> and no one will care because it already happens to them at the airport, so why make a fuss about it at the grocery store or on a public sidewalk.

You may be overestimating how many unique/different people travel through airports, especially more than once or twice to notice the tracking. People who travel once or twice total in their life by air, (are usually easy to spot), far more concerned with getting through a confusing hectic situation then noticing or even knowing that using facial recognition is new and not simply a special thing (because 9/11). And, the majority of Americans have travelled to zero or one country, last time I saw numbers on it. That country is usually Mexico or Canada where they drive (or walk).

I think once it starts trying to hit close to home where people have a routine and are not as stressed by a new situation and have the bandwidth to--at a minimum--take a pause, will ask questions about what is going on.

> Quickly they showed me a video of my entire time with all my movements at the airport so they could pinpoint the employee.

This is just as interesting as it is creepy, but that's the world we live and this is hacker news. So, how quickly was was quickly. You made your report, they get the proper people involved, and then they show you the video. How much time passed before you were viewing the video?

For someone that plays with quickly assembling an edited video from a library of video content using a database full of cuepoints, this is a very interesting problem to solve. What did the final video look like? Was it an assembled video with cuts like in a spy movie with the best angles selected in sequence? Was it each of the cameras in a multi-cam like view just starting from the time they ID'd the flight you arrived on? Did they draw the boxes around you to show the system "knew" you?

I'm really curious how dystopian we actually are with the facial recognition systems like this.

Twenty (!) years ago I got home from a drug store shopping trip and realized I had been charged for some expensive items I didn't buy. I called, they immediately found me on their surveillance recording, saw the items were actually bought by the previous person in line, and quickly refunded me. No face recognition was involved (they just used the timestamp from my receipt), but the experience immediately made me a fan of video monitoring.

The thing with you example is that there is a "time and location bound context" due to which the false positive rate can be _massively_ reduced.

But for nation wide public search the false positive rate is just way to high for it to work well.

Once someone managed to leave a "local/time" context (e.g. known accident at known location and time) without leaving too many traces (in the US easy due to wide use of private cars everyone) the false positive rate makes such systems often practically hardly helpful.

Making it opt-out instead of opt-in means that that vast majority of people won't care, or have better things to do.

You don't have to have your photo taken to enter the US if you're a citizen, but who wants to deal with the hassle? And on and on it goes.

I seriously pisses me off that they make the font so small on the opt-out signage and you get told by a uniform to stare at the camera like you have no choice. Everything you don't fight for ends up getting taken.

I just experienced one of these facial scanners in the UK while boarding a plane for the US. The thought had occurred to me that this could become the norm and that there’s nothing one could actually do about it and that we are already living in the dystopian future we feared, where no one can truly ever be anonymous. But I also wondered about various problem scenarios. If the scanner couldn’t match your face, would they deny you entry? If so, what would happen if someone had plastic surgery or some other condition that altered their face? What if this technology becomes so pervasive that your face is scanned everywhere you go? Where does any of this end?

This reminds me of the early days of applying speech recognition. Some use cases were surprisingly good, like non-pretrained company directory name recognition. Shockingly good and it fails soft because there are a small number of possible alternative matches.

Other cases, like games where the user's voice changes due to excitement/stress, were incredibly bad.

What you describe at the end has already happened in China. Municipalities (at least the large ones) routinely have cameras with facial recognition everywhere in public. The police has power to pull up this kind of information without warrants (it's China, so what do warrants even mean).

Start masking up w/a consistent alterface now, because once everyone gets base-lined, then you're going to be stopped because you don't look like you.

And the biggest problem is that all this surveillance is one-side: "they" can see everything we do but we can't see what they do.

I think the best we can hope for is that government officials are subject to more surveillance than regular people. Everyone is going to have at least some surveillance.

The individual tracking systems were getting secretly installed at a local to me state school about 10 years ago. It's got to be pretty advanced by now.

Don’t assume that this development is inevitable.

Some countries have strong privacy laws, such as Switzerland.

Trading-off of your biometric data for that convenience

a bit after 911 i figured the airport dystopia would eventually ooze out. after soaking deep within the nextgen.

rub my jeans sailor. no 3d xrays for me.

You have zero expectation of privacy in public

>why make a fuss about it at the grocery store or on a public sidewalk.

Because my business is my business and nobody else's. Full stop.

Thank you for giving us this dystopian future, AI bros