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Comment by pjmorris | Hacker News Reader

FUD aside, I'm with the GP on a question that you might have an answer for: How will Rekognition positively affect the common person?

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I am aware of an active use case to catalog mobsters who shake down retailers and identify them to others in the network.

Outside of facial recognition, the service will allow online marketplaces and dating sites to stay safer. They all have a problem where spammers and fraudsters post images with content meant to deceive or abuse site policies.

With facial recognition, app developers can build services like the ones tgat Google and Apple have built in their phones; the ability to look at your photos to see which ones have you or others that are close to you, organize those, etc. Who knows what else Devs will come up with.

I cannot think of a single way facial recognition will really truly help either of those “stay safer”.

I find Google and Apple’s photo recognition features to be of extremely limited usefulness to begin with. Don’t really except other devs to come up with other compelling use cases.

Facial recognition is a technology without a killer app. Unless that killer app is over-the-top, oppressive Big Brother-like security.

I was responding to the OPs question about how the overall service of Rekognition can be useful. The question did not have a safety theme to it, although I gave an example that does. Note the service has other features and uses outside of facial recognition.

The types of sites I reference are frequently targeted by phishing attempts via text on image. Rekognition can help thawrt that.

Small edit

i see a big opportunity in home security.

domestic abuse, alert in case your abuser is at your home. and automatically lock your door.

restraining order? add their face and do the same. i see a future where getting a face scan is a requirement of every restraining order

this tech can save lives

Doors and locks only keep out the honest people. These use-cases have some political appeal but are absolutely impractical.

you clearly don’t know anyone with a restraining order or the fear that comes with your personal safety being threatened. there is nothing impractical with uploading someone’s face to your hole security system when you know that personal is a threat and should be no where near you at any time

Isn't this solely an appeal to emotion? How is facial recognition going to help in this case, where, if the tech were to gain some traction, bad actors would be aware of it and could take easy steps to defeat it? And even if the tech were difficult to thwart, at what point would the rate of false positives make it viable?

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