Does this have that big an impact on surveillance though? You can still set up all the cameras you want to record in public spaces (which i think is a good thing, I.e. this allows people to film police just as much as it allows always-on surveillance that can be used by police).
I don’t really understand why the law needs to take such a strong form. If it said something like “you cannot convict someone on purely a facial recognition match”, that would be a reasonable law and protect against the kind of bias in AI that people are rightly worried about. You still need a human witness, or need the whole jury to agree that the face in a video is the suspect. Maybe the law can even make sure that a facial recognition match in a video is not even admissible evidence in a trial.
But really facial recognition is just an automation tool. So this is a law that says you’re not allowed to make use of a more efficient tool to solve problems. Instead of doing an automated scan of available video footage to look for a suspect’s face, we’ll just pay police officers for a hundred hours of overtime to pour over footage manually until they find a match. (And of course, if bias is the concern, there will continue to be bias in which cases the police and DA feel are worth investing those resources in, and in manually identifying a match).
I just don’t see how this kind of law that basically says “everyone must pretend this ubiquitous technology doesn’t exist at all” is such a clear win. And of course enforcing it as it becomes more and more ubiquitous will be near impossible.
It has to start somewhere :) . I think cameras should be banned wholesale for any use other than watching -your- property. No police cams, no public street cams, etc. There is just too much potential for government abuse. It is the job of police, FBI, NSA etc to do everything they can to capture/stop crooks (of their various areas of interest). The Constitution (and general common sense human rights) gets in the way of that and they will use every tactic they can to get around it and stay legal or in a gray zone. This just gives more incentive to them abuse their mandates. This is why there needs to be a hard well defined wall against public surveillance by any government entity without a very very specific warrant. This includes them using anything obtained from a business. I mean down to the crime/individual/specific area of the street. As it stands they want a web of cameras with auto identification and tracking of everyone "just in case". That goes against any sense of liberty to live your life as you see fit as long as you aren't breaking the law. You really should not have to worry -at all- that big brother is watching, listening, recording, or any of that until you start breaking the law.
I don’t really understand why the law needs to take such a strong form. If it said something like “you cannot convict someone on purely a facial recognition match”, that would be a reasonable law and protect against the kind of bias in AI that people are rightly worried about. You still need a human witness, or need the whole jury to agree that the face in a video is the suspect. Maybe the law can even make sure that a facial recognition match in a video is not even admissible evidence in a trial.
But really facial recognition is just an automation tool. So this is a law that says you’re not allowed to make use of a more efficient tool to solve problems. Instead of doing an automated scan of available video footage to look for a suspect’s face, we’ll just pay police officers for a hundred hours of overtime to pour over footage manually until they find a match. (And of course, if bias is the concern, there will continue to be bias in which cases the police and DA feel are worth investing those resources in, and in manually identifying a match).
I just don’t see how this kind of law that basically says “everyone must pretend this ubiquitous technology doesn’t exist at all” is such a clear win. And of course enforcing it as it becomes more and more ubiquitous will be near impossible.