alt Hacker NewsWhether we ultimately outlaw facial recognition or not is unimportant. Cameras and data are now so cheap that soon we will be able to track every public movement of every person in the country, making crime impossible. Once you leave your house, a street camera will see, and trace the movements of you or your car into the city and as you go about your business, with or without your face. It will follow you until you return home or check into a hotel or fall asleep in your car. Your address is public information so this isn’t a privacy violation. The current cost of storing 24 hour footage of the entire urban street area of the USA is just $100 billion annually, far less than the current total of $300 billion spent on criminal justice.
This will bring an end to crime and herald a massive revival of public trust and socialization.
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Kudos for offering an alternative view exploring the potential upsides, but I'd take issue with "Whether we ultimately outlaw facial recognition or not is unimportant.". Making use of all that data to fight crime would absolutely require it to be legal to capture. Edit: sorry - just realised what you mean. The footage is legal to capture and use in criminal investigations, but not using face recognition.
I imagine somehow billionaires will be able to hide their money in stateless accounts and healthcare CEOs will still be able to murder people by the thousands and monopolistic web stores will be able to condemn their workers to death by locking them in their warehouses during tornados. Funny how that works.
It will bring an end to poor people crime. Rich people crime will become uncontestable. Welcome to the new feudalism, same as the old.
I get your point but the literature on this I’ve read leans towards:
- ubiquitous surveillance is here (your point broadly)
- the data engineering to work the data isn’t quite there, or isn’t full spectrum in the manner you argue (what prevents your theory as of now)
However, what is clunky tech today can be scaled and effective tech tomorrow, so maybe your argued future is possible, if not likely.
https://www.mitre[.]org/news-insights/publication/decipherin...