Your face is not a bar code: arguments against automatic face recognition (2001)
Two things come to mind. The first is some old humorous TV commercial where they had barcodes on your forehead and one didn&#x27;t want to scan properly and the bank clerk or cashier was running this person&#x27;s face repeatedly over the scanner.<p>The second is a historical incident that led to old &quot;biometrics&quot; being replaced with fingerprints as our default for identification. I&#x27;ve read about it previously and found this as the top result when doing a quick search (I will not vouch for its quality -- it is just evidence I am not making it up, plus enough info that you can go look for more if you find it interesting and want to know more).<p><i>How Look-Alike Leavenworth Prisoners Led To The Forensic Use Of Fingerprinting</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kcur.org&#x2F;show&#x2F;central-standard&#x2F;2015-12-15&#x2F;how-look-alike-leavenworth-prisoners-led-to-the-forensic-use-of-fingerprinting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kcur.org&#x2F;show&#x2F;central-standard&#x2F;2015-12-15&#x2F;how-lo...</a><p>The early part of the article makes the distinction between &quot;unobjectionable&quot; uses of facial recognition -- such as for secure facilities -- and facial recognition in public places generally. And it seems to me we are leaving out some important things when we discuss such things.<p>We are not talking about how our historical social norms and laws were rooted in a social reality that no longer exists. The world has changed radically in a short period of time and there are both upsides and downsides.<p>Historically, people lived in relatively small groups of close-knit people. Tribes. Small towns. Etc.<p>We mostly interacted with people we knew fairly well. This both provided some baseline security and also could be a prison from which you could not readily escape. Once labeled a &quot;troublemaker&quot; you would have a hard time living it down. People could easily frame you as the guilty party based on social expectation that it was typical behavior for you to do X.<p>It was hard to leave your place of origin and go elsewhere but if you could, you could potentially start over. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid might have successfully started over had they genuinely left their life of crime behind entirely after moving to South America. But they relapsed and it did not end well.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.baltimoresun.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;bs-xpm-1997-01-19-1997019144-story.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.baltimoresun.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;bs-xpm-1997-01-19-19970191...</a><p>We have statutes of limitations on various crimes because we have this idea historically that if enough time passes, you should not be held responsible for stupid mistakes you made in your youth. People can change, if they are given the chance to change.<p>It&#x27;s complicated because it is human nature that if you make it too easy to get a pass for bad behavior, then you actively encourage bad behavior. But if you make it impossible to redeem yourself and start anew, then you give people no reason to bother to even try.<p>One of the problems with trends like facial recognition is that we are veering increasingly towards a very unforgiving world where every little thing you do will haunt you forever and there will be records even if you might have forgotten the incident entirely.<p>Yes, this is motivated in part by the fact that really terrible people like to look for the cracks in the system. They like to actively exploit loopholes. They will happily take the deal that they can get a free do-over without having to prove themselves only to keep doing terrible things because nothing is really stopping them.<p>But hard cases make bad laws. Designing a world optimized to treat everyone like they are this worst case scenario causes a great many problems while solving relatively few.<p>In a world with 8 billion people (roughly) and international passports required to go anywhere, etc. we are increasingly being painted into a corner individually and this will soon start to really come back to bite us, if it hasn&#x27;t already. If nothing else, it makes it harder to migrate as one practical response to climate change making some areas less hospitable.<p>We need to begin thinking more deeply and more broadly about the social context in which our laws and expectations developed, how the world has changed and how to find a path forward in this new reality that isn&#x27;t overly paranoid, overly controlling, etc.