Through a Face Scanner Darkly

> contemplating a world in which such an idea has taken hold

Like any conference for the past few years already?

Fortunately, your nightmare world would helpfully self-select those of us who share your horror for you to unite with, because presumably everyone who actually thought this was a good idea would be too busy only meeting people like themselves and consolidating their groupthink.

Personally, I concluded that the claimed functionality such as you described must have been added for comic effect, particularly the line in the next paragraph about how someone's facial recognition technology could help me to know whether someone who is presumably right in front of me at the time is attractive or not...

Universal surveillance capability with strong and effective laws protecting privacy should help restore the balance of power.

If there's a presumption of surveillance, and an effective means to compel production of any electronic records, the you end up with an effect similar to that which some people have noted concerning reviewing social networking pages as part of hiring practices (either public-facing content or by the reprehensible practice of requesting passwords).

As several people have noted: sure, if you want to go there, you'll discover that I'm a member of X, Y, and Z lawfully protected groups in terms of discrimination. In which case the onus is then put on the employer (preponderance of evidence) to show that a discriminatory hiring decision wasn't made, to say nothing of legal costs in defending against same.

I'm not entirely sanguine that this be the case -- there's a lot that can go wrong with legal procedure and protections. But laws do matter and can help.

Simply because something is technically possible doesn't mean it must happen.

You're hoping against both human nature and statistics. Even if 99% of people are decent, that 1% will still eventually screw you over for their own profit.

Maybe it will come to active countermeasures. For example, you could set your browser (fingerprint and all) to trawl through an invented web history to poison tracking databases. Running such a program would both screw with the trackers and give you plausible deniability. Tag other people's selfies with your name on "social" sites, and tag your own with several names.

Laws may help some, but I worry that as devices get smaller and computers are integrated into everything, they won't be able to protect us for long.

Sure they will. Laws help to protect us from all kinds of unwelcome behaviour despite there not being any direct physical intervention to prevent someone who is willing to accept the consequences from acting in that way. This is actually a particularly easy problem to solve.

For one thing, even if miniaturisation of the technology does make it hard to detect, someone still had to create it. That will require sophisticated and expensive manufacturing facilities for the foreseeable future.

Then in most cases it's going to be sold. That means money changing hands, and some form of advertising so vendors can be found by interested buyers.

Arguably the big new risk to privacy from modern technologies is the scale they can reach, uploading, correlating and redistributing vast quantities of data. That means someone has to store the database and provide access to it and probably charge money for that access.

Any of these aspects can be identified, challenged or restricted in law as a preventive mechanism. Moreover, doing so will typically be much easier than identifying someone walking down the street with covert surveillance equipment, which frankly is already widely available without trying very hard to find it, it's just not widely used.

The idea that mass surveillance and the demise of privacy are inevitable conflicts with reality. These things don't happen in isolation, and the people doing them have motivations for their behaviour, and you fight socially unacceptable behaviour that happens to invade privacy the same way you fight any other kind.

I wear corrective lenses. Every time I hear that I think of Pol Pot.

Absolutely. It's not like millions of people have ever been rounded up and executed just for following the wrong religion or anything. And you'd better believe I just Godwin'd this thread, because this kind of thing is exactly why the Germans are much more cautious about things like privacy and state surveillance than most.

That's such an oversimplification, both in how it treats the "government" has a single undivided entity, and on how it implies that illegal acts are the only thing that people have to fear, that I don't have the will to counter argue.

But regardless of that, privacy is a right onto itself, it shouldn't need justification. It's violations of thereof that should need to be justified.

Since the government is the only one with the legal authority to torture and imprison and rob us, I don't much see the point.

There is a lot more that can hurt quality of life than something as obvious and severe as imprisoning someone. And if your government has the legal authority to torture you, you need a new government.

Failing to control sensitive personal information, and for that matter the inevitable mistaken information that will go along with it, could harm innocent people for reasons including but certainly not limited to: their religious views, their political inclination, their stance on controversial subjects such as abortion or legalisation of drug use, their employment history, any previous criminal activity no matter how minor and how long ago, and the lies a bitter ex once told about them in an online forum.

The kinds of harm caused might include but again are certainly not limited to: inability to get various kinds of insurance or paying excessive premiums, inability to get a job or to negotiate a fair employment contract and compensation when they do, inability to get credit, inability to travel by certain modes of transport, inability to attend certain public events, inability to send their kids to a good school, inability to meet the special someone they would have had those kids with, and in too many real world examples already, harassment, assault, injury, or death.

Governments should be restricted in the personal information they collect and how they can use it, not least because "government" is a sweeping term that probably includes a substantial proportion of the entire adult population in any first world country. But in some respects, preventing the unjustified collection, processing and disclosure of personal information in the private sector is far more important, because that's where most of the risks of nasty but not life-destroying, hire-a-lawyer-and-sue-for-millions damage will occur.

It would help a little bit, but part of the reason of wearing dark sunglasses is to totally obscure the eyes. They're used as anchor points and if an algorithm can't find them, it is going to have trouble, especially in an identification task like this one rather than verification.

Even if they had no online profiles that they personally created, for a lot of people theres enough stuff online about them besides that. I have a unique enough name that if you google my name and exclude social sites, in the first two pages you can find, where I went to high school, college, grad school, and what I studied there, various awards I won, sports and hobbies of mine, plenty of photos, and my most recent jobs. None of which I personally posted online.

That would work too. Although I fear the cat is out of the bag for a lot people.

And making sure no one else posts things involving you.