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Comment by vfc1 | Hacker News Reader

It's like nuclear power, technology is what we make of it.

Do we want to use it for criminal purposes only, effectively to almost make it impossible for someone to commit a violent crime and get away with it and make a much safer society?

I'm all for it, there are some nasty people out there, serial killers, pedophilians, drug cartels. This technology deployed at scale would make these crimes much harder to get away with.

As long as it's another way to ensure democratic laws are respected, I don't think that completely forbidding it makes sense.

I'm all for regulation, we don't want this technology to be abused.

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The thing is it depends of what you call 'criminal' on the moment, right ?

And when you know you're watched, you start self-censoring to adapt what should be the 'right thing' to avoid blame or judgment.

Ski mask. You might catch/convict a guy with it, but soon after a lot of people are just going to wear them all the time.

I don't know how effective is this technology to identify masked people, if at all.

But then again, how suspect is that to wear a ski mask? Everyone will notice.

Yup. About half the US needs them for 3 or more months per year. And then there's the rise of surgical masks to prevent the spread of viruses.

I also foresee a surge in wide-brimmed hats.

I remember stories from 5 years ago or so about artists who were making facial recognition blocking scarves. The scarves made you look like a lightbulb on camera, so they couldn't see your face.

I chuckled, because it was ridiculous, and now I'm wondering if they make them in professional colors. . .

The same fundamentals used in facial recognition can be applied to 3D pose estimation for gait recognition. This allows identification of a person without biometric features like a face or iris [1].

Facial recognition is used as a catch-all term because it's easily understood, but the deep-learning behind it is much more widely applicable.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.06512

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