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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

Shouldn't this technology be outlawed outside law enforcement?

It sounds like it can be used like a powerful tool.

I'm actually rather the /most/ concerned about law enforcement having access to it.

Yeah banning its use outside law enforcement sounds like the worst option given it is anti-transparency and accountability while allowing abuse. It woukd be far easier to selectively hide misconduct that way.

Is the sole argument that you're presenting in favour of outlawing really that 'it can be used like a powerful tool'?

Why should private analysis of photos legally acquired be illegal?

If computers are legal and software is legal and photography is legal, it seems to me that running your own software on your own computers over your own photos should be legal.

I don’t like the implication either, but I think perhaps the thing we should be looking at is why it is legal for companies to take photos of us for commercial purposes without our explicit consent. I also feel it would be much more practical to regulate and enforce than regulating what algorithms they get to use on already-captured imagery.

Right, so parent is suggesting making facial recognition software (as a class) illegal. You'd still be able to use your legal computer to analyze legal photographs, but we could, as a society, say it is a Bad Idea™ to make that analysis trivial.

Alternatively we could say that everyone should be able to do facial recognition analysis, but then access to the photographs becomes the gatekeeper of power.

Amazon stuff runs on Amazon servers... cloud means, it is not your computer, most likey not your Software and sooner or later not your data.

> Why should private analysis of photos legally acquired be illegal?

For the same reason most horrifyingly destructive items created out of perfectly legal items are illegal?

Yeah I don't care much about what Amazon does with it, at least compared to the police. Amazon doesn't have the ability to kill me or lock me in a cage for 50 years.

A really good definition of government that I've heard is "an organization that has a monopoly on force." There's probably more that I'm forgetting but I think that definition is important because it's something that people often forget or choose to ignore.

> A really good definition of government that I've heard is "an organization that has a monopoly on force." There's probably more that I'm forgetting but I think that definition is important because it's something that people often forget or choose to ignore.

Max Weber, although his definition is a bit more nuanced:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber

> Weber defined the state as an entity that successfully claims a "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory".

"Legitimate" is a tarpit, but in practical terms it's pretty much what others recognize as legitimate. That's the difference between a warlord and a dictator: One controls an armed gang, the other controls a military.

This poses some problems for people claiming that anarchism can work: If a region declares itself anarchist, but the majority can and will enforce its rules by force, is it anarchist or majoritarian? Is there any practical difference?

> Amazon doesn't have the ability to kill me or lock me in a cage for 50 years.

I wouldn't be so certain about that. History is filled with examples of corporations doing exactly that sort of thing, usually (but not always) by having a government act as their proxy.

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