I agree with the general idea put forth by the article. This is an important issue, and the future could bring a lot of bad things if we (as a society) are not

I agree with the general idea put forth by the article. This is an important issue, and the future could bring a lot of bad things if we (as a society) are not careful. Schneier makes it sound pretty scary. For a general audience, this is probably good. It takes a lot to make your average Joe start paying attention to something new. But on a technical level, I can't help wondering, how realistic is the scenario he describes? Or, maybe the better question is, how immediate is the threat of universal face recognition? If we know what time horizon we're working with, maybe we can be better prepared. I think Schneier makes some substantial logical leaps in the article that make it sound like automatic, ubiquitous facial recognition is a more urgent issue than it really is. For example, he goes from this > Today in the US there's a massive but invisible industry that records the movements of cars around the country. Cameras mounted on cars and tow trucks capture license places along with date/time/location information ... to this > This could easily happen with face recognition. with no supporting evidence for how this feat of engineering will be accomplished. Recognizing letters and numbers on a license plate is one thing. Recognizing faces at random angles with random occlusions, hats, eyeglasses, makeup, etc., is quite another thing. I found a couple of papers from CMU and UCF a couple of years ago where they look at the problem of recognizing people in photos at "web scale" [1]. The recall/precision rates of the algorithms they tested are pretty decent, but they're still pretty far from the dystopian future described in the article. [1] http://enriquegortiz.com/wordpress/enriquegortiz/research/face-recognition/webscale-face-recognition/ http://enriquegortiz.com/wordpress/enriquegortiz/research/fa...