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. Thes

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).