for example, pre pandemic, police in Berlin would absolutely stop and harass anyone wearing a mask in a U station/train; that'd be extremely awkward going forward, at least for a little bit.
Modern surveillance software can draw on things like gait analysis, the person’s mobile phone’s IMEI, and tracing people’s movements around the city in order to identify people even if they are masked.
alrighty then. glad that's cleared up.
seriously, what's up with this binary thinking where there's just no room for nuance whatsoever? "no, patching systems isn't effective, because unknown 0 days exist, so it doesn't help."
how about - bear with me - wearing a mask is merely /one/ component of not being mass surveilled, and is part of several layers, each one of which is clearly helpful although each one independently may not solve the problem entirely?
Public surveillance isn’t like, say, private communications where a person still has the option to install Signal and keep their conversations relatively private. Preventing the authorities from recognizing you in public is already a lost battle.