[dontcarethrow2]

We should also allow everyone to be able to hide their face/do funny walks forever into the future.

Looking at the title, I hope one day we can run a campaign for a ban on ALL(*gasp) mass surveillance, not just biometric :/

We will just have to figure out other ways to stop the terrorists.. (or stop creating them in the first place)

[chmod775]

>We will just have to figure out other ways to stop the terrorists.. (or stop creating them in the first place)

Other ways? All this mass surveillance has hardly helped so far. All you get is nice footage after someone blew something up.

By the way these surveillance cameras and systems are stupidly expensive. For most installations they're so expensive you could pay for a police officer permanently stationed for years at each of those public spaces and subway stations you were going to surveil. That would actually help making them safer.

On top of that there's many other ways to use that money to save lives where it matters.

For instance you could use the money you were going to use on surveilling public places to make them physically safer instead: less accident-prone, install public access defibrillators, etc. Statistically you're going to save so many magnitudes more lives that way, it's not even funny.

People seem to assume that heart attacks is something that happens to other people, while terrorism of all things is a personal threat to them.

[raxxorrax]

And we have a lot of parasitic security companies that induce heavy costs on taxpayers without tangible results. The problem is that "feeling safe" has become a metric because people are bad at math and understanding risks.

[pmiller2]

> We will just have to figure out other ways to stop the terrorists.. (or stop creating them in the first place)

Not bombing their countries would probably go a long way toward this. The US spends far too much money dropping explosives on brown people.

[fsflover]

> We will just have to figure out other ways to stop the terrorists..

This was never intended to stop terrorists:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24777115

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance#Purposes

[almamater]

Mass surveillance is illegal in the EU.(except, of course - the infamous "national security" argument) https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/06/europes-top-court-confirms...

[dimitrios1]

I had an idea for a product: A semitransparent material that acts as a face covering when you are in public places like airports that allows you to be seen completely, but when imaged by a sensor like a camera products an unintelligible result.

[chmod775]

At face value this is physically impossible. Light either goes through and can be picked up by human eyeballs and cameras, or it doesn't.

However if you used a material that is only transparent at certain angles, you could make use of the fact that cameras are generally placed somewhere near the ceiling.

A baseball cap kind of solves the same problem though.

[lbotos]

I mean, I just flew Delta from JFK and to board I had to use a face scanner at the gate .... instead of just scanning my ticket. There didn't appear to be a way to opt out at the time, and with a few people behind me in line, I just _gave up whatever rights I had._ On my return trip, if I see the scanner I'm going to talk to the gate before I board to see how to opt out.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90274113/heres-a-look-at-delta-a...

[1996]

Didn't you wear a covid mask?

Simple solution: just wear sunglasses on top.

Then simply refuse to remove either. It's about creating a shelling point: face scanner work on the pre-covid premise that most people were NOT covering their faces, so it required no action on their behalf.

Fortunately, the situation changed: the shelling point prefers the existing status-quo, so it will be seen as an unreasonable expectation to ask you to remove your mask, unless it's a TSA agent checking your id... and it's not.

[lbotos]

Hilariously, they asked everyone at the gate to remove their masks to get scanned. AFAIK, everyone before me did, as did the few I saw behind me.

[1996]

> Hilariously, they asked everyone at the gate to remove their masks to get scanned. AFAIK, everyone before me did, as did the few I saw behind me

Say out loud "But I don't want to catch Covid and die!"

Pretending you care more about public health works very well!

If they insist, say their disregard for the FDA guidelines just to play with they new tech toy is not acceptable, and say you will denounce this blatant endangering of everyone health.

The fear of monetary liabilities from Covid is a great way to make most business dance the way you want.

[petermcneeley]

Recurrent games in game theory require the reliable identification of the players. The social order is just a tangle of these games played with variation.

If you remove reliable identification as a feature you will push the equilibrium to some other state. Are you sure you want to live in that state?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_in_game_theory

[pjc50]

Reliable identification of everyone everywhere in public by a single state actor has never been a thing until just now.

[petermcneeley]

You are replying to the article to which I agree with you. But I was replying to the comment which suggests as significant reduction in one persons ability to identify another.