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> (Every government on earth) plans to use face recognition to track (everyone) through airports Fixed it for you. I know for a fact at least 2 asian countries

• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• FRex 9y ago
  There might be problems with the laws still. I.e. Polish constitution has 'Public authorities shall not acquire, collect nor make accessible information on citizens other than that which is necessary in a democratic state ruled by law.'. There are many techs out there that are quite dystopian (face scans, mass surveillance, etc.) or outright evil (alleged organ harvesting of death row inmates in China) but yet the governments aren't doing it. Even that article in Polish constitution smells (to me personally) like it came due to secret police back in communism collecting 'dirt' on people, that required 0 tech, just secret informants with small monetary incentives or who were blackmailed with dirt already collected, telling little bits of 'innocent' things and yet I can't imagine many (if any) countries Western democratic doing that.
  • JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > outright evil (alleged organ harvesting of death row inmates in China) Why is this necessarily evil?
    • berbec 9y ago
      While if done properly, this isn't in and of itself evil, it leads to a slippery slope. Larry Niven wrote stories of a future where the organ banks were always empty, and the population voted the death penalty in for lesser and lesser crimes. The tale I recall has a man trying to escape from his capital trial for running a red light.
      • tehlike 9y ago
        sounds like an episode from black mirror.
      • sitkack 9y ago
        They wouldn't be red lights anymore, they would be organ donation lights.
    • pjc50 9y ago
      - Consent violation: important part of medical ethics. - it provides an additional financial incentive to execute inmates
      • freeone3000 9y ago
        If they're dead, why is their consent required?
        • akubera 9y ago
          Are you suggesting the state has a right to execute any inmate because they will not object after they are dead?
    • yardie 9y ago
      The prime minister needs a new kidney and we’ve found the perfect match. But he is on prison for robbery. Well, just upgrade that robbery to capital offense and kill 2 birds... Brilliant, Watson! I’ll inform the prime minister’s family immediately.
  • sho 9y ago
    > other than that which is necessary in a democratic state ruled by law Well the thing is that is open to interpretation. You can define anything as "necessary". From what I have heard the typical "foot in the door", if you will, is AML/KYC. There's a convenient intersection there between anti-terrorism (national security) and the everyday (banking). Bring those together and now you have a perfectly plausible excuse to build a biometric database on everyone with a bank account - ie, everyone. And once you've got that DB, wouldn't it be positively remiss not to start using it at the borders? This is the legal basis of the DB in a certain large asian country you've heard of and, on information and belief, it's being expanded to airports too under the guise of national security. The DB has never been announced or confirmed but its existence can be inferred from KYC banking processes there. The future is now! > but yet the governments aren't doing it I would be very surprised if a biometric database doesn't exist in most moderately wealthy countries, even in Poland. They may not (yet) be able to use it legally but knowing the general climate you'd think the various intelligence organisations almost aren't doing their job if they didn't have it.
    • FRex 9y ago
      That was just an example of such a line since I know only Polish constitution. I know that everything legal is open to really wide and crazy interpretations already but if there weren't such a line to interpret there would be no chance for an anti-scanning interpretation. It could also end up being limited to foreigners since the line protects citizens specifically. It depends what do you mean by biometrics database, i.e.: Polish passports are 'biometric' and have two index fingerprints stored in them for a few years now. I have no idea if the passport database is accessible to police or if there is any face scanning going on. I'd say the foot in the door is airports themselves. You already need a passport or ID there so the face scan is literally no new information and only confirming what the papers say. The real creepy tech to me is mass country wide face scanning to track everyone everywhere 24/7 and see what they do, who they associate with, etc. and possible future airport brain scans (like MRI to detect positive or negative emotions in response to a country flag or a picture of state head for example).
  • ionised 9y ago
    While a lot of Central/Eastern European countries are wary of this having had history with pervasive surveillance under the Soviets, many are also very nationalistic and right-wing. All it takes is some demagoguery and opportunism to convince the populace that it is in their interests, like what has happened in the UK and US.
    • aerique 9y ago
      They will become less wary over time. The same thing happened in Western Europe: policies which governments didn't even dare proposing a few decades ago (because of experiences in WW2) are now being pushed through without much resistance under the guise of terrorism or child pornography. I don't even think it's an organized effort to create a totalitarian state but more how such a state will emerge from the interaction between public, media and politics.
