>I’ve yet to hear a potential benefit of this sort of software that would justify the huge cost to citizen privacy. // It makes it easy to find suspects and na

>I’ve yet to hear a potential benefit of this sort of software that would justify the huge cost to citizen privacy. // It makes it easy to find suspects and narrow down suspect lists. Meaning far fewer police are needed to catch a greater proportion of known criminals. Most people consider that a huge benefit. Let's say you have a db of all faces in country of 60M people. You have a photo/video of a person committing a crime, robbery. False positive rate is 1:100,000. Your search returns 600 people; address match finds 60 with connections to the locality; 5 of those have records, one for robbery. You'd at least sit a person down for an hour to review the matches, consider the records, list people for interview. According to UK ONS stats, those adults released from prison, in Jan-Mar 2018, had a reoffending rate of 65%. It seems just tracking known offenders would find the perpetrator in many cases if visual recognition is possible. I mean, this is _the_ principle benefit.