Why not? Concrete use case: many property crimes have a minimum cutoff (a felony only if more than $X is stolen or damaged). So to convict someone who knows the letter of the law and regularly engages in some mischief under the cutoff amount, you will need to gather video evidence over a long time period - a period during which the person technically hadn't hit the felony threshold yet.
Because a free society is a finely tuned balance between state power and individual freedom, and the pendulum is on the far side of state power since 9/11 anyways.
The same thing that can be used to find perpetrators in minor crimes can also be used to trace political movements, that any given government happens to dislike.
IMO there are certain uncertaintiws that any free society has to accept. One of those is that not every perpetrator will be punished. Not because there wouldn't be a way, but because a society in which this would be implemented wouldn't be free anymore.
If a shopkeeper submits footage of a crime to the police, the police should be able to keep it as evidence. What's problematic is proactive gathering and aggregation of footage by police or by corporations.
Sure. But we are talking about a global facial recognition technology, not about someones private surveilance video.
There is a slight difference between the state having facial recognition AI-Cameras and a privat citizen submitting surveilance footage of their private shop after a crime has been committed, don't you think?
When the private citizens use services explicitly connected to state police services, is the difference only a matter of latency? For now it looks like Ring is oriented around geography but its probably just a ToS change away from adding a face-print dimension for lookup.
What is the threshold of scale when a private citizen has multiple homes? Can that individual collect biometrics from their visitors and do whatever, privately, with that data as long as they wish? What if that same individual owned one or more private companies? Can they collect biometrics for internal, private use, then? Even if that private individual is an internationalists, traveling to different countries with access to that data at will, perhaps with specialist staff analyzing that data?
Why is that problematic? Individuals are allowed to capture photos and footage in public spaces, and there isn't an expectation of privacy there. I don't see why capturing footage is a problem - without that the cost to actually apprehend a criminal is so high that we might as well not have laws for many crimes.
> without that the cost to actually apprehend a criminal is so high that we might as well not have laws for many crimes.
Which crimes are those? Perhaps it's a sign that they shouldn't be considered crimes after all?
Whatever those crimes are, we've apparently successfully lived with them prior to the advent of modern mass surveillance technology so it can't be that bad.
People keep using this phrase as if it's binary. I 100% expect that when I go in public, there isn't someone following me with a notebook, keeping a log of everything I do. I also expect that someone won't walk up into my face and take a picture of me without asking.
But why won't anyone think of the poor paparazzi that need to be able to take awful photos of people in public so they can destroy people's reputation?
It might be nice if we gave public figures a bit more privacy through this whole process.
Any crime that is not worth having humans investigate is not worth disrupting a suspected criminal's life. If it isn't worth the cost to society, then society should leave it alone. Due process should be owed to every single citizen, and disrupting their lives should be considered worth the cost.
