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Comment by da_big_ghey | Hacker News Reader

Only if face images also are acquired from a legitimate investigation (ideally a prior criminal conviction). Police cannot observe a face for years until they get a warrant then all suddenly have years of data, that is wrong.

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What if someone is known to have committed a crime and police look at surveillance footage from nearby red-light cameras?

Or if that person is thought to have visited that location in the past, could they use that footage?

Which brings another question, what about facial recognition performed by a human? Investigators can presumably scour video or surveillance data by hand, but I guess just not by machine? Can they use face detection to simplify picking out faces? Zoom in and enhance?

It's very tricky when passing legislation to narrow in on the pernicious aspects of "facial recognition"

Well the legislation is pretty specific in terms of what facial recognition is allowed actually, and the scenario you are describing is listed and explicitly allowed.

The text is completely open so you can see exactly how they have scoped it.

If only there were some system in place where police would request the judiciary evaluate their evidence and reasoning to see if violating the privacy of the suspects were approved and warranted.

Whatever would we call such a process?

Well i don't trust government to collect data on movements of every person but only use it with a warrant... i have issue with red-light camera for exactly this reason, we are not london, we should not have constant government surveilling. I am also concerned significantly by ring doorbell and similar, but unsure for what solution we need use. I think maybe as a first step we say they may not record any outside of a person's own property line.

I'm not really sure why we've normalized the collection of biometrics during police investigations that are kept forever. I know deleting them would defeat the purpose of the fingerprint/DNA databases but if we're gonna do this either collect and keep everyone's biometrics or no ones because creating two classes of people, those who have had run-ins with the police and not, is gross.

Not only people who have had run ins with the police - when I took an entry level job at a bank I had to go and submit my prints to the local gov (via an expensive third party of course) as part of my onboarding requirements (and run a background check). These are now stored forever in some police database; I would guess there are some other jobs like that, maybe government employees as well.

In todays political climate of fear that would mean everyone has to give their biometrics to state enforcement.

> Only if face images also are acquired from a legitimate investigation (ideally a prior criminal conviction).

Wouldn't that inaccurately bias results towards people already involved with the criminal justice system?

Absolutely!

Why not? Concrete use case: many property crimes have a minimum cutoff (a felony only if more than $X is stolen or damaged). So to convict someone who knows the letter of the law and regularly engages in some mischief under the cutoff amount, you will need to gather video evidence over a long time period - a period during which the person technically hadn't hit the felony threshold yet.

Because a free society is a finely tuned balance between state power and individual freedom, and the pendulum is on the far side of state power since 9/11 anyways.

The same thing that can be used to find perpetrators in minor crimes can also be used to trace political movements, that any given government happens to dislike.

IMO there are certain uncertaintiws that any free society has to accept. One of those is that not every perpetrator will be punished. Not because there wouldn't be a way, but because a society in which this would be implemented wouldn't be free anymore.

If a shopkeeper submits footage of a crime to the police, the police should be able to keep it as evidence. What's problematic is proactive gathering and aggregation of footage by police or by corporations.

Why is that problematic? Individuals are allowed to capture photos and footage in public spaces, and there isn't an expectation of privacy there. I don't see why capturing footage is a problem - without that the cost to actually apprehend a criminal is so high that we might as well not have laws for many crimes.

expectation of privacy

People keep using this phrase as if it's binary. I 100% expect that when I go in public, there isn't someone following me with a notebook, keeping a log of everything I do. I also expect that someone won't walk up into my face and take a picture of me without asking.

But why won't anyone think of the poor paparazzi that need to be able to take awful photos of people in public so they can destroy people's reputation?

It might be nice if we gave public figures a bit more privacy through this whole process.

> without that the cost to actually apprehend a criminal is so high that we might as well not have laws for many crimes.

Which crimes are those? Perhaps it's a sign that they shouldn't be considered crimes after all?

Whatever those crimes are, we've apparently successfully lived with them prior to the advent of modern mass surveillance technology so it can't be that bad.

Any crime that is not worth having humans investigate is not worth disrupting a suspected criminal's life. If it isn't worth the cost to society, then society should leave it alone. Due process should be owed to every single citizen, and disrupting their lives should be considered worth the cost.

You are not allowed to take a photograph of people in Germany if they are recognizable as individuals.

Sure. But we are talking about a global facial recognition technology, not about someones private surveilance video.

There is a slight difference between the state having facial recognition AI-Cameras and a privat citizen submitting surveilance footage of their private shop after a crime has been committed, don't you think?

What is the threshold of scale when a private citizen has multiple homes? Can that individual collect biometrics from their visitors and do whatever, privately, with that data as long as they wish? What if that same individual owned one or more private companies? Can they collect biometrics for internal, private use, then? Even if that private individual is an internationalists, traveling to different countries with access to that data at will, perhaps with specialist staff analyzing that data?

When the private citizens use services explicitly connected to state police services, is the difference only a matter of latency? For now it looks like Ring is oriented around geography but its probably just a ToS change away from adding a face-print dimension for lookup.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/ring-changed-how-polic...

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