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Comment by lwneal | Hacker News Reader

A problem with opt-in data collection is that whenever the law allows a user to opt in, businesses will require the user to opt in.

A ban on facial recognition doesn't mean much if every hotel, gym, and pizza parlor has a shrink-wrap contract or cookie banner [1] forcing you to opt in to their data collection if you want a room or a pizza.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23090393

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...which is fine and well within their rights. Businesses don't have to offer people any services if those people don't want to follow their rules. Under federal anti-discrimination laws, businesses can refuse service to any person for any reason, unless the business is discriminating against a protected class.

And we are changing those rights, which is fine and well within our rights.

It is so refreshing to see this asserted, that citizens can update the societal contract through legislation when deemed necessary instead of simply being at the mercy of corporate interests.

This is literally the point of legislation and I haven't seen the opposite asserted even once.

> ...which is fine and well within their rights.

Not anymore. :)

Portland decided that the rights of the individual outweigh the rights of businesses when it comes to this issue. Strongarming people into giving up their privacy won't work. The argument that "if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere" has also been shown to not work when every business is harvesting every bit of personal data they feasibly can.

The argument that "if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere" has been shown to work extraordinarily well when it comes to businesses choosing to go elsewhere rather than serve high crime neighborhoods. In fact it's a big part of why people from those neighborhoods lack opportunity.

You're not really helping your own case here. Especially as you're basically using an example of a case whereby having the state not act in the public's interest by addressing the high crime problem, it leads to poor outcomes for the populace; actually justifying the prohibition in the interests of the public's privacy in general over the freedom of private individuals to create a facial recognition based privacy free zone through their own volition and recognizance by leaving contractual acceptance of facial recognition based programs and data sharing open in much the same way as functioning and effective law enforcement prograns are justifiable in maintaining public safety.

Another way of looking at it is that your counterargument to 'business just does what it wants with no regard to the needs of consumers' is 'business just does what it wants with no regard to the needs of consumers.'

Those neighborhoods lack opportunity because they lack funds and have ethnic names and or faces. When the same resume gets a fraction of the bites when you put the name Jamal on it vs John its pretty easy to identify the issue. Furthermore I don't think disallowing facial recognition is going to materially effect the services offered in a city so this seems like you shimmed it in there.

Well it is within their rights, in the hypothetical scenario being discussed where the law was opt-in rather than prohibition.

This doesn't work unless you have a choice. We've already gone from "free, but we collect your data" to "paid, but we also collect your data and didn't decrease the price." Just look at TVs or ISPs.

Before you say "well that's user's rights" I think we're all aware that most people are tech illiterate. They are starting to become aware of the problem but everyone feels completely helpless because they don't even know the first steps (and quite frankly it isn't just laziness, they don't have the literacy rate).

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