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Comment by willmadden | Hacker News Reader

I don't want my biometric information on my smartphone.

Cell signals can be triangulated. This "convenience" will be abused. Mark my words.

Triangulation isn't needed. Most phones have GPS chips already. If your phone is powered on, and with you, there is no difference between presenting an ID on the phone or physically. The carrier and (for most people) a bunch of apps on your phone already know your location and who you are. Data brokers have merged this information with your credit cards, vehicle registration, voting records, social media posts and tons of other information to create a digital twin. In fact, they probably already predicted you would be at the location you're worried about keeping private before you even arrived.

Why are you in a comment thread about adding your ID to your smartphone then?

I'm not. I'm in a comment thread about Apple announcing the first states to adopt a digital driver's license. I don't have to be a supporter of that news to comment in a thread about it, do I?

No, I’m saying you’re in the wrong thread to be complaining about pre-existing biometric authentication (Face/Touch ID), being used to verify ID usage on the same phone.

I also think you misunderstand how biometric models on phones/laptops work.

We are building a society where one or two companies get to decide "I don't like your face" and then you are shut out of communication, commerce, and now mandatory interactions with the government.

The decisions these companies make will be unaccountable, probably with the input from an inscrutable AI, and limited only by the terms of service which you click through without reading.

The dystopian consequences of this trend are so concerning, they deserve to be brought up in every thread on this site.

What are you going on about? Please find somewhere else to go on meaningless rants. Do you have some examples, or just fake FUD?

What exactly do you need examples of?

There have already been cases of people having their YouTube and Gmail accounts blocked because of their politics[0] and app stores are notorious for banning apps (and thus businesses) that allow access to legal but politically-unpopular speech[1][2]. You might argue that this censorship is a positive thing, or at least legal, for these platforms to do, but I don't know why you would call my concerns "fake FUD".

I admit I was using the phrase "I don't like your face" as it's a provocative idiom, but this article is about a technology which stores pictures of people's faces, and is activated by a picture of their face, so the real issue is that companies might react negatively to what's behind someone's face — that is, their opinions and beliefs — and lock them out of this facial recognition ecosystem.

[0] https://torontosun.com/2017/08/01/free-speech-advocate-jorda...

[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/google-chrome-web-store-bans-disse...

[2] https://www.insideedition.com/unjected-dating-app-created-fo...

None of your examples have anything to do with the commenter’s faces, and everything to do with their hate speech and/or rule breaking.

You’ve linked stories about Jordan Peterson, Dissenter, and Unjected as if they prove your point about biometric authentication, so I’m going to stop commenting now.

I prefer not to feed trolls.

It sounds like you took my comment about not liking faces too literally. I apologise if my metaphorical use of language was ambiguous, and I can only take comfort from the fact that the people who upvoted my original comment seemed to have understood my choice of idiom.

This person can comment wherever they want— and the implication of your comment (that someone is out of place or out of line for expressing opposition to digital government ID on a monopoly's platform) is ridiculous.

HN guidelines are pretty clear about trying to have detailed interesting discussions versus open-ended ranting.

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