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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

The article and discussion is not about privacy. The people against facial recognition are against it, at least in this case, because it is racist - or at least, it produces racist outcomes.

Removing bias from facial recognition is the problem you would have to solve to appease the concerns right now, not privacy.

When innocent minorities are getting locked up because the software running it was trained with poor data, the outcomes of using the software is a racism-entrenched legal and justice system.

Which is why people are fighting against it.

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Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them.

It’s a shortcut for manually digging through databases to identify people. Any identification is followed up with investigation, just as it would be if a human matched it. No decision is made by the machine.

So, no, it’s not racist at all.

> Someone should let these people know that nobody gets put in jail based on the facial recognition’s decision, so their “concerns” are impossible. Not only that, but if anything, it’s less likely to find darker skin tones at all, so it will favor minorities, not hurt them.

The article directly contradicts both of your claims:

> "Facial recognition technology is still incredibly biased and absolutely creates harm in the real world," said Jennifer Lee with ACLU Washington. "We now know of three black men who have been wrongfully arrested and jailed due to biased facial recognition technology.

The article provides no details on those cases, and I am not willing to trust the ACLU at their word, given how politically biased they are these days (https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/civil-rights/347375-a...). I would like to know whether those incidents involved a human in the loop. It's also worth considering the benefits of facial recognition. Just like policing as a whole, I am willing to accept a small number of incorrectly handled incidents against a much larger body of good policing.

I don't think you read the article, which contains examples to support their claims that are the opposite of yours, which do not have any supporting evidence.

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