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Comment by apples_oranges | Hacker News Reader

We should probably take worldwide action with regard to biometrics and tracking. Face recognition and tracking should be completely outlawed, just like biological weapons.

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Meanwhile, at the intersection of crypto & biometrics: Edward Snowden Slams Sam Altman's Worldcoin: 'Don't Catalogue Eyeballs'

https://decrypt.co/84277/snowden-slams-sam-altman-worldcoin-...

Sam Altman is behind the eyeball crypto? I didn't know that...

That's like outlawing knifes instead of murder. We should outlaw what the tech is used for, not the tech itself. Doing the later will just mean companies switch to other equally effective technology.

"It's not face recognition, it's a gait and hair identification system! We're breaking no laws..."

Certain technologies are simply too abusable to be unrestricted. In fact, many technologies only exist to do things we consider wrong, so we outlaw them. Granted, many times these laws are not well enforced.

Why?

I think the better approach is to take steps to stop the centralisation of power. Breaking up the mass media corporations, regulating ownership of media, introducing proportional representation and more direct democracy, abolishing the domestic intelligence services, etc.

Trying to ban technology just because it _could_ be used for bad things seems as misguided as it is ineffective. The security agencies and authoritarian governments can just ignore those agreements anyway.

Capitalism, for lack of a better term, makes conglomerates and winners, in the sense of huge multinationals. Breaking a huge corporation up doesn't really solve anything. Where's Ma Bell?

- sent from my post-Bell breakup cellular connection but still totally Bell. (Southwestern... Some DNS responses still show SWBC!)

I'd add autonomous weapons to that list. They all sound like absurd restrictions, then you imagine from the perspective of a different landscape where those were actually prevented. Then it starts to be unconscionable that the annual body-count from these technologies is accelerating.

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