• mtgx 9y ago
  > The tech is there. This is why comments such "but spy agencies have always been spying, it's their job" have always pissed me off. The spy agencies will continue to encroach on our rights the more "tech is here". We now have "smart" devices with mics and cameras in every room, so they're going to use that. If 30 years from now we'll use some kind of "bluetooth headset" that actually interacts directly with our thoughts, then they'll use that, too, to screen out thoughts and arrest you for "extremist thoughts". There's no limit for how far these people are willing to go - just because "the tech is here". And the sad part is the vast majority of people don't understand new tech, so they aren't even aware what's happening until it's way too late. And then it's already "normalized" and the government agencies cry about "how much they need it" and do slight of hand tricks with "look over here, this tech helped us save a kid from kidnapping!" -- "but don't look over there, where we abused it in 95% of the cases for our own twisted and vengeful interests."
  • skate22 9y ago
    When your "right" to privacy starts conflicting with your "right" to safety, something has to give.
    • triplesec 9y ago
      A false dichotomy should always give first. You can both be safe and have privacy
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • cmiles74 9y ago
      In my opinion, that's just propaganda. It's not at all clear that all the surveillance is making anyone safer.
      • usrusr 9y ago
        Safety is never an absolute. Imagine a world of "very-many-nines" safety, where only once in a century a person died from a violent death, planetwide: the cause of that death would be on people's minds for decades, and any measure for decreasing the chance of it ever happening again would see great support. Once we have established that safety is a relative term it becomes pretty clear that ruthless surveillance would yield some safety improvement. I think that you can make a much more meaningful stand against surveillance when you acknowledge that, a opposed to outright denying any possible effect.
• otakucode 9y ago
  The tech is not there, actually. Facial recognition is absolute garbage. It borders on being completely useless even in ideal circumstances. Airports might have a slight advantage since they have a list of people they expect to be present (people with upcoming flights) and such, but in my experience systems like what the TSA uses are obstinantly terrible. They most likely have a commercial product purchased from some vendor deployed in ways it was never meant to function with management types forcing everyone to ignore the utter uselessness of the solution. They're going to make their career on deploying the system regardless of whether it works or not.
  • danesparza 9y ago
    "Facial recognition is absolute garbage." Yes. And so is a human's ability to predict who are good and bad actors in a given situation. The statistical mathematics is very deceiving to most people. See "Base rate fallacy" for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
  • rtkwe 9y ago
    Making it slightly easier is that they have multiple points where a person is matched with a name during their time in the airport. With that and good enough coverage they could make the recognition better with continuous tracking. Even without an explicit name attached to a person just knowing all the places a person has gone could be useful for flagging 'weird' behavior.
    • sitkack 9y ago
      How about using a VR display to give them a mediated representation of the world that constrains them to the allowed route? Put on the helmet and walk forward, looks like I was wandering down a beautiful meadow when I am really just walking to my gate. Objects would enter the VR world that you would need to avoid in the real one.
    • libertyEQ 9y ago
      It's almost as if some people are taking the poor state of the technology being proposed as some challenge, when most of us simply do not want to live in a police state. Do. Not. Want.
• mbroncano 9y ago
  Ok, so it's fine 'cause everybody else is doing so. A perfectly mature statement, furthermore supported by anecdotal evidence. Why on earth every single time the US government does something that is, err regretful, there's always a bunch of white nights ready to point out something of the sort 'but all the other kids do it'? Sounds like a recipe for societal disaster indeed. What we should we at the very least considering is whether this is what we want as a society. Who knows, maybe we do - but not because somebody somewhere is/would/might do the same.
  • flamtap 9y ago
    I didn't get the sense that they were implying that it was acceptable at all. My understanding of that comment was that they were pointing out that the problem is international, and doesn't only exist in America.
  • sli 9y ago
    This comment would be far more at home on reddit, where deliberately misreading what people say seems to be a pasttime. Or, would you mind quoting the part where OP said it's fine? I don't believe I see that anywhere, so some help would be nice. Have some respect for the intelligence of your peers.