King County, WA bans facial recognition software

Let companies use on our children. Let companies/government scan our kids from birth to death.

Put cameras in schools, on every street corner, government buildings, parks, doctor's offices, and of course scan every face that goes through governmental facilities (DMV, Criminal/civil courts). Put cameras in all stores. Put a Ring type camera on every residence.

Government could then predict whom will most likely succeed in our complicated, competive society.

The good kids will go to the best schools of course. The good adults will get preferential treatment in hiring, loan accusation, housing, etc.

Stores will track our every buy. Stores will know I stole an olive from Whole Foods once.

STD's will be a thing if the past. We will know who likes to booze it up. We will know what percentage of fast food they consume, and we will definitely know who uses tobacco.

We can do away with Credit Scores. We can do away with most tests. We will be able to predict a person's future success with data.

Cops can give up patrols, and just use AI programs to catch bad guys, or prostitutes.

This is Not the future I want.

I cannot believe Americans are even putting up with the surveillance we already have.

(The only thing I like about cameras/surveillance is it might make cops a bit more honest?)

I'm not for an instant saying that there aren't any implications in terms of how the technology can and should be deployed - but some people just want to be angry and offended despite a lack of understanding of what they're actually on about.

Facial recognition struggles to accurately identify black people and women.

The difficulties around both are probably around edge and contour detection:

Black people have darker skin and less angular features - the shadows on their faces are not only harder to see (due to blending with skin-tone), but softer to begin with.

Women routinely leave the home wearing enough makeup to not only look less like themselves, but often look more like other women.

There are ways to mitigate these issues to some extent: cameras that work better in low light and codecs that do a better job of encoding relative rather than absolute light levels will do a better job of preserving the information in the faces of people with darker complexions.

As far as makeup is concerned, it can misrepresent the shape of a face - if you only have one angle.

Treating the face shape as invariant as Δt -> 0 and running on video (even better with multiple synchronised cameras) will allow for topography extraction despite dealing with someone deliberately misrepresenting what they look like.

Moreover, yes, other deeply awful weapons are also banned. Biological weapons and Chemical weapons are both widely banned by all decent countries in the world. Nuclear weapons should join this list. They almost did, during the Reagan era: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/ronald-...

Compare to a situation in which identification is not required and the officer can't be identified even with video evidence.