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okay, so when do we see police departments getting sued for unauthorized searches of members of the public? when do we see police departments sanctioned for tr

okay, so when do we see police departments getting sued for unauthorized searches of members of the public? when do we see police departments sanctioned for tracking people not suspected of any crime? when do we find out that the police arrested or killed the wrong person based off of a faulty algorithm? when do we start wearing dazzle camo on our face to disrupt them?

krapp 10y ago
Well, the thing is, your face isn't private information. I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights. Facebook likely automatically builds a profile for every face it can recognize in a photograph, as well as approximate dates and times based on landmarks, shadow geometry and timestamps, building an ad-hoc and constantly updated dossier of travel times, places and associations, and feeds it into some kind of predictive machine learning algorithm designed to model, predict and influence the behavior of people who aren't even on Facebook yet. And they're secret best buds with the NSA. But the police actually knowing someone is who they they think they are might actually be a net positive in terms of public safety. It seems like a step up from "nondescript black male, 18-35, possibly wearing clothes."
- uxp 10y ago
  > I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights. It would be one thing if there was some RainMan FBI agent who was the database and could recollect the name, address, declared weight, height, eye color and hair color of half of the population of the United States after meeting them through natural social introductions. But this is a collection of databases that hundreds or thousands of cops can search through simultaneously without having to know anything about the unidentified person. Recently, it was declared unconstitutional to attach a GPS tracking device to a vehicle without a warrant, yet it's still perfectly acceptable to have a real live person tail another individual in another car without a warrant. The reasons being is that a small police force of say 20 people could in effect virtually tail and track thousands (if their budget allowed them to purchase that many devices) of individuals at once, where physically tracking those individuals is a natural limitation of the capacity of the force. It enforces a burden on the police. Exactly the same rules apply here. If a cop knows a subset of individuals in his or her neighborhood, and then comes across a picture of unidentified person taken during the commission of a crime, and is able to identify that person from memory and develop further proof that the individual in the photo was in fact the one that committed the crime, then they have a good case. If the only way for the cops to identify that person is to look up the identification of the suspect via a highly sophisticated computer algorithm that can check against hundreds of faces per second, then the "capacity" of the force to identify suspects far outweighs the effort the public had to counteract that. Checks and balances, and all that stuff, don't just apply to the 3 branches, they apply between the citizenry and the powers over them too.
- cryoshon 10y ago
  >But the police actually knowing someone is who they they think they are might actually be a net positive in terms of public safety public safety will soon be crushing dissent further then we will wish they did not have records of what we looked like
- eveningcoffee 10y ago
  * Well, the thing is, your face isn't private information.* And this could be an misconception you have learned. Naturally everyone who wants to have control over you wants you to believe it. Still it does not follow that you have to share this belief. The question is where to draw the line. Naturally the ones who want to have control over every single person, what to push this line far away and make it look natural. Our duty is to question the motivation to do so.

krapp 10y ago

Well, the thing is, your face isn't private information. I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights. Facebook likely automatically builds a profile for every face it can recognize in a photograph, as well as approximate dates and times based on landmarks, shadow geometry and timestamps, building an ad-hoc and constantly updated dossier of travel times, places and associations, and feeds it into some kind of predictive machine learning algorithm designed to model, predict and influence the behavior of people who aren't even on Facebook yet. And they're secret best buds with the NSA. But the police actually knowing someone is who they they think they are might actually be a net positive in terms of public safety. It seems like a step up from "nondescript black male, 18-35, possibly wearing clothes."

uxp 10y ago
> I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights. It would be one thing if there was some RainMan FBI agent who was the database and could recollect the name, address, declared weight, height, eye color and hair color of half of the population of the United States after meeting them through natural social introductions. But this is a collection of databases that hundreds or thousands of cops can search through simultaneously without having to know anything about the unidentified person. Recently, it was declared unconstitutional to attach a GPS tracking device to a vehicle without a warrant, yet it's still perfectly acceptable to have a real live person tail another individual in another car without a warrant. The reasons being is that a small police force of say 20 people could in effect virtually tail and track thousands (if their budget allowed them to purchase that many devices) of individuals at once, where physically tracking those individuals is a natural limitation of the capacity of the force. It enforces a burden on the police. Exactly the same rules apply here. If a cop knows a subset of individuals in his or her neighborhood, and then comes across a picture of unidentified person taken during the commission of a crime, and is able to identify that person from memory and develop further proof that the individual in the photo was in fact the one that committed the crime, then they have a good case. If the only way for the cops to identify that person is to look up the identification of the suspect via a highly sophisticated computer algorithm that can check against hundreds of faces per second, then the "capacity" of the force to identify suspects far outweighs the effort the public had to counteract that. Checks and balances, and all that stuff, don't just apply to the 3 branches, they apply between the citizenry and the powers over them too.
cryoshon 10y ago
>But the police actually knowing someone is who they they think they are might actually be a net positive in terms of public safety public safety will soon be crushing dissent further then we will wish they did not have records of what we looked like
eveningcoffee 10y ago
* Well, the thing is, your face isn't private information.* And this could be an misconception you have learned. Naturally everyone who wants to have control over you wants you to believe it. Still it does not follow that you have to share this belief. The question is where to draw the line. Naturally the ones who want to have control over every single person, what to push this line far away and make it look natural. Our duty is to question the motivation to do so.