Through a Face Scanner Darkly (opens in new tab)

Like any conference for the past few years already?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.