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Comment by Zanni | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: why is this bad? Is it just the 3% false negative rate? I don't see the negative privacy implications of face recognition when the alternative is to present your face (via photo ID) anyway.

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I enjoy traveling to Berlin for vacation, as it's a totally different atmosphere around privacy. Default payment is cash, your entry and exit from train stations is not tracked (surveilled perhaps, but you do not tap-in/tap-out or god forbid tap your credit card every time you step on a train like SF or NYC), and it's against the law to publish photographs of someone without their consent.

Ask IBM what becomes of databases full of people's names associated with their movements.

In both SF and NYC you can still buy transit passes anonymously with cash if you so desire.

Convenience won, though, it seems.

I think this is silly given how much Germany is actively helping a country where the PM of that country has an arrest warrant out for him through the ICC.

Germany is still facilitating an alleged genocide. The only thing that has changed is the profile of the victims. The situation now is even worse, given that practically everyone in the world knows what’s happening but life is going on as normal.

You could have made a sensible argument about how security policies in Israel move in a wrong direction, even if it isn't at all on topic. But you stumbled here too.

It’s a reply to this part of OP:

> Ask IBM what becomes of databases full of people's names associated with their movements.

None of this matters. If a state wants to commit a genocide, they will. Collection of IDs being there or not is a minuscule bump in the road there.

It is not against the law to publish photographs of someone without their consent. People post me to Instagram without my consent in Berlin all of the time.

It is against the law: https://www.lhr-law.de/en/thema/media-law/the-right-to-your-...

There are some carve outs for including you in a picture of something else, but there is, at least, social backpressure to swinging a camera around.

I appreciate the response, but it seems that database can be constructed with or without facial recognition because photo ID is already required. So, I ask again, why is this bad?

Showing ID to pass a gate is somewhat different than having a timestamped record of the fact that you passed a gate, but I agree that given it's already surveilled it's not a big difference. Still, small differences add up.

I mean, it was living memory for many HN'ers that you could travel freely in the United States with doing either. It's a post-9/11 thing that an airline ticket is associated with a unique person, and requires a matching photo ID.

There was a time when America's security forces did not routinely surveil its own peoples' movements.

When I was a kid there were classified ads like "Pan Am NYC Dec 20-28, E. Smith, $200 o.b.o" for people who wanted to resell their ticket because they couldn't make the trip. There were no id checks then.

In the 1990s the airplanes jumped at the opportunity to have required id checks so they could take control of the secondary market.

It was still possible to buy a ticket like "E. Smith", but that option was cut off a few years later.

The leviathan is often arbitrary and capricious.

(American here) A quick search shows Pew Research, National Academies Press (associated with the Library Of Congress), AmericaUnderWatch dot com, Politico and Georgetown Law .. all with varying responses to this question. In the case of social structure and law, there are many layers, interwoven, and difficult or impossible to fit into chat-level responses.

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