Isn't it better to find how you can defend against something (face recognition in this example) instead of convincing the people to "ban it"?
I mean, let's ban all wars, ban low income and ban evil. What sort of thinking is this?
On the flip side, you have the "good guy problem" that we normal "good" people will happily give up our rights in order to help catch bad guys.
But really... it's not a MAC address or an IP address. It's your face. What "defense" is there to facial recognition software? Even if you stay off of facebook, your friends and family will still post photos of you there and reference you and talk about you. "No man is an island" has never been more apparent.
An automated system that scans friends galleries to find my face in their galleries maybe would be helpful. Then I would see who uses my face in what context, so I can react; maybe send a polite request to remove me from the picture, set it as private, or simply remove the picture from the gallery?
Or maybe an approach based on spreading disinformation would be enough, so I could produce fake photos of my face with other randomly chosen faces from all over the internet, so that face-gathering systems will store fake relations between me and some random people?
There are lots of methods we can use to defend ourselves.
The "ban something" approach works only for parties that are willing to cooperate. But it's not the cooperative parties that we should be afraid of, it's the uncooperative ones.
You would love to have a system that scanned the world's photos and notified you automatically about people commenting on you. You don't necessarily want the government to have that same system.
Furthermore, how do you rectify disagreements over that trust? I may trust a multinational corporation (especially if I own stock in it and can vote on its directors), but you may trust your government, and our neighbor may not trust anyone.
Both of those questions need to be "solved" (if such a thing is even possible), but that's (obviously) a lot easier said than done.
So I would rather allow anyone to have access to face recognition software, than to allow using it only for illegal use. Because nobody can prevent it from being used illegally.
This is the nirvana fallacy. We don't expect people not to drink and drive ever again, but we still ban it.
And like drinking and driving, not only can we ban something, but we can find how we can defend against it (such as education and making it easier to get taxis home). So, the question:
> Isn't it better to find how you can defend against something
can be easily answered with: "Why not both?"
> What sort of thinking is this?
Reasonable, logical thinking that has succeeded in the past.
Does this mean it's the correct solution here? I don't know. But this isn't illogical by any means.
The same thing goes for any crime. Most people will not mug you, but a few will. So what? Should we not make mugging illegal, because there will always be some muggers around? Or do we just forget about policing such behaviour and instead "find ways to defend against it"?
I mean I guess you could argue for the latter approach, but then you need to explain where the buck stops- do we have any laws banning harmful behaviour, or is it every man and woman for themselves? Or something in between?