stalking my wife? The negatives are obvious, do I really care who is doing it? These discussions often feel like tax law debate to me. We're debating whether or not X person is bad for legally avoiding tax, instead of talking about restricting tax laws. Likewise, we're sitting here focused on Amazon for implementing facial recognition instead of focusing on changing laws and government "culture" to make such an act against its own citizens far from accepted. I don't like what Amazon is doing either, but attempting to stop people from advancing facial recognition seems fruitless at best. Facial recognition is here, and it's only going to get easier, better and faster. Can we focus on finding ways to prevent/identify/etc bad actors? Because facial recognition is coming, regardless of Amazon, and bad actors aren't loyal to amazon. |
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Tech like this is designed and deployed in such a way as to discourage people from thinking it's a problem that needs a fundamental solution. If people realize it's a problem at all they assume it will be solved with just a few laws or a company protest.
If there was a public website you could go to where anyone without authentication could monitor every street in your town, maybe that would spark more citizen-controlled solutions, in the same way that browser extensions intercepting Facebook logins at coffee shops sparked https adoption.
The problem of democratizing surveillance is that many laws prevent neutral actors from building these systems (what's your state's 2-party consent law for audio and video in public spaces?) As a result, the only people doing widescale recording are exempt institutions and companies that people are trained to think aren't a problem, or criminals that people think are rare or limited because their results aren't widely broadcast.
It's like social security numbers. If a company started just publicly releasing them en mass via its Twitter account, we would quickly figure out an alternative way to authenticate that prevented them from doing that. But if instead a company just leaks them to the black market, well that's just a security breach and the system doesn't need to change - even though the practical effects are very similar.
It's trivial to secretly monitor people via facial recognition. It's not trivial to publicize or demonstrate how easy it is in a dramatic way that will spark public attention.