TCPA works really well for call centers, and CAN-SPAM works really well for email marketing platforms. There's no reason a similar piece of legislation for facial recognition could not be passed.
TCPA and CAN-SPAM are hardly what I'd call effective. I still get tons of spam calls and emails.
I'm not saying legislation is a bad idea; just that it's not going to be able to put the genie back in the bottle.
"It's hard" is not an answer to the question "should this be illegal?". It's a statement that comes later, when the budgets are being made.
https://collectingtrek.ca/2019/02/03/leonard-nimoy-sued-para...
If you leave it up to contract law to answer it, we'll be in the same spot we're in now with a new template clause no one will ever read.
Plus, it doesn't solve the more pressing fundamental issue of Third Party Doctrine giving government an end run around any prohibition of amassing such a system by hiring out the deed to someone unencumbered.
No, because I don't have any legal relationship with street camera operators. This would not be a panacea for all privacy issues, it would specifically solve ones related to zero-touch trackers.
No, because neither the government nor unencumbered entities can profit by selling works that I own the copyright to, nor can they profit from selling derived works.
Regulating and restricting the use of facial recognition technology is entails creating civil and criminal liabilities. Such liabilities would make it prohibitively expensive for private initiatives to develop facial recognition products and services.
Such legislation doesn't have to target facial recognition tech directly. In many jurisdictions, existing privacy legislation already puts up barriers. And legal cases involving Clearview are testing these frameworks.
For instance, last year, privacy protection authorities in Canada launched a probe into Clearview and how it holds up legally (february 2020). Clearview subsequently shuttered it's operations in Canda (august 2020).
https://priv.gc.ca/en/opc-news/news-and-announcements/2020/n... https://priv.gc.ca/en/opc-news/news-and-announcements/2020/a...
In Europe, there's the GDPR. Last year, Clearview was hit by a complaint in France. And just last month, february 2021, Hamburg Data Protection Authority ruled that Clearview clearly breaches the GDPR.
https://www.businessinsider.com/clearview-ai-gdpr-complaint-... https://edri.org/our-work/reclaiming-your-face-from-clearvie... https://noyb.eu/en/clearview-ai-deemed-illegal-eu
For sure, legislation and enforcement don't root technology once it's out there. But that's not the point. If you live in a place where you don't have strong privacy rights, you, as an individual citizen, don't have any legal footing to begin with to stop anyone from appropriating your portrait and using that in ways you don't agree with.
> All legislation would do is create a situation where it's "illegal" to [commit some crime] even though just about everybody knows how to do so trivially and secretly.
The list of crimes that fit that description is huge:
- rob a convenience store
- molest a child
- commit insurance fraud
- make a pipe bomb
- ...
We still outlaw those things, even though most people already know how to do them (or could figure it out quickly) because we don't want people doing them routinely and we're willing to force people to stop.
The problem with facial recognition software is that it's very easy to conceal its usage. Businesses can use it secretly and then use parallel construction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction) to explain how they obtained the information that actually originated from facial recognition.
You could do this on a personal level also, use your phones camera and start telling people their heart rate, breathing rate, radio emissions, etc., to raise awareness. Start saying "Hi" to them before they are within site range of you when you detect their phones transmissions. People may start to think you're a creep, but they'll certainly start to recognize that they are at the mercy of creeps. A likely outcome would be a ban on remote sensing during workplace meetings or at the workplace in general which could lead to a nationwide ban eventually. I don't think anyone's boss would like their employees monitoring their heart rate or stress level during meetings or using that to get an advantage over other employees. Or maybe everyone will love it, you could automatically terminate meetings if everyone's stress level gets too high and people may become more forgiving if they find out what raises other peoples stress levels. You can get heart rate from cameras and variability in heart rate is strongly correlated with stress.
Can you elaborate on this? Short of treating tobacco like heroin, what other measures should the government have taken to curb tobacco use?
Make people with traces of nicotine in their blood ineligible for free health care. Including emergency care.
Focus their minds.