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>I’ve yet to hear a potential benefit of this sort of software that would justify the huge cost to citizen privacy. //

It makes it easy to find suspects and narrow down suspect lists. Meaning far fewer police are needed to catch a greater proportion of known criminals.

Most people consider that a huge benefit.

Let's say you have a db of all faces in country of 60M people. You have a photo/video of a person committing a crime, robbery. False positive rate is 1:100,000. Your search returns 600 people; address match finds 60 with connections to the locality; 5 of those have records, one for robbery. You'd at least sit a person down for an hour to review the matches, consider the records, list people for interview.

According to UK ONS stats, those adults released from prison, in Jan-Mar 2018, had a reoffending rate of 65%.

It seems just tracking known offenders would find the perpetrator in many cases if visual recognition is possible.

I mean, this is _the_ principle benefit.




I fully understand and appreciate that supposed benefit but I don’t think that justifies the privacy cost.


> According to UK ONS stats, those adults released from prison, in Jan-Mar 2018, had a reoffending rate of 65%.

So, society has totally failed to rehabilitate people, and when their sentence is served, they have no future and re-offend.

I think that's the problem, not mass surveillance that starts with good intentions and then is turned on your doorstep.

> Most people consider that a huge benefit.

Until it's too late (like HK), then what?




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