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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

>it's just a tool that would save tax dollars

No, nothing is "just a tool". Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks. Automation makes things feasible. Cheap storage that allows weeks or months of security footage to be preserved changes what's possible. License plate scanners are "just" a technology that could be done with a bunch of cops on corners with notepads, but in aggregate they're a tracking of where everyone is and has been that could never be done without the technology. Facial recognition is very similar.

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I still don't see why this is the place we should draw the line. If we want to ban license plate scanners because they can be used to track location, should we also make it illegal for police to access cell phone records or cell tower ping data with a warrant? Should we ban cell phones altogether so that the location data can never be collected in the first place to be misused?

Lots of new technology has some downsides, the laws should more specifically target the downsides instead of require that everyone pretend the technology doesn't exist. If nothing else, it's just far too impractical for a technology that is easily available and in everyone's pocket to be illegal to use. It will just incentivize obscuring and lying about using it, rather than truly prevent it from ever being used. It reminds me of the history of banning encryption, you're basically just making math illegal.

The trick is that police need a warrant to invade your privacy via cell phones or whatever, but they won’t need a warrant for the flawed surveillance stuff that can end up severely fucking over someone’s life/their family if the police ever decide they don’t like them for whatever reason, such as being an advocacy against police abuse ;)

> Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks

Sure, but like any other tools it also enable all sorts of new benefit.

The preferable action would be to take advantage of the benefit while also try to fix whatever it is that cause problem with the tools instead of simply banning it.

That's what they're doing.

The problem is automated identification of faces. The solution is banning that.

>The problem is automated identification of faces

Whats the problem with this ?

I had a dream a few months ago where I was standing in front of a computer. I typed in my name and got back a stream of video which showed every single moment of my life from multiple angles starting from the moment I was born. The footage came from a variety of sources, CCTV, smartphone cameras, dashcams. The system had videos of everything anyone had ever done. I didn't like it. Found it kind of disturbing.

Fortunately, we can stop that from being a reality.

Then basically you says its boil down to matter of subjective preference. So you don't like it, fine fair enough then don't be surprised that other people may like it.

I don't say that? You just have to think about how this stuff is going to be used in the real world where we actually live. The thing which is objectively disturbing is how easy it is to lose control of one's life once the government is able to record, observe and judge every single thing a person does. I believe such a level of transparency is only beneficial when it's applied to people who hold power over others; to subject everyone in a society to that kind of scrutiny would just be laying the foundations for abuse.

The government simply record, observe and judge every single thing a person does is not problem, in fact it can be used for my benefit.

The problem is when they use it to harm me.

What need to be fixed is The government record, observe and judge every single thing a person does to harm people.

>to subject everyone in a society to that kind of scrutiny would just be laying the foundations for abuse

It can be used for abuse but not always, It can also be used for good, what need to be prevented is the use for abuse.

I don't think that's the problem. The problem is that the justice system believes that it's enough to convict someone of a crime.

Even just arresting them or bringing them in for assessment is enough to put someone in a dangerous position, because cops can effectively legally execute people. So the problem is any police interaction is potentially deadly and this is giving cops another arbitrary, potentially racist tool to interact with people who are just living their lives.

Let me ask you a question: How many unarmed people were killed by police in 2020?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

According to this, 405, which is 405 too many.

I only see 50 there. Are you sure you're looking at unarmed 2020 and not for all years?

I also just looked at a few unarmed shootings at random to get an idea of what they were like. Of the three I looked up I saw one guy who was shot while fighting with a police officer after being discovered at the scene of a burglary. One guy who was shot after a car chase when, after they had caught him, he got behind the wheel of a police car and the police shot him to prevent another chase. One guy, after stabbing someone to death and being approached by multiple police officers, faked a draw to "suicide by cop". My point is, I don't think it's even clear that all (or even most) of the 50 unarmed shootings are unjustified.

So we have 50 total out of thousands, if not millions of potentially negative police interactions.

You can't build a system of robots without some fault-tolerance. How are humans supposed to keep up to that?

Based on this data - how can you make the assumption that a police interaction is an inherent risk to life that is always unjustified?

We mostly pay police to show up and be generally aggravating to people who might be doing bad stuff - in some sense "being sketchy in the vicinity" is a valid reason for police action, which doesn't even always turn into an arrest, let alone a life-or-death situation. Those cases are the vast minority of police interactions total.

People have a right to be armed; why would you consider using your rights to be worth a death sentence?

If it's illegal to be armed, you should change the constitution, rather than asking police to shoot evry armed person they see

This ignores the coerced plea bargains, which i don't think involve any conviction

The problem is that constant surveillance of people makes exerting power over them trivial.

So then that is the actual problem, try to fix that problem instead of banning it. Allowing people to own gun also make it trivially easy to kill people. So ban gun ?

If there’s a way to make it impossible for the government to use facial recognition to monitor people other than legally banning them doing so, it’s hard to imagine it.

why would i want to make it impossible for government to monitor people ?

government monitoring people by itself is not a problem, government monitoring people to harm people is the problem.

What need to be fixed is the usage of tools to harm people, not the tool itself.

The only thing that keeps them from harming you is your power relative to them. Handing them more power only increases the probability that they will abuse what powers they do have.

I thought the election of Trump would disabuse people of this idea that it’s smart to hand more and more power to central authorities. But at this point I think it’s hopeless. People just want the state to be Daddy, and assume or hope that its power will always be wielded by people they like against people they don’t.

For your analogy: yes, guns should be banned. That bottle has been opened in most places in the world, and some countries have actually put the genie back in, and it has resulted in dramatically lower gun death rates. The UK for example, as it has one of the lowest gun homicide death rates in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_the_Uni...

Moreover, yes, other deeply awful weapons are also banned. Biological weapons and Chemical weapons are both widely banned by all decent countries in the world. Nuclear weapons should join this list. They almost did, during the Reagan era: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/ronald-...

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