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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

These laws sound good, but I don’t trust that any layer of government would willingly give up that data source, and definitely not the more secretive agencies. I fear these types of laws will only further disarm the general populace and even activists, since we will not feel any pressure to develop awareness of and countermeasures for something that “can’t be used”. If this tech exists then it will be used, just maybe not admitted to.

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Here is what will happen: the task will be outsourced to some nebulous SaaS that has no FOIA obligations.

Or the law will have exceptions for special emergency circumstances. And the government will operate under a permanent state of special emergency circumstances due to the threat to their safety (whatever it is that particular day).

Meanwhile levying big fines against any local stores who use the technology for their own security.

That would be a little difficult to pull off at the municipal level. The federal government doesn't even fully implement that strategy, which is why we are unlikely to ever see systemic fixes for consumer data protection at the Federal level (that doesn't involve barriers to entry that favor established industry).

IANAL but seems like you could get a case against you thrown out if it was found facial recognition was involved in your identification.

I imagine you wouldn’t find out. Parallel construction would be easy with city-wide CCTV plus face recognition. Maybe an officer would “just happen” to be walking by and think you look suspicious for some reason.

But they are trained to lie about their sources when illegal tools were used (parallel construction)...

What is the better alternative?

I don’t think a totally binary “alternative” is a viable thing in these situations. In the short term, people should assume their face is capable of being identified and tracked in real time and act accordingly. For some people that would certainly amount to self-censorship of choosing to avoid certain places/events/activism. Other people would probably be drawn to create some sort of new generation of “CV Dazzle”-like fashions/cosmetics.

In the far long term maybe people will be able to generate or design a brand new face for themselves on demand. Facial recognition is only so scary when the thing it recognizes is effectively a permanent identification card that must be worn at all times (pandemic times notwithstanding lol)

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