Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Facial recognition helps catch criminals.

Young people can be criminals too. And if the police catch them while still juvenile, they might have more of a chance to turn their life around.

Young people can also go missing, and facial recognition of security cams could help find them.

I honestly can't see any reason why children shouldn't be included like everyone else.

It goes without saying that a conviction should never depend on computer matching, and that safeguards need to be in place to prevent abuse and limit to legitimate law-enforcement purposes.

But trying to locate suspects or victims in the first place? Children are no less important here than adults.

View on HN

You can reuse that comment when we get mandatory under skin gps tracker from birth. We could even sacrifice all our liberties and get rid of every single crimes if we went further.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

There is a big difference between your skin gps tracker and facial recognition. The skin gps tracker is a new data source. Facial recognition is making better use of already existing data from mug shots and security cameras.

If you are concerned about privacy, then let's regulate what data you can collect and from whom you can collect it. However, once you have the data, police should be able to use computers to better understand, filter, and generally make the data more useful to solving crimes.

Everything is new data source at some point, everyone gets outraged for a bit and then it's business as usual. There is no stopping ""progress"" and technology.

There was a story here locally where a young boy wandered out of his house while he was thought to be napping. The parents noticed and a search was started, but after a few hours they found him inside a neighbors car, dead from the Texas heat. A GPS tracker would have saved his life. I understand the privacy and personal liberty concerns, but I have a hard time coming to a decision on this one myself.

You can find an isolated incident for anything. When you get your GPS trackers, you'll be able to tell an anecdote about a child who was hiding from a criminal, but was found by a GPS tracker.

A single dead child was enough to put you on the fence of wide spread skin implanted GPS trackers?

That's a ridiculous argument. There are a myriad of other things that could have saved his life. Safety measures around the house to prevent young kids wandering outside at night, home surveillance to keep an eye on the property and alerts anytime movement is spotted around the house after a certain time, or even teaching kids not to go wandering off in the dead of night. How did he even get into the neighbors car? Was it malicious? Then it has nothing to do with tracking, they should worry about that neighbors record. If not, how would tracking have helped a young kid somehow getting themselves trapped in someone else's car?

Notice how eroding privacy even further is not even in the top 10 things that could have improved this situation

A dumb boy wandered outside and went inside thr dumbest place to find shelter from heat, the inside of a car.

For this you want to expose society to even more dystopian ruin by hyper-asymetrical information gatherng via GPS on a per body basis.

You can't make this up.

> Young people can be criminals too. And if the police catch them while still juvenile, they might have more of a chance to turn their life around.

The US justice system isn't designed to turn anyone's life around -- it's designed to punish people. There's no benefit whatsoever to a kid spending time in jail or prison (or to putting their parents in debt over fines or bail payments).

>It goes without saying that a conviction should never depend on computer matching, and that safeguards need to be in place to prevent abuse and limit to legitimate law-enforcement purposes.

Lol. Has the past half century or so of law enforcement hammered in a belief in the moderation of power by law enforcement? That such power is never used asymmetrically against the lower strata of society as opposed to the elites? Will it prevent people from being the victims of selective enforcement of laws, even non-violent ones involving the mere possession of drugs?

Lol. Lol. Lol.

You're basically stating the plot line of Minority Report. It's not a good idea.

Has the system been trained and tested to even work with children's faces? Can it cope with having two different photos of a child taken a year apart?

Or (as seems to be the case) are we just shoveling data into a system and hoping it can cope.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com