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Comment by baroffoos | Hacker News Reader

> security (home/building/car entry, detecting suspicious individuals, known terrorists, past offenders, restraining orders)

So now we literally destroy the lives of anyone who has ever committed a crime in the past. Imagine a world where every single store refuses you entry because you stole something years ago.

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That’s the other thing that doesn’t get mentioned more in these discussion. Governments can be bad actors and suppress citizens like how China is doing right now, no guarantee your own country won’t use it to suppress citizens who they don’t agree with.

Sounds like they'd be leaving a lot of money on the table. More likely these people would be able to shop at retailers that took that into account and took appropriate precautions. People refuse to do business with people for reasons that are much dumber or more cynical than "has previously ripped off a similar business."

So we pass a law to prohibit that.

Passing laws like that is usually seen as "weak on crime" and is unpopular with politicians.

Because corporations and governments always follow the laws they write and laws never get repealed and overridden.

The fourth amendment already has a bunch of exceptions to it, and the constitution is the highest legal framework in the land. Other laws mean diddly.

Laws are a high latency side-chain of power and authority.

That doesn't mean they are completely useless.

I'm not sure anyone is proposing that laws are _entirely_ useless. But it a tech is powerful enough, any abuse at all has potential for widespread negative effects. In the US, we've already seen post-9/11 how laws are side-stepped, trampled or quietly ignored even by well-meaning actors. Plus, getting laws in place is _hard_. Much of the public doesn't care enough to make noise about this kind of tech until it has already been abused (and sometimes not even then). None of this is meant as an argument against your position per se; just counter-point.

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