[itwasntandy]

While I agree with the aspiration, I don’t see how it’s possible to use facial recognition to flag “america’s Most wanted” or to look for missing children without mass surveillance though?

It only works if it scans _everyone_ .

Additionally what happens when the technology isn’t perfect and innocent people get mistakenly flagged as persons of interest?

The other thing is once it’s installed and in operation, what’s to stop it being used for other purposes? - being used to target people peacefully protesting against the government or whatever.

It’s a slippery path from there into a surveillance state - China is already pretty much there with their social credit system - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

I for one don’t want to wake up someday soon and discover it’s 1984...

[joemag]

And that’s the argument the grand-parent is making. It’s a tool. It can be used for good or bad. There are other tools like that.

Because of that, there’s unlikely to be universal acceptance or rejection. And without popular opinion, it will be hard to pass any laws that change the status quo.

[philwelch]

CCTV cameras are already ubiquitous. That ship has already sailed. And honestly, there was never an expectation of privacy in public in the first place.

[ahelwer]

CCTV cameras monitored by humans are COMPLETELY different from a facial recognition system recording the identities and movements of all people. There is no comparison.

There absolutely is an expectation of privacy in public. Being seen in public by a series of uncoordinated people is massively different from a PI tailing you and recording your actions. This form of privacy is generally termed "obscurity".

[philwelch]

> Being seen in public by a series of uncoordinated people is massively different from a PI tailing you and recording your actions.

That is actually completely legal to do in all circumstances, precisely because there is no expectation of privacy in public.

> CCTV cameras monitored by humans are COMPLETELY different from a facial recognition system recording the identities and movements of all people. There is no comparison.

Which is not necessarily how facial recognition would necessarily work. More likely would be to scan for known suspects and fugitives. But then we’re back to the “how is it used” question.

[ahelwer]

It is legal for a PI to tail you not because of the lack of expectation of privacy in public, but because it is impractical to have PIs tail everyone all the time in public. People are generally okay with targeted surveillance. Mass surveillance is the issue. Quantity has a quality all of its own, as they say. There has been a court case which addresses this issue[0].

Any technology which searches for fugitives will necessarily scan everyone. There is no such thing as targeted facial recognition, it can only work by mass surveillance.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/opinion/data-privacy.html

[philwelch]

You're assuming facial recognition would necessarily be the moral equivalent of "[having] PIs tail everyone all the time in public.". But for that to be the case, facial recognition would have to scan every face it sees, store that face, and then cross-reference every other face it sees against every face it has ever stored.

I'm suggesting a far simpler use case: It scans your face and if you don't match any of the fugitives it's looking for, it forgets about you. I think this use case is far more likely because it's a lot simpler and cheaper to pull off. And that's a big difference.