Right, this is like banning knife because it can be used to kill people. I much prefer they try to fix whatever it is that cause misery with the use of facial recognition, instead of banning it altogether.
Any ban would be pointless. "Facial recognition" stopped being about faces some time ago, and now the more advanced systems look at everything from the shoulder tops on up - additional information from the shoulders, neck, ears, and so on provide additional discerning characteristics.
If "facial recognition" were banned, organizations would just start ignoring the face and proceed with other characteristics. The world of biometrics is huge, and the whole reason facial recognition is the biometric people pick on is because it is the easiest for laypeople to grasp.
This is article is nearly obsolete fear propaganda. We're getting wise to this crap, as the fear card is being played far too often, it's become the boy who cried wolf.
I am wary of facial recognition, and I avoid the use of it. But I'm not convinced by this line of reasoning either, so let me play devil's advocate.
> But again, once authorities have any of this data in their possession, abuse always happens. Literally always.
Well, before something can be abused it must first be available to use. Conversely, once a tool is available to use some may abuse it.
For example, if collecting fingerprints or DNA were completely forbidden then that might prevent abuse of such data (such as false matches). But it would also prevent any beneficial uses as well.
Banning facial recognition prevents not only abuse but also any potential good uses, such as locating victims of abduction or trafficking, and perhaps other uses we cannot foresee.
Killing it in its infancy may be easier than doing so after it takes root, but it also gives society less opportunity to learn what the consequences of the technology may be, intended and unintended, good or ill.
We know it can be abused, especially in the hands of an authoritarian government, but does that mean it cannot be used responsibly? Anything that gives the state power could be turned against the people, as libertarians might warn, but social progress also requires that we learn to work together rather than reject anything which might do us harm.
Perhaps a better argument for an early and complete local ban might be that it allows other regions to be the test subjects. Or that by taking a less compromising stance the anti-facial recognition side gains a stronger bargaining position at the table. But those arguments are not as attractive, maybe.
They should ban facial recognition though, in all and every context where the owner of the face has not given explicit consent. Nothing good can come of it.
This is equivalent to asking to ban glasses to prevent short-sighted people from identifying "masculine" features. If people can learn to handle the information they see, they can teach the same to the algorithms they use. So while i agree that there are dangers, i can't agree that banning face recognition is the solution to that.
How did you get that impression? Making laws that prevent abuse while permitting the benefits of facial recognition is difficult and takes time. During that time, companies using it could cause a lot of damage. So temporarily banning it altogether as a stopgap makes a lot of sense.
We shouldn't ban any technology. However, we should ban a technology when it is used for _____. The ban should cover the use, not the technology itself. It's fine to make building a nuclear bomb illegal, but studying radioactive elements should not be.
Similarly, the technologies this article describes "identification, correlation and discrimination" should not be outright banned, but maybe they should be when their use conflicts with other important values (e.g., due process in criminal prosecution, privacy rights).
Recent targeting of facial recognition does not "miss the point", the reason it has become an issue is because it has started being used in the criminal justice system. No one really gets upset when it's just used to tag your photos.
I know developers love abstractions, but we should not try to build abstractions of technology and regulate those. To borrow from the article, identifying a person based on their "gait" is not nearly as serious an issue as facial recognition, even if abstractly they may seem similar to a developer. Instead, focus on the direct problem at hand, regulate it, and only after the passage of time when commonalities become clear, build an abstraction.
I think nobody says that banning facial recognition is a step backwards. It just doesn’t solve the underlying issue and might even distract from the real problems.
Now politicians can say "but we banned facial recognition, isn’t that good enough?".
Is case by case, in this case if they think is so bad, say selling hard drugs, should be a ban. Facial recognition banned is like AI banned under the same reasonings. Others will be doing it.
This is why I think we need to be careful when considering a ban on facial recognition. Pandora's box is open.
Even if we do decide on some kind of ban, we need to assume facial recognition will always be used by someone, somewhere, and design our social systems to account for that fact.
Facial recognition technology has all sorts of situations where one can imagine where it would be useful. Unfortunately all of the ways you could use it to suppress, discriminate, silence, and intimidate people outweigh any upsides by miles. Facial recognition tech should be outlawed, unequivocally, plain and simple. I’m not holding my breath that will happen.
because that's the only option. There is no scenario in which it's allowed in a narrow set of circumstances that isn't going to get abused by law enforcement. Either you ban it, or law enforcement is going to find ways to abuse the right to use it, including appointing people whose job it is to say "this was fine".
If this was a reasonable society, with a reasonable police force: absolutely, narrow definitions of permitted use should be reasonably fine. But the US isn't, and the US doesn't, so in the US, it can't be.
(but then you look at countries where it might be fine, and it turns out that they don't need facial recognition to have a decent enough catch rate, kind of making the whole thing moot. No police force should use it, for wildly different reasons)
What I meant was not that the wording of the ban will be limited to certain use-cases, but that the outcome would be... regardless of wording. Even if they do generally "ban using software to recognize faces," the difference will be symbolic.
If cameras are being used, facial recognition is probably happening... if not in real time than later.
Limit is not the right word. Abolition would be more suited. Facial recognition technology is too much power and too much potential abuse ; it should just be illegal for anyone including law enforcement.
> Only a full ban — a federal ban, covering the use of facial recognition by government agencies, in public places, and in public contracts with private entities — can prevent our nightmares from becoming reality.
Talented teenagers are irrelevant, this is a call for a ban of using that technology by government entities.
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