I should clarify, I'm not arguing in favor of real time facial recognition, I'm just skeptical of this move's efficacy in preventing the same outcome.
With a ban in place, the ability to build such a database drops significantly because you need a pretense for every image or piece of video you acquire. You can acquire and send for processing security camera footage when there was a crime, but when there was no crime? How do you justify acquiring the security footage, and how do you justify asking for it to be processed. Whether the footage available to facial recognize is ubiquitous or not makes a qualitative impact.
My only other thought is that a government/organization interested in using/misusing such a database would be willing to invent a pretense.
I'm not sure how heavily to weigh the precedent of government surveillance skirting these kinds of protections. I assume that Portland doesn't have a FISA court rubber-stamp equivalent, but I can't know for sure.
Either way, I think you're right that adding speedbumps to the process is a good thing, especially for data security. I just hope that people don't consider this too much of a victory, although it is definitely a victory.
I hope that the latter would require a warrant and have some scope limitations. The former expands constant surveillance to constant surveillance + identification.
> I should clarify, I'm not arguing in favor of real time facial recognition, I'm just skeptical of this move's efficacy in preventing the same outcome.
You don't appear to be, don't worry. And these days there's nothing wrong with being skeptical. After all, it did turn out that the government was spying on its citizens. This wouldn't stop that, but it does blunt it a bit. Dunno, maybe I'm an optimist.