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Comment by jammygit | Hacker News Reader

> These efforts are well intentioned, but facial recognition bans are the wrong way to fight against modern surveillance. Focusing on one particular identification method misconstrues the nature of the surveillance society we're in the process of building. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is increasingly the norm. In countries like China, a surveillance infrastructure is being built by the government for social control. In countries like the United States, it's being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behavior, and is incidentally used by the government.

He’s right, but we should take every winning battle we can, no? Even a few notable victories could help to change public opinion about whether things are inevitable or not

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“In countries like the United States, it's being built by corporations in order to influence our buying behavior, and is incidentally used by the government.”

No, he’s not right about it being “incidental”. The use of facial recognition by police is widespread and widely reported (0). Unlike other forms of digital surveillance, this one has serious and potentially deadly consequences when misused. Banning it at least temporarily is a major win for civil liberties and I would wager that anyone thinking this is a step backward is privileged enough to never have experienced police brutality.

0. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-priv...

I think nobody says that banning facial recognition is a step backwards. It just doesn’t solve the underlying issue and might even distract from the real problems.

Now politicians can say "but we banned facial recognition, isn’t that good enough?".

> Now politicians can say "but we banned facial recognition, isn’t that good enough?".

And we answer "No!" and continue to push them further.

But this would be "perfect is the enemy of the good" situation. Banning things piece by piece is easier than trying to ban everything at once.

I mean, we could curtail most of the surveillance tech development overnight if we banned most forms of advertising and burned the adtech industry to the ground. But good luck pushing that through politics.

Facial recognition for Black people has been in play for decades. Generally if you’re Black you fit the description. Cameras actually are a huge net positive for this group.

> but we should take every winning battle we can, no?

It's treating the symptoms not the cause though, and this little victory will likely serve to dampen resolve to continue fighting against the root cause: increased surveillance, invasion of privacy, and the overall devaluing of privacy.

Facial recognition may be a battle that gets won, but it could be a key moment that results in the war on ubiquitous surveillance being lost.

Additionally, this is only a 5-year victory. Must we repeat it again every five years? At least the victory in the war for encryption lasted 20-odd years.

I have noticed victories tend to embolden a political groups to seek more of the same. It’s why chipping away is so often used in politics. Each individual bill does not make a big enough change to upset the silent majority, but in agrigate over time you see things like a 50% reduction in top tax rates. Passing that on day one makes headlines, but a 2% drop flys under the radar, as does the next, and the next, etc.

The entire reason why we're facing down these privacy and surveillance issues is because they came one small step at a time. First it's rolled out for some incredibly small part of the population, gradually expanded to everyone else as people get used to the new norm. Rinse and repeat.

The way you win battles like this is by winning many smaller ones and pushing back what is acceptable or not one step at a time.

I'm on both sides of the fence a bit. I agree entirely that victories are piecemeal, but the facial recognition issue just feels like the piece of the iceberg that's above the water. The rest of the iceberg, supporting things such as facial recognition, feels as if it will never be addressed, and that's the war that needs to be won.

My original reply written prior to the above: And yet nothing has been done about the information dragnet that is the Internet, even after the Cambridge Analytica situation got worldwide press. Well, the GDPR happened, actually, but that's only a reaction from a single country. And this has been going on, and escalating, for years with almost zero political will to halt or even slow it down.

Winning on Facial Recognition will be license for most governments to happily ignore the other, more insidious, creepings of privacy invasion.

The EU is not a country, it is a collection of 27 countries.

My apologies, I had incorrectly associated it with just Germany rather than the EU as a whole.

The Cambridge Analytica situation wasn't a founding cause for the GDPR, it came to light after the legislation was already finalized. It just happened to coincide (roughly) with the GDPR enforcement date, and helped illustrate why such regulation was necessary.

100%. It’s all case-by-case; moment-by-moment.

“And then they came for me”, in full effect.

Also, unrelated: but fuck yeah F-Zero. <3

We’ve had to handle Holocaust Denial since WW2, we’ve had to handle anti-vaxxers since Andrew Wakefield, and conspiracy theorists since the first apes developed complex language.

This is not a “fight every five years” episodic battle,mthis is a daily struggle, with the vested interests on one side looking to squeeze in more of the wedge until they can walk through the door unobstructed.

The cause is the desire for profit and control.

Unless you're going to build better people, you're never going to deal with the cause. All we can do is deal with the symptoms.

how do you devour a whale? One bite at a time. I don't think there is any purpose to being caught up in theoretical discussions about privacy. Privacy is won by extending the real rights of people piece by piece and sustaining that effort for a long time. There is no one time, root cause fix that holds forever in a democracy.

>Must we repeat it again every five years?

