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No street art. No protesting. Social credit. No way to break away from the stigmas assigned you your face. No speeding. No jaywalking. No pissing outside. No wa

by moksly 7y ago

No street art. No protesting. Social credit. No way to break away from the stigmas assigned you your face. No speeding. No jaywalking. No pissing outside. No way to rebel. I mean, it wouldn’t really stop crime. London has something close to total surveillance, and they have a lot of crime. But if you really want that sort of thing, you can actually have a taste of it in parts of China.

quotemstr 7y ago
This comment reinforces the OP's point: opponents of facial recognition seem to approach the world with a particular value system that includes a disagreement with several existing laws. Instead of working to get these laws changed, facial recognition opponents advocate bans on technology that would maken these laws easier to enforce. Why should they succeed? > No street art Good. Graffiti is a blight. > No protesting There's protesting and there's "protesting". Lawful protest will be unaffected. Unlawful protest involving criminal behavior will become much more difficult. Good outcome. > No way to break away from the stigmas assigned you your face In an age of background checks, your face is the least of your worries. Are you opposed to background checks? > No speeding Speed cameras already exist and don't rely on facial recognition to issue tickets > No jaywalking > No pissing outside > No way to rebel Why should people get to break the law?
- mbel 7y ago
  > Why should people get to break the law? Because laws are made by people and as such can be flawed.
  - quotemstr 7y ago
    Laws can also be unmade by people. What gives random individuals the right to nullify laws made by everyone? Don't like a law? Get it repealed. In the meantime, you have to follow it.
    - avmich 7y ago
      > In the meantime, you have to follow it. You also would like to expect that if the law is unjust, it can't manage to make too much harm while getting repealed. And repeals can take a long time. If people would easy organize for things like repeal a law or a government which suddenly become despotic according to majority opinion, we'd live in a different world. What we're trying to make here, banning face recognition, is to make mistakes in laws less costly - sometimes way less costly.
- etripe 7y ago
  > Lawful protest will be unaffected. Unlawful protest involving criminal behavior will become much more difficult. Good outcome. What is perfectly legal today might be criminal tomorrow. Criminalising lawful protest is one of the first things a despot would do.
- moksly 7y ago
  The holocaust was legal. No one ever entered a Gulag without a sentence. The Uyghurs of China are being persecuted within the law. Laws aren’t a model for society, or at least they shouldn’t be. Ideals and morals should, and throughout human history we’ve needed a metric fuckton of law breaking to get to the democracy we have now.
thu2111 7y ago
What's street art got to do with it? In the city I live in, there are areas specifically reserved by the government for pro-grade graffiti. It looks great. These areas are where people really are too, it's not like they're shoved miles out of the city centre. No protesting? Why not? Democratic countries all have laws on the book that allow and regulate protests. Social credit? Why does that depend on face recognition? All these are government related. I think there's a huge problem with such anti-face recognition arguments, namely, all of them can be implemented by just interrogating the phone in your pocket. Phones are linked to contracts linked to verified government-issued identities. Phone companies can track their location very precisely, especially now with 5G. So governments have had the ability to track people en-masse for decades, and have done it, Snowden showed us the PowerPoints and ... nobody cared. Only some people in the tech industry but wider society, no. In practice people prefer safety and low crime. That's why I've come to see all the EU's privacy actions as just posing for political reasons. Do any of these laws make NSA-like organisations illegal? No? Do they stop police using ANPR or phone triangulation? No? Then they are just for show. GDPR is an especially pernicious offender as it's so badly drafted, but the cookie law is a clearer example: it makes no difference to anyone's privacy but does make life in the EU worse on a daily basis. Banning face recognition is the kind of micro-managing that governments throughout history have proven very bad at and which are riven with unanticipated side effects (well, unanticipated by the regulators).

by moksly 7y ago

quotemstr 7y ago

This comment reinforces the OP's point: opponents of facial recognition seem to approach the world with a particular value system that includes a disagreement with several existing laws. Instead of working to get these laws changed, facial recognition opponents advocate bans on technology that would maken these laws easier to enforce. Why should they succeed? > No street art Good. Graffiti is a blight. > No protesting There's protesting and there's "protesting". Lawful protest will be unaffected. Unlawful protest involving criminal behavior will become much more difficult. Good outcome. > No way to break away from the stigmas assigned you your face In an age of background checks, your face is the least of your worries. Are you opposed to background checks? > No speeding Speed cameras already exist and don't rely on facial recognition to issue tickets > No jaywalking > No pissing outside > No way to rebel Why should people get to break the law?

mbel 7y ago
> Why should people get to break the law? Because laws are made by people and as such can be flawed.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  Laws can also be unmade by people. What gives random individuals the right to nullify laws made by everyone? Don't like a law? Get it repealed. In the meantime, you have to follow it.
  - avmich 7y ago
    > In the meantime, you have to follow it. You also would like to expect that if the law is unjust, it can't manage to make too much harm while getting repealed. And repeals can take a long time. If people would easy organize for things like repeal a law or a government which suddenly become despotic according to majority opinion, we'd live in a different world. What we're trying to make here, banning face recognition, is to make mistakes in laws less costly - sometimes way less costly.
etripe 7y ago
> Lawful protest will be unaffected. Unlawful protest involving criminal behavior will become much more difficult. Good outcome. What is perfectly legal today might be criminal tomorrow. Criminalising lawful protest is one of the first things a despot would do.
moksly 7y ago
The holocaust was legal. No one ever entered a Gulag without a sentence. The Uyghurs of China are being persecuted within the law. Laws aren’t a model for society, or at least they shouldn’t be. Ideals and morals should, and throughout human history we’ve needed a metric fuckton of law breaking to get to the democracy we have now.

thu2111 7y ago

What's street art got to do with it? In the city I live in, there are areas specifically reserved by the government for pro-grade graffiti. It looks great. These areas are where people really are too, it's not like they're shoved miles out of the city centre. No protesting? Why not? Democratic countries all have laws on the book that allow and regulate protests. Social credit? Why does that depend on face recognition? All these are government related. I think there's a huge problem with such anti-face recognition arguments, namely, all of them can be implemented by just interrogating the phone in your pocket. Phones are linked to contracts linked to verified government-issued identities. Phone companies can track their location very precisely, especially now with 5G. So governments have had the ability to track people en-masse for decades, and have done it, Snowden showed us the PowerPoints and ... nobody cared. Only some people in the tech industry but wider society, no. In practice people prefer safety and low crime. That's why I've come to see all the EU's privacy actions as just posing for political reasons. Do any of these laws make NSA-like organisations illegal? No? Do they stop police using ANPR or phone triangulation? No? Then they are just for show. GDPR is an especially pernicious offender as it's so badly drafted, but the cookie law is a clearer example: it makes no difference to anyone's privacy but does make life in the EU worse on a daily basis. Banning face recognition is the kind of micro-managing that governments throughout history have proven very bad at and which are riven with unanticipated side effects (well, unanticipated by the regulators).