It took me awhile to grok but I think that people like Schneier want to take the ideology of online anonymity and apply it IRL.
Now maybe that protest you went to as a college student shows up every time you attend a job interview. That time you drank too much and were seen peeing against a building by the buildings security camera is available to someone that was recording the unsecured stream.
People from old youtube videos are now locatable as they had their face show up on facebook.
That cute girl on the bus now gets stalked home because the creepy guy that likes her can find here address.
The guy you cut off in traffic has a dash cam, he uses it to find out who you are and is waiting for you at work the next day.
The picture of you at a party on someone elses facebook now shows up to every employers search as they can now search by photo.
How do witnesses in criminal trials disappear now? They might show up in someone's publicly posted holiday photos or on a webcam feed that hasn't been locked down.
Schneider's point is that we're failing to regulate against surveillance in general, and by simply focusing on banning a single form of surveillance, we're ignoring the dozens of other mechanisms that can be used both online and offline to track every single thing we do.
I think he's just trying to think and get others thinking about "identification, correlation and discrimination" technologies. Obviously you can't have perfect anonymity in real life, but is there something we can do to ensure that our lack of anonymity is not used improperly?
I imagine it's something like - Biological and Social constraints have restricted human endeavors. "Online" in terms of the "internet" was an experiment to test this theory.
It both succeeded to a lesser degree than expected and failed, primarily due to social conditions of the times. Wealth disparity (motivating more bad actors than good), and outlet for those in psychological crisis (who tend to have a lot of time on their hands), juvenile behavior (gaming as a gateway) and the weakness of the legislation/prosecution for when cursory privacy invasion was enabled enough to track down bad actors (due to legislators being relative luddites).
It sure as hell does in any practical sense. I expect that I can walk around town, and people that I don't know, don't know my name, phone number, purchase history, etc.
Let's say I want to buy a butt plug or something. I could go to the sex shop in town, and make sure nobody I knew was around before I went in, buy it and leave. If I wanted to buy a studded electro-shock butt plug, and wanted to take extra precautions that I was undiscovered, I could drive to another town and drop it off.
Now suppose I'm a government whistle blower trying to expose some really nasty government coverup or conspiracy committed by the FBI. I'd definitely take the same precaution. I could leave my phone, go several cities over, walk up to a public mail drop and drop off my envelope of documentation in the USPS box and historically, could fully expect to remain anonymous in doing so. That's still arguably safer than sending an email and hoping I've perfectly configured all my network VPN or tor settings to try to ensure there aren't any leaks.
That's NOT the case with facial recognition. Particularly when that info can be processed and categorized into a form where someone could just query an identity and get a complete historical tracking of a bunch of places you've been prior to any sort of investigative interest.
All you’ve done is try to obtain privacy, but you can’t walk into the shop and demand that your neighbor shouldn’t be there.
The “expectation of privacy” is really a hope that you’ve marked your identity well enough, which is really the same thing you do online.
This is a total fantasy.
1. If I was concerned about it, I probably would have noticed before entering that he was there.
2. If I knew him, I'd probably know where he worked and could avoid him.
3. If I didn't catch myself in time, I could walk in and buy something mundane, or nothing at all, or a gift card.
4. If I was really concerned, I'd go the next town over.
5. There's a massive difference between taking a very low probability risk of being identified multiplied by further low probabilities of it being spread notable, remembered, and spread around, and a 100% chance of being categorically identified and logged by an automated system.
I have that expectation for most of that space.
On my Discord. I have a HomoSexual Nazi (I don't think he is a real Nazi I think he is larping because I believe works in a very PC environment), A socialist transexual woman, a half Mexican / Chinese American Immigrate who just got his first job in the USA after he got his Green Card and many other personalities. These people can be who they want and if they want to stop being that, they can just leave and it is gone forever and it is all harmless.
Flamewars, Trolling and some Drama (before the likes of actually harmful stuff like doxxing, swatting etc) were sometimes kinda fun.