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I think they're more similar than you think, definitely along the same continuum. This isn't an argument for why this data collection is ok however, I'll actually take the more radical stance that even the local face recording is unethical or at least pointless and possibly harmful.

> “what footage do I have locally of this face?” which can be extremely helpful when securing a home.

How? What mechanism of security is strengthened here? Almost certainly your only use case for this data is handing it over to the police to apply their facial recognition systems to it. Which they have because of homeowners like you, I guess. It's the same surveillance apparatus as in your google case except more manual and less efficient. If it shouldn't exist at all, a bad version of it also shouldn't exist.

“Send me a push notification for every novel face detected”

“Alarm if any face other than these 5 are detected on an indoor camera between the hours of 10pm and 8am”

“I want to review all footage of the nanny from the past week since they spend time alone with my children”

“Show me all footage of myself inside the house in the last 15 minutes because I have no idea where I set my keys down”

“I just heard a window break at 2am, which cameras are detecting motion so my wife can avoid them to get the kids out while I do the opposite to buy them some time”

Several of those are still currently science fiction and the rest are the same cop shit google wants to do to all of us, except you're the cop and you're only doing it to your family and employees. It's not better.

It doesn't matter whether it's a paternalistic police state or literally you, dad, sitting in the seat of the panopticon. It's bad for the psyche of everyone surveilled in this way and it shouldn't be done. The fantasy that you'll use this in an emergency is the same one gun owners use to justify their decisions, and just as likely to come true.

There is a difference between the power that comes with the centralization of surveillance into a panopticon (by the state or a business) and localized home surveillance. There is also a difference in how consent works in those cases.

> The fantasy that you’ll use this in an emergency

Knowing how many people are in my home and where they are at 2am seems like information that would be extremely helpful. You’ll need to share data to backup your stance that I’m doing home security wrong. I’d love to learn how to do it better.

Let’s not derail this into a conversation about guns, we can save that disagreement for another day.

> If [country-wide private surveillance] shouldn't exist at all, a bad version of it also shouldn't exist.

While I’m on the side of less surveillance in general, I don’t think I like this logic: it seems to me that the crucial point that distinguishes the systems of the last couple of decades from what came before is convenience. “No expectation of privacy” means very different things when someone needs to physically follow you around or even make a lucky guess as to which CCTV to look at compared to making a query from the comfort of their desk. It’s one thing for a passing cop to memorize your license plate number and then have to thumb through paper files in order to know that’s you; it’s another for them to have a full map of every car and owner name on it. (I don’t think the latter extremes are available in most countries yet, FWIW.) The bland “expectation of privacy” wording seems to miss this sliding scale of effort for a given amount of tracking.

I actually half suspect that this argument is wrong for some dumb reason I’m missing, because I don’t have a source for it (even though it seems to be in the air somehow) and even supposed experts like EFF lawyers don’t seem to be making it. But I haven’t yet found that reason.

I think the difference is right in front of you, you almost said it explicitly right here:

> It’s one thing for a passing cop to memorize your license plate number and then have to thumb through paper files in order to know that’s you; it’s another for them to have a full map of every car and owner name on it.

Those are the exact same thing if you're a person who cops are following around already, memorizing your number trying to get you for any offense they can. The difference is for many people, particularly people overrepresented on HN, the police are not generally taking much interest in your routine activities and trying to use them against you. But this isn't a relationship with policing that everyone has.

All these abuses were already here, they just weren't applied to everyone. The expanding of these capabilities is what makes them devastating, you're right. But the earlier iterations weren't actually less bad, they were just less likely to be applied to us.

I love this train of thought and it aligns well with how I think about the world. You treat state actors differently than citizens and, living under a state, they are absolutely in your threat model for home security. Police get it wrong sometimes. Sometimes they act maliciously.

Counter point. My security system is not easily taken offline (resilient against cutting power for 2+ hours, cameras are all PoE, hard to find the drive storing footage, etc.). If the state enters my home COINTELPRO style, or gets the wrong house, I want footage of that encounter under my control when it’s time to go to court.

I think this line of thinking lines up well with my original comment. We shouldn’t look at this technology as an all encompassing shift towards centralization of power. There are uses that gives power back to individuals. This power is a good thing on an individual level and dangerous in aggregate.

> Which they have because of homeowners like you, I guess.

All of my security cameras are isolated on my network. They do not exchange packets with the public internet. They can not phone home to the manufacturer.

If law enforcement has footage from my surveillance system, it’s because they have a warrant or because I willingly handed the footage over to them after someone made a bad decision on my property.

Great, so now you're surveilling your family. It's still a violation of privacy, perhaps even moreso because you, an intimate, now have a much wider view of your family's behavior. It's weird and unnatural. And you may say today that you're a beneficent broker of this information, but tomorrow when your wife or your children in some manner act aberrantly - viola your opinion suddenly changes - you'll leverage it for some self-concerned motive. At least with a third party monitoring shit there's not such a considerable conflict of interest. But none of it is really reasonable. And criminals will adapt - they have way more options than you do.

> they have a warrant or because I willingly handed the footage over to them

Yes, that was the assumption I had in mind while writing that.

But these profiles can be built on the fly. Imagine you host photos but have no biometric profiles. The police show up with a warrant and this warrant demands you run a search for all faces that match a given face and turn over the resulting images to the court. If such a search algorithm exists, the court might be able to order you or an outside forensics company to use it.

So basically to prevent police being able to do this you have to prevent hosting non-end to end encrypted photos.

That’s a significantly reduced service capability.

> demands you run a search for all faces that match a given face and turn over the resulting images to the court.

Hopefully a court would reject that warrant as being too broad, but either way the compute to do this would be really expensive for any not-large company, or even a large company if they regularly get these requests.

The compute wouldn’t be that high as long as you had a way of scoping it down. If the police limited it to a handful of accounts of to a geo-fenced time of day, it would be quite tractable.

The police have already used such geo-fenced warrants before.

You give the US justice system way too much credit.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/16/geofence-war...

Notably Facebook has been building AI profiles of face recognition from its users' photos for more than a decade now. Yet no Texas lawsuit. It's important to recognize the clear political angle here too. Paxton sees Google as an enemy whereas Facebook is closer to "his team" (or at least relies for more of its revenue on his team).

And I get how this comment will be taken, but it would be good for all the HN libertarians to introspect and think a bit on whether they really want to get their "stronger enforcement of personal internet privacy standards" via "extended use of state power against political enemies".

Seems like both of those are slippery slopes. I know which one I personally fear more.

What are you talking about? There is a Texas lawsuit about this against Meta: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/technology/texas-facebook...

FB shut down facial recognition last year. I'm waiting to see other companies follow suit. Apple?

https://about.fb.com/news/2021/11/update-on-use-of-face-reco...

Not sure why you're being downvoted.