Scary stuff. But if we only use mass facial-recognition to catch “the bad guys” then that’s OK, right? It’s not totalitarian or authoritarian at all, right? When a majority of voters want it, that’s democracy, right?

My head hurts.

[1] https://news.met.police.uk/news/arrest-landmark-for-met-offi...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62lq580696o

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/met-police-facial-reco...

The problem is that people in power decide who the "bad guys" are.

Authoritarian regimes come up with bogus charges to include political opponents in the "bad guys", painting them as criminals to the rest of the country, and legitimizing their arrests.

These surveillance technologies have two main problems: if you have more data, it's easier to dig dirt on people. And if you don't have data, you can always fake it.

The requirement for it to work though is that you need regular people to believe that political opponents are in fact criminals.

The scary shit is that the US is not too far from being there.