Good. Some progress at last. I am still boycotting the Co-Op
supermarket in the UK for using face tracking in their stores.
> if there are photos of you on the internet, then you may well be [in
the database]. And you are very unlikely to have been asked if
that's OK
The cat is out of the bag with these technologies. If not already,
it's only a matter of time before highly compressed face-feature
databases are out in the wild and a score of apps appear to ID total
strangers with a click.
That will change social dynamics, mostly for the worse I think, though
it will allay some casual street crime and abuse much as in a society
where people carry arms. Dog shits on your lawn? Send it back to the
owners house.
It will also make face-covering in some public places far more
acceptable and understandable, as the pandemic has already paved the
way for.
What this law does though, and why it's not pointlessly fighting a
tide, is that it prevents "facing" someone being socially normative.
If we can't uninvent abusive technologies we can at least make using
them unacceptable. The powerful, including people like undercover cops
and agents, will soon demand legal means to remove themselves - and
that will open the door further for broader "right to be forgotten"
type instruments. So I am also looking forward to Californian style
laws in Europe that allow me to personally take down data in actions
against companies outside my locality who do not have permission to
store my likeness or data derived from it.
