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Comment by lockhouse | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, no one will blink an eye. I hate to be pessimistic on this, but your average person does not care about their privacy or even most of their rights. I think your typical person will throw just about all of that away for the appearance of safety and security.

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no you are completely misreading it.. the average person is overwhelmed and distracted; uniformed service people and their close allies have no problem with this technology, in fact it fits closely to their existing daily routine and worldview.

Ordinary people are being required to use the same rigor and verification that uniform services use. What is the problem with that? similar fork in the analysis.. from the average person point of view it is invasive and "I didnt agree to this" but that is not what is important IMO; what happens is that the uniform services are prone to deep corruption because the rewards for that, and the ego of that, are just too great. IMO both "I can do this obviously illegal thing since no one can stop me" like some low-level thug mind, and "I make the rules and the rules say I get these privelages" much more common.

This is a disaster for civil society unfolding now. A uniform services takeover of previously civilian and uniform mix. Who runs the ID system? updates the software ? checks for outstanding warrents? etc

The TSA already has your travel data from the airline PNR database [1], which stores your travel data for five years, after which it is moved to cold storage for another ten years. PNR is a contributing system as to how the TSA can provide identity proofing at the checkpoint with only an ID now, versus previously needing your boarding pass [2].

These are governance issues, not technology issues. TSA using facial recognition is no different than an agent comparing you to your ID (except that the automated system increases throughput), depending on what the exception process looks like.

[1] https://www.cbp.gov/travel/clearing-cbp/passenger-name-recor...

[2] https://www.dhs.gov/publication/dhstsapia-018-tsa-secure-fli...

No, a human being comparing your face to a picture is entirely unlike facial recognition. The cop matching your face will not remember you for an arbitrarily long time (or indefinitely), cannot transmit the memory of your face to other cops across space and time, does not catalogue what you are wearing, the delta between your actual face and the image, and all other manner of minutiae.

Cameras and automated systems are likewise fallible in entirely separate dimensions (personal bias, circumstantial factors): the camera does not get tired, but we place a certain unwarranted trust in black-box systems that fail in unexpected ways.

They are absolutely governance issues, but _augmented_ in scale by technological reach.

You can see this at US airports already. Facial recognition is (sometimes? on international flights?) used, but you can opt out. If you do opt out, nothing bad happens. It's not even more inconvenient, the gate agent checks your picture ID instead of the facial recognition box. Still, almost nobody does.

If not for job security, surely this is a reason to make software and IT a national trade union.

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