I know this outside of the scope of the article, but I've seen this a bunch of times when HN commenters claim that a given topic is not relevant for HN. The gis

I know this outside of the scope of the article, but I've seen this a bunch of times when HN commenters claim that a given topic is not relevant for HN. The gist of the claim is basically "$badaction was already illegal, this new tech did not enable $badaction, therefore we don't need to discuss this further". The claim always seems disingenuous, because it ignores a crucial fact: prior to the tech, the friction opposing a bad action was sufficient all by itself to keep the rate of the bad action within acceptable limits. Its a "nothing wrong with nuclear weapons, if sharp rocks are still allowed too" sort of argument. Fine, yes, this is a police-made-up-evidence story. But its also a technology-enabled-a-psuedo-scientific-confidence-interval-to-make-the-made-up-evidence-more-convincing story. Dismissing it out of hand really downplays why facial recognition (or algorithmically generated feeds or the banning of human content moderation or...) is so fraught. There may well be a solution to the problems appearing, but we're not going to arrive at those solutions without discussing those problems as, well, problems.