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Comment by makewavesnotwar | Hacker News Reader

I love the sentiment, but seriously... who did you think you were building this for? It's absurd to believe you were helping anything other than the big brother character from 1984. Who else would this help? Foreign secret services? Maybe you believed it would help stream line the automation process? Thereby making humans irrelevant? I'd love to hear a legitimate - non-big brother implementation of this. And please don't be so coy as to say this helps automate person to person sales. I can already review all purchases made through big box hardware stores thanks to them identifying me through my credit card number and the email address I associated with it.

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There are myriad positive applications of facial recognition. My iPhone uses it to categorize people by faces and can make me a video just of my daughter. An app I have can actually make a time lapse where all the photos have been registered to the center of her face so I can get a video of her growing up.

This bring up an unrelated question. Where is Las Vegas in facial recognition? Before the big players like AMZ, GOOG et al got into it, they had the best civilian systems. Have they all migrated to the GOOGs and AMZs of the world?

Given that tech earned millions of dollars vs this tech earning billions, I'm gonna guess the old tech is now underwhelming.

Retailers. I've seen multiple working demos of retailers using facial recognition to flag repeat customers, allowing the retailer to streamline the experience for their repeat customer -- show them something new they might like based on previous purchases, start cooking their usual order before they get to the front of the line so it's ready right when they order, etc.

> Who else would this help?

FaceID users. Just because something has downsides doesn’t mean it has no upsides.

This is not the same thing as Face ID. First Face ID requires special cameras. Second it only on device. Third, classifying something that is novel is much different than identifying a previously registered person. (This difference is somewhat akin to transcription versus recognizing ‘Hey Siri’)

Streamlining the criminal / judicial process would be a plus for me. Use webcam feeds to record filesharer, illegal activites passively. Capture known criminals anywhere because you have a real time facial recognition. Cross reference the evidence, and avoid long drawn out court time.

If anything this will make court time longer - you better believe lawyers are going to challenge every aspect of the face recognition software and it's validity in courtroom identification

They may, seeing as "eyewitness" testimony is pretty strong n in the face of its wild inaccuracy, I'm not so sure that protest will last too long.

Right after we get to see the source code.

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