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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

While he is right I think Bruce is also missing the point here himself: he states that this law is the wrong way to fight surveillance – but that is not the stated goal of the law.

The goal of the law is to prevent the development of a technical reality in Europe, to which a Jurisdiction can only passively react. The technical space moves so fast at times, that reality has been made before the law can even start to think about what is okay and what isn't.

This time they wanted to say: "Yeah it is a shiny new thing, that would definitly come if the law stayed as it was, but it is such a hairy ball of mud that we ban it till we figured out what is allowed." Or phrased differently: it is so obvious for them that this is prone to abuse, they ban it first and then figure out how to deal with it in an adequate fashion.

So Bruce' idea that the goal was to fight surveillance is a tad bit to optimistic in my eyes..

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>The technical space moves so fast at times, that reality has been made before the law can even start to think about what is okay and what isn't.

In general I think this is exactly how it should work. You cannot stop all technological developments early on and make rules for imagined problems that may or may not arise.

Imagine it's 1995. The Web gets banned for five years so that a government committee can meet to figure out what could possibly go wrong with that technology.

There are always groups that stand to lose when new technologies are introduced. And these groups are inevitably very powerful at the beginning of any new development. You can be pretty sure that nothing would go ahead without great resistance.

That said, we have to find a balance. Of course there are technologies that are so dangerous that they must be regulated fairly early on. Making some rules for face recognition and similar technologies seems entirely sensible to me.

But as a general principle I think problems should be solved when they arise. Solving imagined problems before they arise is impossible and prone to misuse of power and influence.

> Imagine it's 1995. The Web gets banned for five years so that a government committee can meet to figure out what could possibly go wrong with that technology.

Fortunately we already know what can go wrong with facial recognition technology. We have China, and we have American and Israeli and various Asian marketing startups inventing abuse after abuse after abuse. So there is already a test bed in place; it doesn't have to be the entire world.

As a general principle, it may not be a bad idea itself. Let a part of the world play with the new toys and other part observe, after that either the tech will be exported to holdouts (the control group, if you like), or the regulations will be exported to the experimenters.

But the context in those countries is too different to ours to come to any meaningful conclusion about what should be allowed "here" (I'm assuming UK + US mainly).

The vector of anglo world isn't too promising right now either.

I don't remember stating otherwise.

> Imagine it's 1995. The Web gets banned for five years so that a government committee can meet to figure out what could possibly go wrong with that technology.

This analogy doesn't work because the web is something I can choose to use or not, whereas facial recognition isn't.

> But as a general principle I think problems should be solved when they arise. Solving imagined problems before they arise is impossible and prone to misuse of power and influence.

The problems aren't imagined; they're very real and already present in other tech.

Also, "figure out problems when they arise" is rather naïve; history has shown that corporations will do anything to make a buck and will lie and bribe to get away with it. So this strategy didn't always work so well with past.

>This analogy doesn't work because the web is something I can choose to use or not

You cannot choose whether or not others use Facebook and get manipulated by micro targeted ads into making stupid political decisions. And yet you are affected by those decisions.

You cannot choose whether or not all the services you depend on are only available online while the physical branches in your neighborhood are closing.

Most technologies have systemic effects that individuals cannot choose freely. Isn't that exactly why some people argue in favour of "let's stop and think before we jump"?

>Also, "figure out problems when they arise" is rather naïve

On the contrary, I think it's very naive to think we could just stop the clock and think very hard until we have figured out all the consequences of the technologies we are introducing. We have to live with the possibility of bad surprises and try to deal with them as good as we can.

>history has shown that corporations will do anything to make a buck and will lie and bribe to get away with it.

But that is not just true for change. It's also true for blocking change. Would oil companies not go to great lengths to stop us transitioning to renewable energy for instance?

Just look at what's happening in the US right now. You have an administration that thinks climate change is a hoax and that we should dig up more coal and pump more oil and gas. And yet the transition to renewables is in full swing.

Would you really want this administration to be able to press the stop button on all new renewables development based on some fanciful claims about potential future risks?

>The problems aren't imagined;

Which problems? I was talking about a general principle not about face recognition. I did say myself that I think face recognition and similar tech needs to be regulated in some shape or form.

The difference here is that the EU bans something here that some of its governments actually want (e.g. the german minister of internal affairs said he'd like to role out surveillance that can do that).

I understand that things that are new should not be banned per default (as they aren't) — however if it is quite obvious beforehand they might hurt civil rights I think we can make an exception.

As opposed to the Web, facial recognition barely has any positive use for an individual.

> The technical space moves so fast at times, that reality has been made before the law can even start to think about what is okay and what isn't.

I think lawmakers should watch more dystopian science fiction movies.

I think it's hard for most people to tell apart cheap nonsense sci-fi for one in which the vision is plausible. E.g. there are many reasons to be concerned about human-level AI, but Terminator robots is not one of them.

Personally, the best approach I've found so far is to assume that everything that is technologically and economically feasible will be attempted by someone, no matter how perverted or evil it is. If you can imagine something as a plausible consequence of the science/technology we have, and if you can imagine someone plausibly making lots of money from it, then it's the right time to talk regulations.

I don't really agree, and in fact I think the EU already has a pretty good proactive law, in the form of the GDPR. You can't use indiscriminate facial recognition, gait recognition, or any other such mechanism if you need individual consent to process any data related to a person.

That said, specific bans for cases that the GDPR doesn't cover might still make sense. But we should be careful about de-fanging it by making it seem that any technology not specifically banned is fair game.

Consent isn't the only grounds for processing, though.

I think this article was written a few days before the EU memo was leaked. He doesn't mention the EU in it.

I don't really see what you're getting at? As is, you seem to be employing some convoluted reserve-psychology scheme in an attempt to square this law in with "HN reality", where all politicians are corrupt and stupid, and all laws are either evil or pointless?

How did you get that impression? Making laws that prevent abuse while permitting the benefits of facial recognition is difficult and takes time. During that time, companies using it could cause a lot of damage. So temporarily banning it altogether as a stopgap makes a lot of sense.

> The goal of the law is to prevent the development of a technical reality

Facial recognition in the brain is just specialized object recognition, therefore any research on powerful general-purpose object recognition via deep-neural-networks is improving facial recognition technology whether it means to or not. Only a law banning all artificial neural network research seems to have a chance at stopping the technical reality here.

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