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Comment by imaginenore | Hacker News Reader

You can't have an expectation of privacy in public places.

Facial recognition can be beat by a hat + sunglasses (which is the hugest plot hole in Person of Interest, the characters never even attempt to disguise themselves).

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If you followed PoI closely enough (if you did not: spoiler alert!), the main characters do not have to disguise themselves from Samaritan because they snuck in a patch that literally makes Samaritan blind when it sees them. For one reason or another, Samaritan or its accomplices can not locate and remove that patch. That, of course, does not prevent Samaritan from figuring out where they are by other means (like tracking their actions, accomplices, vehicles, etc.) and from Samaritan agents to see them in plain old ways. But by the time a team of dozen commandos comes in guns blazing, it's too late to get the hat on. They would probably disregard the hat.

I don't want to live in a world where I have to wear a hat + sunglasses.

You don't have to. But throwing a tantrum isn't going to change reality. We have the laws allowing anybody to film anything visible from public places, with a few security exceptions. That's more important than you getting upset that you are not invisible.

We're talking about limiting the actions of government here. It's hardly a "tantrum".

To address your point on Person of Interest (an absolutely wonderful series, recommended to the entire HN audience): There's several instances where the main characters disguise themselves. But it's not practical for general purpose - There is more than facial recognition at play - voice recognition, process of elimination etc and there is no trouble tracking already-identified targets.

It's not a plot hole if the magical artificially-intelligent supercomputer also integrates gait detection and real-time location data.

You can be identified by body shape and gait. If you've ever been through airport security, a 3D model of your body has been captured. If you have a smartphone, your gait can be recorded.

Your walking style identifies you better than face. Are you going to walk differently once you put a hat and sunglasses on?

Do you have a database of walking styles? Does anybody?

They definitely have access to most people's photos - driver's licenses, passports.

I personally don't care if they know where I go in public. They can just tail me if they really want to know.

> Do you have a database of walking styles? Does anybody?

I nearly always walk around with a 3-d accelerometer which can indeed "phone" home.

Here's the ML extraction mechanism as explained by a Samsung engineer - http://www.slideshare.net/satnam74/the-fifth-elephant-2013-t...

Yeah but if they have access to your phone, they already know where you are, no need for the overcomplicated accelerometer method.

If it's in a database, then people without access to your phone can still identify you.

In Cory Doctorow's book Little Brother, the protagonist defeats gait sensors with some pebbles in his shoe. It's really not such a bad idea, as every step is going to be different as your foot tries not to hit the pebble too hard.

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