Ask HN: Why is any child still missing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is any child still missing?

3 pointsjavajosh7 comments

When the worlds photos are concentrated and searchable in Google Photos, Facebook, Instagram, why is any child still missing? It would be one significant upside to the panopticon: no more missing children!

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Why do you think a picture is so likely to be posted? Not even thinking of murder victims. You won’t find pictures of hardly any kids in my extended family circle and their faces can change dramatically over relatively short periods of time.

A counter proposal to reduce missing persons: geo tracker always reporting on everyone and stations that detect “non-tagged” people and authorities then geo tag them. Now when anyone goes missing, you check their location history and cross reference it with everyone in that area. Still has issues with areas of no reception and of being terrifyingly orwellian. And bad actors will still figure out ways to work against the system. Just like they would with missing kids and photos - just don’t take or allow photos.

Perhaps a corollary to this: instead of trying to match children’s faces, the surveillance state can mine other parts of the image; Open Source intelligence. Language and sound cues in a video. Or, my personal favorite, detecting the age and manufacturing origin of floor tiles and wall trim from a photo.

Why do you think a picture is so likely to be posted?

People love posting pictures of kids, and pictures in general (with strangers in the background). It seems like you'd have to take special steps to avoid having pictures of someone make their way online.

Consider that some teenagers run away from bad situations. I’m not sure that identifying and locating them is in their best interests. So, who should control that great central database? In some countries, law enforcement would have a tendencies to blackmail people who are trying not to be found.

There are many downsides to the panopticon - I'm asking specifically about an upside. And, since we don't see this upside, I wonder how much of a working panopticon we really have. The urge to locate missing kids (or missing people in general) is politically very strong, so it would make sense that it would be done if it could be done.

Then again, it could be that national security requires that the technology be deployed sparingly, lest the counter-party learn to avoid it. But this seems less likely to me.

Unfortunately, in the USA, the cause of reuniting families after a kidnapping has been politically subverted to try to connect an emotional issue to conspiracy theories.

Where families are actually separated, one particular party is in control. And to cover for that, they whip up stories about kidnapping rings where the other party is in control.

You are making an interesting assumption about the reach of such technologies. There are developing countries where you'll find thousands of children (say 5 year olds) who are never photographed (no photo exists).

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