A 9 year old girl was just rescued from possible death or horrible abuse - and you are not in favor of the technology that allowed that?
Yes, it is concerning that, the moment you’re in police custody, for any reason, your biometrics are stored indefinitely. Both can be true.
We could bring crime to near-zero if we give the government full, unlimited access to all of our communications, devices, and our homes. There are happy mediums in between, and the above commenter thinks a decades-long storing of your fingerprint sounds concerning.
FWIW if you’re convicted of a DUI I have no problem with your prints being stored indefinitely. DUIs are treated as far, far more minor offenses than they really are.
I'm definitely okay with keeping them on file for every convicted criminal, though I will continue to argue for certain kinds of convictions to be thrown out.
Presumably you're not going to have one who will be.
But that aside - this is silly. Why DUI? Why not just all adults, if you want to go police state on people?
Heck, most progressive are just a mugging away from becoming neocons. That’s just how life is.
Incidentally, I'm pretty sure that my country had much higher rate of murder/theft/kidnapping while it was a police state.
No, we really couldn't. That's an authoritarian fantasy. I don't think people really grasp the volume of crime that's occurring every single day. There aren't enough prisons/police/etc to enforce even a fraction of the laws on the books.
Will not scale. They had full, unlimited access to all the communications, devices, home and working place of one citizen for four whole years, and the list of criminal charges is higher than the Trump tower
But no, I'm not in favor of the technology that allowed that. I think there are a lot of tradeoffs to giving the state powerful tracking capabilities, and the same power can be used for evil instead.
As another example: I work in cybersecurity for a governmental institution. A LOT of crimes could be solved if my organisation could MITM any citizen and get access to their plaintext traffic, probably also crimes involving 9 year old girls (given the sheer scale of cybercrime on national level). But I really don't want to have that power.
The 20th century has a bunch of examples of countries that were democracies, until they weren't. That's probably the main reason for which the EU is pro-privacy. Because Europe has seen what can happen when data falls into the wrong hands.
Both can be true, good & bad, simultaneously.
Good that a child was rescued.
Bad that bio-metrics are stored indefinitely without knowledge or consent of those whose bio-metrics were essentially stolen and waiting to be leaked or used for nefarious purposes.
No citizens voted for this indefinite capture. No citizens voted on length of storage, type of storage, sharing options, or security of said indefinite captures.
This is bad. ALL BAD.
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The ends NEVER JUSTIFY THE MEANS!!!
Also it's a personality fair: someone who is ok with driving drunk is a candidate for worse things. I for one think it's a good thing to keep their biometrics on hand for _WHEN_ that happens.
And if people are found to be abusing this information, prosecute them for it.
The indefinite biometric capture is the topic.
Indefinitely retained biometric capture is inherently bad; period.
There is no scenario where governments can be trusted with that data, especially if it never expires is never deleted and can become ammunition for opposing views.