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Comment by highcountess | Hacker News Reader

Quite curious how no one ever talks about “responsible use of facial recognition” or policies to control the use of facial recognition, as it totally pervades and destroys the ability of a person to remain anonymous, at all.

It’s always curious to me how the peasants always seem eager to facilitate the interests of the monarchs to oppress them rather than their own interests to remain free from control by the narcissistic psychopathy of the ruling class prone to tyranny. What do you do as a peasant once you’ve closed the trap you created and led yourself into? I guess maybe more accurately would be to say that it is the aspirational minor nobility that facilitates the creation of the structure that serves the creation of oppressive, top down structures. It’s an odd human characteristic.

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Your criticism seems somewhat misplaced. An open-source facial recognition library enables the peasants to wield the same tools that the monarchs already have at their disposal. The cat is out of the bag, and there’s no putting it back.

We can ban the stuff until such time when we truly need it.

Doesn’t help with the climate crisis? No. Does it help with any of the ongoing health threats? No. Does it help hungry people finding food and healthcare or somehow advancing science or any cultural benefits? No.

Does it consume vast amounts of water and electricity to facilitate “bad example of humanity” use cases? Oh yes.

Just feel our priorities are not where they should be.

So we as humanity should stop all actions that are not directly solving the worlds largest problems (at least if there might be slightly negative side effects)? And what’s up with the energy and water consumption argument. I accept this for LLMs maybe, but not for a local python script that runs on consumer hardware. Should we stop playing video games, too?

Respectfully, I think it's more likely that you're just not personally plugged into and/or have your awareness tuned to them but those conversations are definitely happening. There's not a single consensus (at least in the U.S.), but discussion definitely occurs and in many cases has led to concrete action.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/07/982709480/massachusetts-pione...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/facial-recognition-ban...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/face-recognition-banned-but-ever...

> Quite curious how no one ever talks about “responsible use of facial recognition” or policies to control the use of facial recognition

That's because that debate has already been lost starting in about 2000 to 2001. 9/11 was really the last nail in that coffin.

Post 9/11 made everything shitty. I feel bad for people who didn't know life before it; now it's the normal.

I would imagine other milestones for new and improved shittiness is the drug war, 1993 crime bill, prohibition, Woodrow Wilson and WWI, etc.

There is the EU AI Act which heavily regulates the use of facial recognition, but I feel that we as “the people in tech who makes these things” should be a lot more conservative in creating frameworks, abstractions and generally advancing/facilitating facial rec use.

It’s even more shocking as this library also incorporates a great deal of cultural bias. e.g. gender, emotion are attributes which vary a lot more than what the models allow for.

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