I've got no issue with using law enforcement having access to these pictures for identity verification (i.e. checking to make sure the face on a license matches the face of the person in the database). Although automatic systems setup to identify people in crowds is a bit too Minority Report for me. I understand that I don't have any expectation to privacy when walking around in public but its a bit unnerving to have someone logging my every location and never needing a warrant, as publicly taken pictures wouldn't require one whereas cellphone tracking would.
[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/c...
Maybe we need something like HIPPA for personal data. If you start fiddling with stuff that invades privacy of individuals, things should get touchy and messy legally. I have an expectation of privacy in public while in crowds and during my personal travels.
The theory has made a minor appearance in at least one Supreme Court case: U.S. v. Jones, where police placed a GPS tracker on a car and didn't comply with the restrictions of the warrant they'd obtained to do so. The holding went against the government, but the mosaic theory only featured in a concurrence. The decision was based not around the invasion of privacy inherent in round-the-clock automated location monitoring but instead on the rather mundane and case-specific fact that the police committed a "trespass" to the car by sticking the device magnetically to its underside.
It's a tough case because it's really the plummeting cost that's changing things: round-the-clock warrantless public surveillance is legal and basically uncontroversial if done the traditional way, by sticking police officers in a car and following you around. But the growing ability to get the same information at massive scale, at minimal marginal cost, and even retroactively is... not so uncontroversial. The Court, and courts generally, are still firmly in the camp of analyzing searches individually and not in aggregate, but there are glimmers of change on the horizon.
I think the government and businesses should be subject to the same limitations:
"Stalking" someone, even in public, is illegal and is a violation of their rights.
As one quick example of restriction of rights, constant, pervasive tracking may inhibit one's right to free speech by assembly and association.
Corporations so often insist they are "people", when such claim is to their legal and economic advantage. Well then, treat them like such. Capable of "stalking" and subject to punishment for same.
Next up, crazu EULA that are purposely onerously burdensome while, amidst all that mess, claiming to secure the right to e.g. "stalk".
This is a misconception. Legally, corporations are people (this is not disputed), but not natural people (humans are natural people).
Of course you have. Naturally anybody can see you, but it does not follow that anybody, especially a state representative can follow you and record your whereabouts.
Well, maybe in US you can, I do not know US law this much, but in many EU countries this constitutes as surveillance and requires a warrant.
when do we see police departments sanctioned for tracking people not suspected of any crime?
when do we find out that the police arrested or killed the wrong person based off of a faulty algorithm?
when do we start wearing dazzle camo on our face to disrupt them?
I'm usually all for paranoia when it comes to the police but knowing your identity based on your appearance isn't really a violation of your rights.
Facebook likely automatically builds a profile for every face it can recognize in a photograph, as well as approximate dates and times based on landmarks, shadow geometry and timestamps, building an ad-hoc and constantly updated dossier of travel times, places and associations, and feeds it into some kind of predictive machine learning algorithm designed to model, predict and influence the behavior of people who aren't even on Facebook yet.
And they're secret best buds with the NSA.
But the police actually knowing someone is who they they think they are might actually be a net positive in terms of public safety. It seems like a step up from "nondescript black male, 18-35, possibly wearing clothes."
It would be one thing if there was some RainMan FBI agent who was the database and could recollect the name, address, declared weight, height, eye color and hair color of half of the population of the United States after meeting them through natural social introductions.
But this is a collection of databases that hundreds or thousands of cops can search through simultaneously without having to know anything about the unidentified person. Recently, it was declared unconstitutional to attach a GPS tracking device to a vehicle without a warrant, yet it's still perfectly acceptable to have a real live person tail another individual in another car without a warrant. The reasons being is that a small police force of say 20 people could in effect virtually tail and track thousands (if their budget allowed them to purchase that many devices) of individuals at once, where physically tracking those individuals is a natural limitation of the capacity of the force. It enforces a burden on the police. Exactly the same rules apply here. If a cop knows a subset of individuals in his or her neighborhood, and then comes across a picture of unidentified person taken during the commission of a crime, and is able to identify that person from memory and develop further proof that the individual in the photo was in fact the one that committed the crime, then they have a good case. If the only way for the cops to identify that person is to look up the identification of the suspect via a highly sophisticated computer algorithm that can check against hundreds of faces per second, then the "capacity" of the force to identify suspects far outweighs the effort the public had to counteract that.
Checks and balances, and all that stuff, don't just apply to the 3 branches, they apply between the citizenry and the powers over them too.
And this could be an misconception you have learned. Naturally everyone who wants to have control over you wants you to believe it. Still it does not follow that you have to share this belief.
The question is where to draw the line. Naturally the ones who want to have control over every single person, what to push this line far away and make it look natural. Our duty is to question the motivation to do so.
public safety will soon be crushing dissent further
then we will wish they did not have records of what we looked like
Point redacted.
law enforcement in more than half of all states can search against the trove of photos stored for IDs like drivers’ licenses.
Getting that data from Facebook is way more complicated, fraught with legal problems and lower quality than all of the systems that already exist in the legal system between all of the sources that utilize photo id: drivers license, passport etc
I definitely skimmed the article too fast. State ID photos makes a lot more sense.
(with some chance of error)
The government being able to figure out who you are, is not a story.
(Systematic & automatic use of ID information to continually track you, is)
