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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

>However, that is the problem inherent in using facial recognition in this way.

Would it have all been a-okay if an employee "manually" spotted her face on a CCTV feed and matched to a physical binder with lawyers' photos? No? Then this has nothing whatsoever to do with facial recognition itself.

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The sheer scale facial recognition allows makes it different yes. You could ban millions of individuals with automatic facial recognition which you simply can't do manually.

Banning millions is objectionable while banning dozens is okay, purely due to numbers involved? I am trying to find this argument coherent in any way and failing. Maybe someone can help me out.

If you only have the capability to ban 10 people, you are going to be very judicious in who you ban. If you can ban an unlimited number of people, you will ban people up until it has a financial impact as long as business feels the ban is a net financial positive (such as making all lawyers second guess taking any case against any of your businesses, or your affiliated businesses once these databases get shared. Imagine being banned from your local grocery store based on representing a person's legal interest in a completely unrelated lawsuit, corporations could bring a lot of pain if this was to be extended).

> If you only have the capability to ban 10 people, you are going to be very judicious in who you ban.

But how do you arrive at this limit? Why 10? Why not 100? Why not 0?

10 is the number that a person can reasonably accurately memorize based on photos.

I'm having the same exact issue. I don't understand the argument that many here seem to implicitly be making, that "businesses should be allowed to ban as many people as they can without using automated technology". First of all, the question is 'why?' Why should a business be allowed to ban a person so long as they're not using technology to do so? The next question is, this would still allow a big business like MSG to ban significantly more people than a smaller business, just by virtue of being able to hire more security staff.

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