Police Say They Use Facial Recognition Despite Bans
&gt; If it&#x27;s not possible then I think we&#x27;re destined for a very nasty future.<p>Possibly. But if that&#x27;s the case, it&#x27;s very important that we acknowledge that fact now and work to prevent it. We can&#x27;t just say that governments will suddenly become incorruptible because the alternative is unpleasant. We have to face that unpleasant reality and respond to it.<p>&gt; What would prevent it?<p>The fact that it&#x27;s not working. Even in totalitarian regimes like China, they&#x27;re not stopping all crime, they&#x27;re just crushing political dissidents. And they don&#x27;t even have perfect enforcement on that.<p>To get to the point in enforcement you&#x27;re talking about, we would need an even larger jump in surveillance than what we&#x27;re talking about now. And even in that world -- it&#x27;s not lack of surveillance that allows police officers to violate people&#x27;s rights with impunity, it&#x27;s lack of prosecution. Enforcement of the law isn&#x27;t just a problem of finding criminals, it&#x27;s also wrapped up in the system&#x27;s own brazenness and willingness to apply different standards to different people.<p>Getting rid of privacy won&#x27;t fix that, and <i>preemptively</i> getting rid of privacy when we have unequal standards of enforcement will make things worse because the corrupt parts of the system will have even more power.<p>&gt; I feel strongly that laws should be legitimate or repealed.<p>This is a good ideal that we should strive for, but not a practical reality. Marijuana would not have become legal if people couldn&#x27;t have broken the law. Gay rights would not have become a reality if people couldn&#x27;t have been secretly gay. Perfect enforcement of the law can stagnate social progress, because the law is fallible. Fallible systems need safeguards that make it possible to oppose them -- and extra-legal normalization of certain behaviors is one of those safeguards.<p>There are other ways we could add checks and balances to the law, but I have not seen many proposals from anyone that seem realistic or achievable to me. The reality is that breaking the law is often how we achieve social progress. Again, see Hong Kong and China, or the history of slavery in the US, or any number of social movements.<p>&gt; We in the West could do that too but if we don&#x27;t because we value our personal privacy over the occasional kidnapped kid, well, I&#x27;m no fan of the CCP but that doesn&#x27;t seem like a defensible moral position to me.<p>I think it&#x27;s a completely defensible moral position. I think that our privacy is one of the reasons that the US government is not the CCP, and I think that the harm China is doing to its own citizens is pretty objectively greater than the harm that a couple of kidnappers will do. I&#x27;m not a fan of kidnappers, but the CCP is building concentration camps. Muslims in China need privacy more than they need protection from kidnappers, it&#x27;s not a hard trade for me to make.<p>&gt; We should be talking about a universal highest-common-denominator of laws for the planet so that the decreasing cost of asymptotically-prefect enforcement becomes a solution rather than a problem!<p>I think the solution you&#x27;re proposing is more difficult and less likely to happen then even the most long-shot of my proposals. The odds of all of the nations of the world uniting under a common set of laws, and those being laws being <i>good</i> are astronomically low. It would be easier to invent an invisibility cloak.