[kujino]

Facial recognition is one of the most harmful for society & dystopian tech we've made. We need to draw strict lines

With that kind of reasoning we could go anywhere ... Hey we have Alexa in every house in the country what do we do ?

Option 1 - record & access anybody's intimate life and solve abuse, crime, blabla

Option 2 - do nothing

Ofc going full unlimited surveillance could, maybe in some cases, help with crime ( actually there was a trial were Alexa recording were handed over to convict the murderer). But there is a balance to strike, and mass spying facial rec from unconsented data scraping from the whole web is going is going too far.

You might have your photo on your blog, on your university website, yet you never signed any agreement that Clearview could analyse & monetize your biometric data and sell it to all the shadiest people of the world.

At least in the EU, Clearview is clearly illegal, yet all gov close their eyes on it because they like the power it give them.

Even if, we suppose we want to accept the use of facial recognition for some cases, this should be allowed to be done only by the gov., on a limited dataset, on a case-by-case, on a specific person & only after the okay from a judge

But not by a psychopath's shady illegal company whose initial business was to spy on billionaires daughters' friends

[jmole]

I agree 1000% that the unconsented use of someone’s image as training data or as a target match for facial recognition ought to be illegal, or at least as inadmissible in court as the statement “we had Joe review the footage, and he swears that the guy there in brown is his old college roommate’s friend Jimbo”

But matching against a govt-collected set (photo IDs for example), has well known precedent in fingerprinting.

I think requiring a judge to sign off is the right idea in principle, though in practice, I’d prefer it to be an open-records administrative function of the govt instead, in particular for cases where there is no known ID for the suspect.

To get a facial recognition done, you have to provide a video with enough context that shows someone committing a crime. That video is reviewed by the non-police administrative function, and then the request is either granted or denied.

Records are kept for later review and appeal, and are ideally public record, although I can certainly imagine cases (like porch pirates) where a public record of the video could open up an accuser (or an accused, for that matter) to later threats of harassment or violence.