San Francisco Considers Ban on Government's Use of Facial Recognition Technology

I do not want the government to possess the tools for dragnet surveillance for the same reason I don't want the cops kitted out like they're navy seals or the army stockpiling chemical weapons.

No amount of dragnet surveillance will change the fact that going hard on petty crime is politically unpopular in SF. If it really was an issue SF wanted to solve they would solve it with or without facial recognition.

The potential for abuse and false positives is just too high, and that class of failure mode is invited by the very mechanism that makes facial recognition effective: broadness of coverage.

IMO what SF needs is beat cops. What I want is a city where it feels like your actions might have consequences. Like there are actually police who are there to help citizens and intercept criminals – fast, and non-apathetically. That's what SF doesn't have.

Everything between broadway and townsend on the Y axis and the embarcadero and van ness on the X axis should have, at minimum, a beat cop per 4x4 block area. Doing laps all day, meeting and integrating with the community, and enforcing the law – lowering the time and variance between violation and consequence, instead of promoting the perception that you can mess around and 9 out of 10 times the cops are going to be too distracted to care.

Ditto for the mission.

When I lived in SOMA, just under the loin, the liquor store guys knew who all the baddies were. They knew their faces, their MOs, where they hung out... nobody cared. The police presence in SF is so ethereal and abstract. It was so disappointing. The people on the street have the answers, and they're not exactly a sophisticated group. But it seems like the system just doesn't want to interface with the population at that level.

I want old fashioned preventative community policing, not high-tech post-crime people monitoring.

There's a court system component, as well. My understanding is that the courts just don't have the bandwidth to enforce the law in all cases, so they have to let the small stuff slide, which just creates a system with no consequences for petty crime. SF's situation is very unsurprising when viewed through that lens.

A solution for the pain of a few should not have negative affects on the rest. If you have your house broken into them I'm sorry, but maybe put up some cameras that upload to the cloud. If something happens this can be handed over to the police and they can run their searches. Stopping privacy from everyone should not be considered a solution. History shows that ther government likely doesn't have the best interest of the people and will try to get away with anything they can so it'd only be a matter of time before this is used to against the population. Before you know it, it'd be discovered that these cameras also "unknowingly" also had mics and "accidentally" were recording everything.

> We have a crime epidemic and it seems to me like facial recognition can help

But.. do you?

https://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/california/san-f...

Property crime, is up, but not an "epidemic" - that's probably the homeless issue.

Violent crime, it's not any worse than normal.

It's a matter of prioritization and due process. Sure, mandatory ubiquitous face recognition at all levels of society might reduce crime. By how much? At what cost to our society? What are the alternatives we could pursue instead to reduce crime, and how do they compare? Those are important questions which deserve a thoughtful, cautious public debate before we rush into implementing it.

I'm personally in favor of these bans because it gives us chance to have that debate.

People desperate to break into your house because of socio-economic issues won't care about the cameras. It has also been shown that masks and other prosthetics can be added to your face to prevent detection (something a robber would probably be willing to do). In the end, you give up freedom for perceived security and lose privacy in the bargain.

Motion-triggered guns set up in your house would be more effective against burglars.

We have to beware of unintended consequences. Deployment of facial recognition tech could very well make the crime situation worse. You see, teens are rebellious by nature and they think everything is about them. They'll likely react by masking their faces in public. First the delinquent ones. Then the wannabes. Soon enough it would seem there're hoodlums everywhere on the city streets.

From my understanding, the technology is not deeply flawed. It just has accuracy problems when dealing with edge cases.

Facial recognition is not a 100% independent solution, but instead should aid other systems, including human-run systems. I think this is the concept that critics fail to grasp.

Look up Singapore, and how disastrous it is.

It will lead to unintended consequences, for certain. Disaster is a loaded term in this case, which contains no actionable or otherwise useful information. No doubt private concerns will happily continue to use or not use facial recognition of images captured within the city limits. The genie is out of the bottle.