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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

Technology itself is always amoral. Even splitting the atom can be used to achieve wonderful and horrific outcomes.

So of course “facial recognition” per say is not the problem. But in this particular example, we see how facial recognition combined with a couple hundred million surveillance cameras funneled into a massive government data processing pipeline can be extremely effectively used for persistent tracking and nearly instant geolocation of “suspects”.

I’m pretty sure we’ve seen how this movie ends. There’s a reason we don’t implant GPS trackers into babies at birth just because they might get lost one day.

Maybe China will use this technology to build a veritable Eden free from crime and lost puppies. Or maybe they are closing the grip on a dystopian nightmare. I think you have to be pretty naive to think it’s not looking startlingly like the latter.

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The situation in China is dire. USA is not far behind. Does your neighbor have a Ring camera? Well, that watches the whole street and it is connected to a massive corporate data processing pipeline that is used for persistent tracking of advertisement subjects. Only need to tweak it a little bit for vastly different purposes. Oh, and we work hard to improve our far-field microphones connected to the same pipeline. To offer you a better service [TM].

You make a critical point. Technology itself is always amoral. We are enamored by technology for technology sake, while we drifted away from our moral roots.

> Does your neighbor have a Ring camera? Well, that watches the whole street

I was burgled recently and looking for cameras and alarm systems. I was asking the police who came to check the burglary and they explained that here (Spain) it is illegal to point cameras to anywhere ‘public’, so the situation you describe would be removed and fined here. My feeling at the time was that now I cannot protect my property adequately because I cannot detect people at my gate as that would also cover the street so I would only get to them when they are already in after they disabled the power. But after thinking about it, I do think it is a good thing.

Ofcourse law enforcement here can do more, however they seem quite limited as well compared to UK/US/CN.

So large companies outsource the breaking of the law to minions, while getting all the benefits. They even make a profit from it!

> There’s a reason we don’t implant GPS trackers into babies at birth just because they might get lost one day.

What reason are you thinking? I wouldn't support it myself, but I don't usually represent public opinion.

GPS didn't really burst into the public imagination before 2007 and the iPhone; in a sense the technology is only about a decade old or so in the public sphere. Prior to 2000 the US government's official position was something like "this is a military technology".

As the cost of sensors and radio chips goes down, we might reach the point where we do put a GPS sensor on everybody. Law enforcement would love it and on the small scale it would probably save lives and reduce crime.

>As the cost of sensors and radio chips goes down, we might reach the point where we do put a GPS sensor on everybody. Law enforcement would love it and on the small scale it would probably save lives and reduce crime.

GPS chips are already cheap enough (single digit dollars), that it's an issue of policy\public perception, not cost

Unless you can make gps readers that are non-metallic and don’t require battery changes, probably not going to happen...

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