LIDAR would be preferrable to cameras when it comes to privacy actually

People saying LIDARs can't recognize colors or LIDARs can't take pictures don't know what they are talking about.

They're just fancy cameras with synced flashes. Not Star Trek material-informational converting transporters. Sometimes they rotate, sometimes not. Often monochrome, but that's where Bayer color filters come in. There's nothing fundamentally privacy preserving or anything about LIDARs.

▲

KaiserPro 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think it makes a difference. Dense lidar goes you more information than 2d colour imagery.

There are SLAM cameras that only select "interesting" points, which are privacy preserving. They are also very low power.

▲

clayhacks 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’d definitely feel much better if most cameras in the world were replaced by LIDAR. I feel like it would be much tougher to have a flawless facial recognition program with LIDAR alone

▲

adrianN 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Who needs facial recognition if you can identify people based on gait?

▲

0x3f 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Gait recognition is almost entirely hype. Sure it works to tell the difference between n = 10 people but so what, you can tell the difference between a group of 10 people by what kind of shoes they are wearing.

▲

vntok 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Judicial systems where a 6% error rate is deemed way too high to lead to a conviction.

	▲	adrianN 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Then you combine it with some other technique, eg tracking daily routes of individuals, to lower the error rate. You only need a handful of bits to distinguish all inhabitants of the average city. But imho that error rate would likely be low enough for some judge to authorize more invasive surveillance of suspects thus identified.