Yes we must. We live in a society where people over and over negotiate how they want to live together, which means that if we advocate for something we have make our case again and again. That is a good thing. In the Mie Prefecture, Japan the citizens tear down a shrine every 20 years because it is the only way to learn exactly how it was built.

I agree - enthusiastically - with your points, but I do have one comment:

> I don't think there is any purpose to being caught up in theoretical discussions about privacy.

There is a point! These discussions provide the context, terminology, and language for the people that understand these issues the best, to provide people like me - people whom our peers consider “conspiracy wackos” and “tinfoil” because of our deep-seated suspicion and mistrust of surveillance tech - with the tools to explain our rationale to the people we have influence over, via interpersonal relationships and whatnot.

This article, for me, crystallizes and defines many of my own personal anxieties about surveillance culture, and gives me the tools to better explain my concerns and apprehensions to my friends and family.

Just a thought.

> how do you devour a whale? One bite at a time.

Missed a step. You gotta kill it first.

Not really, it'll die eventually if you've taken enough bites. Might be a bit more difficult to take the bites if you didn't kill it beforehand, but still ...

Additionally, this is only a 5-year victory. Must we repeat it again every five years? At least the victory in the war for encryption lasted 20-odd years.

I think the idea is to ban it in Europe for 5 years while the rest of the world carries on with it, and then reassess the impact by looking at how the rest of the world has changed. If the tech hasn't moved on and there's been very little impact, great, use it. If other countries that use it are police states where citizens can't leave their houses for fear of automated oppression then ban it permanently.

Politics isn't medicine.

Banning one technology might well make banning the broader practice easier (or harder). At the very least it creates precedent: This is a reason we ban technologies for.

The notion that we must spurn incomplete victories in order to hold our resolve for complete victory has achieved approximately nothing ever in politics. One of the most successful movements of the 20th century was the environmental movement (even if it isn't perceived that way). We now have comprehensive systems for regulating and approving chemicals that didn't exist at all until the last couple of decades of the 20th century. This wasn't achieved by saying we shouldn't stop destroying nature until we reform all of society.

Tech reformers and activists could do well to learn from previous successful movements.

He’s right, but we should take every winning battle we can, no? Even a few notable victories could help to change public opinion about whether things are inevitable or not

"Banning" facial recognition is the worse possible outcome for people who are privacy focused.

At the moment it's useful to point people at and make them feel "creeped out". If it's "banned" the concern goes away.

I'm using scare quotes around "banned" because I cannot imagine any scenario where there won't be exemptions that are so big anyone will be able to use it anyway. Facial recognition is already widely used within company security systems, and within law enforcement and the idea that these systems will be banned just seems completely non-credible to me.

Well, in my EU country the police was recently stopped by our National Data Protection Commission from implementing such a system in a public street. It's not impossible.

If they ban facial recognition, they'll just work around it by recognizing every other part of you but your face.

He’s right, but we should take every winning battle we can, no?

Absolutely. Things like this serve to raise awareness that tech companies such as Google and Facebook are sleazy and exploitative. When people who used to brag at parties that they were “a googler” feel ashamed to mention it then some progress might get made.

At the same time, banning the one mechanism that inherently creeps people out might make them not worry about the problem as much, and we won't fight the more nefarious and less obvious mechanisms that come next.

I wonder if the EU has done any other notable things to fight mass surveillance, because if so it would mean they weren't focusing on one particular identification method. I mean maybe they are working on multiple fronts.

Also perfect being the enemy of the well-intentioned here.

Well the GDPR helped quite a bit already. Creates a proper inventive to not "just for good measure" aggregate PI

Especially if one considers how the NSA got most of their data through PRISM from corporate partners like Google. If those never collect it, the NSA can't gather it.

General data retention was also banned by EU courts, I think.

While Germany is over and over trying to integrate something like that with dubious reasoning ("it will only be used against terrorists and other really bad crimes" - reality is that everybody wants his piece of it, even to use against false parking), the EU regularly puts a stop to this.

So, it's great to have this higher-level legislative to stop single countries efforts, but there could even be done more...

yes, I suppose my post was too dryly sarcastic to be obvious but really the EU has been doing quite a bit more than other nations or international organizations to stop the surveillance state and it seems a little unfair to pick on what attack of a symptom and saying but stopping this symptom won't do enough.

Not sure if this kind of problem isn't best solved by attacking the symptoms anyway, until you build up a sort of selection of anti-surveillance principles that can be used to decide new laws and regulations.

But I guess I'm pretty pro-EU so this kind of thing makes me grumpy.

Missed half your point. ;-)

Nevertheless, I think temporary bans are not a bad idea till we can come up with a better solution. Let's see what others are making out of this for the next five years, and come up with better rules. I'm totally with you on that.

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