When people on hacker News talk about requiring cops to do traditional police work instead of doing wide ranging trawls using technology, this is exactly what they meant. I hope you don't complain when the future you want becomes reality and the three letter agencies come knocking down your door just because you happened to be in the same building as a crime in progress and the machine learning algorithms determined your location via cellular logs and labelled you as a criminal.

The grim meathook future of ubiquitous surveillance is coming regardless. At the very least we could get some proper crime solving out of it along the way.

There’s a pretty big difference between surveillance logging your every move your and scanning photos voluntarily uploaded to Facebook.

No, I don’t like Facebook using facial recognition technology, and no I don’t like that someone else can upload photos of me without my consent (which ironically could leverage facial recognition technology to blanket prevent), but these are other technical and social issues that are unrelated to the root issue. I also wish there were clear political and legal boundaries around surveillance usage for truly abhorrent behaviour versus your non-Caucasian neighbour maybe j -walking triggering a visit from ICE.

Yes, it’s an abuse of power for these organisations to collect data these ways, but I’m not against their use to prevent literal ongoing child abuse, it’s one of the least worst uses of it.