The cat's out of the bag with this technology - it exists, citizens will demand that the police use it to help solve crimes. The way forward is to ensure that i

The cat's out of the bag with this technology - it exists, citizens will demand that the police use it to help solve crimes. The way forward is to ensure that it gets used as an investigative tool, rather than part of mass surveillance. The way to do that is to make sure that querying a facial recognition database is too expensive for ubiquitous use. A court order per face you want to identify is likely enough, though I'd like an additional $100-$1000 fee to discourage rubber-stamping. IIRC, the police have hired people who are just really good at recognizing faces and given them a giant stack of photographs of criminals. Driving down the difficulty of that sort of process - identifying suspects with known faces - seems actually reasonable. Driving down the cost of identifying faces to the point where you can have a historical database of identity-annotated sidewalk footage of an entire city is the sort of thing we need to fight.