Edit, I wanna preface this question with the fact my bike was stolen from right next to a camera. The theft is on tape but the perp wasn’t identified
In: Culture
Because the areas where this technology would be most likely to capture criminal behavior are minority areas.
Plus, the technology tends to be developed by light-skinned engineers who don’t have a good historical record for achieving error-free performance on dark-skinned images.
Something to keep in mind when it comes to civil rights is that while you may trust the current uses of a technology, every technology that you implement will have some future use that you might not have foreseen.
Think about nuclear technology. There’s the electricity generation capability, but then there’s also the weapons capability. A country researching power can easily (well… not easy at all, but bare with me) turn that same research towards weapons.
So public video surveillance and facial recognition. Seems cool, good for crime fighting, all kinds of things. Also gives anyone with access to the cameras the ability to know who is where at every moment of the day. Think of the protests going in Hong Kong right now. Imagine anti government protests happening in your home country, where the president (or whatever equivalent) decides to jail or fine anyone who was at the protest, and uses this tech to do that.
Think back to the 50s and 60s during the civil rights era. The FBI planted agents within those civil rights organizations. Even organizations that had not committed any crimes, as a means of surveillance. More recently the exact same thing happened to environmental organizations. Not that they committed any crimes mind you, but rather they were causing economic disruption.
Once you allow the government to have a power over you, like tracking everyone’s movement all the time, you might not like how they chose to use it. Like, I would have trusted Obama with that power, but now Trump is in office and if you think he wouldn’t track his political enemies you’re a fool.
So trump gains the ability to know the location of anyone at any time. Think of how he would use that against immigrants. If you tend to be more republican in nature, imagine a democratic president using facial ID cameras outside of every gun store in America… Or every planed parenthood clinic, or every gay bar, or every church or every small time pot dealer.
The thing is, it’s human nature for power to corrupt. We all know that saying. So the oblation of an informed public is to be aware of the potential for abuse of new systems or technologies and place constraints on them before they become to big and too in use to constrain.
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Data could be used to draw conclusions about who you are, what you believe, what you done, and what you might do in the future
Semi-worst case scenario: Let’s say that you protest against the current administration, and one day the administration decides it wants to play dirty and lock up a bunch of the opposition. You’ve been out and demonstrating. Your face has been matched. You are now a target. They arrest you for some bullshit charge and throw you in jail, at least until the election is over.
You might say “Oh that’s crazy that’ll never happen” but… why not? What is stopping it from happening? If all the protesters are saying that they didn’t do what they say they did, well, how often do ordinary people listen to accused criminals protest their innocence these days? Too many people are still blindly trustful of those labels to separate people, and wouldn’t know how to tell the difference between an actual threat to real people, and a political opponent who’s in custody to keep them from gaining more power and influence.
We’ve seen it happen other places, and it’s getting to the point that a lot of people are more than happy to let some constitutional rights get violated if it means their agenda gets furthered.
Because there are fundamental issues with its use being inconsistent with the Constitution, and there are always fears that technology might be abused.
The way that the current White House has been antagonistic to many minorities, etc. cause fear that such technology could be used to intimidate, track, or otherwise abuse power to punish/harass those people or be used for political gains (tracking opponents, outspoken critics).
You can take the example of the body camera that was to insure accountability for police conduct, but they mysteriously always break or are turned off when a cop is accused of wrongdoings. You might have heard the expression “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely”, well, the more power the police wield without accountability the more corrupt they become.
Why would they not be? Rights are not consistent with public video surveillance, and definitely not with automated/computer facial recognition.
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