> Ok, I will give you two examples, but you will need to use your brain to try to adapt the problems to other situations. Can you do that? Great! There's no n

> Ok, I will give you two examples, but you will need to use your brain to try to adapt the problems to other situations. Can you do that? Great! There's no need to be uncivil or rude. Let's take Example 1. It would indeed be problematic if we convicted people based solely on the algorithmic conclusion of a machine. But thankfully, we still have jury trials in the U.S.; it requires a unanimous verdict to convict someone; and it requires a level of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt." It's important to understand that a machine is not a witness. It can't be cross-examined. So whatever result it produces is evidence. How strongly that evidence is believed is up to the jury; and a good defense attorney is going to do whatever it takes to attack the machine (using expert witnesses and so forth) to introduce reasonable doubt if its conclusion is incorrect. The defense attorney is also going to introduce whatever other exculpatory facts and witnesses they can find. In your example, if a sexual assault occurs, the victim is likely to testify. Without the victim's testimony identifying the defendant, and without any corroborating DNA evidence, the defendant is likely to walk, even with the machine saying it's 90%+ probability match. In any event, I think what's needed here is some additional law forbidding the sole use of FR data as evidence used to convict a defendant. That, I think, would help assuage most people's concerns -- even though I think it unlikely that a conviction would result this way anyway. A really important fact that you're not considering is that FR has a strong potential to prevent false identification. Many studies have shown that eyewitness identifications, including line-ups, are extremely unreliable; and yet, we've been using them for decades to convict people. And we've released innocent convicts many, many times, sometimes decades after imprisonment, when it turned out the witness was lying or simply had a faulty memory. And in your example, if you in fact went to the toilet during the crime, the cameras would be able to corroborate that. OTOH, if a machine strongly disagreed with the eyewitness, I have little doubt that the defendant would be dismissed. Example 2 is a bit trickier. You don't need FR technology to have a police state: North Korea has had one for nearly 70 years without one. East Germany had one for over 40 years (see: Stasi). There are cruder methods than using FR technology; spying is a very old game. So, FR can help enhance control for regimes that are already inclined to preventing freedom by making it much more economical than having a spy network, but it's by no means necessary. Besides, you can trivially foil FR by wearing a mask. I don't know how to prevent a police state, other than to employ violent resistance, and even that doesn't always work. I don't think anybody knows. But if you want a prevent a police state, I think banning FR isn't really going to help. At least so far, history shows that many police states resulted from democracies or republics ceding control under some sort of "necessity."