The US is slowly moving towards adopting the same ubiquitous surveillance that we used to pride ourselves of not needing to worry about in this country. In both

The US is slowly moving towards adopting the same ubiquitous surveillance that we used to pride ourselves of not needing to worry about in this country. In both the public and private sector, systems that monitor people are going to make life a living hell if nothing is done about it. There is currently no federal law preventing the deployment of a privatized social credit score to be passed around in the same way financial credit scores are today. And there is every incentive to do so. Using present-day technologies, stores could quickly refuse customers who have been blacklisted, and this list won’t require any conviction or pesky due process whatsoever. It doesn’t even have to be that accurate: a list that’s right 90% of the time is rejecting undesired patrons 9 times out of 10. Some places can and will ban law enforcement from using facial recognition, but that’s hardly enough. Many places have private security which will not be bound by those rules. And most of the infrastructure we use and treat as “public” really isn’t. Credit card processors are private. Transportation is almost all private. ISPs and cell phone carriers are private. Grocery stores are private. A blacklist doesn’t even need to ban people, raising the prices and downgrading service for “troublesome” customers is enough. If I were marketing such a product, I would focus on the positives: you can also quickly identify big spenders based on prior shopping (including at other stores). Stores will give priority customer service to these people and maybe even other perks. I should also note that it is immaterial that facial recognition currently has major issues. There’s no question that bad ubiquitous surveillance is bad, in the same way that a diet of radioactive cheeseburgers is bad: removing the radioactivity doesn’t solve the problem. Arguments relying on the accuracy of current capabilities are always at risk of being outdated. I’m not as focused on “what is inaccurate” but rather “what if facial recognition is 100% accurate”.