Comment on ‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops
MangoCats@feddit.it 2 days agoIn GDPR countries (among others) nobody is allowed to do something like this with face recognition because the law works for everybody.
IDK the specifics of GDPR (and GDPR is relatively new, so it will continue to evolve for some time…)
In my view: the police are public servants, salaries and pensions paid by taxes. They have voluntarily chosen to serve as public servants. Whole hosts of studies show that police who are actively involved with the communities they police, seeing, being seen, being known by the neighborhoods they work in, those police are more effective at preventing crime, defusing domestic disputes, etc. than faceless thugs with batons and guns who only show up when they are going to use their arrest powers to shut down whatever is going on.
If I were to write “my version” of the GDPR that I think the US should enact, there would be clear exceptions for public servants, including police and politicians. Now, you can get into the whole issue of “undercover cops” which is clearly analogous to “secret police” which may be a necessary evil for some circumstances, but that’s not what is going on with OP’s website. OP is providing a tool to compare photos to a public database of photographs of public servants - not undercover cops. By the way: performance is spec’ed at 1 to 3 seconds per photo comparison, so 9000 photos might take 9000-27000 seconds to compare, that’s 2.5 to 7.5 hours to run one photo search.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 2 days ago
Considering people all across the world tend to generalise I don’t think it’s a good idea to share all the personal details of a cop. I would rather prefer we just having transparency in the general administration (annual reports) and their salary.
I also dislike that the law should have exceptions. The more exceptions a law has the complexer it gets and the more some people can abuse it.
Fining a complaint about a police office can also be done on their badge number, and that should be enough. If a police is just bad at their job, but a good person (so they fuck up some other way), then they shouldn’t be at risk of being attacked/stalked or whatever by the people they arrested, which is what a public database of the people doing their job allows for. People should be held accountable for their actions and everybody should be held accountable in the same manner.
Just because a photo is made in public doesn’t mean it is a public photo, or at least it shouldn’t mean that. Again, to protect civilians.
MangoCats@feddit.it 2 days ago
I think there’s a balance to be struck. Should the cop’s home address be shared? No. Should their face, badge number and service record be public? Absolutely. I also agree that all public servant’s salaries (including employees of publicly traded companies) should be public.
Agreed, but something as complex as “the police” isn’t going to have one solution fitting all circumstances. Whatever the solution is, it should be simple enough to explain, clearly and accurately, to an average 12 year old.
Any database, public or private, can be endlessly abused. This is the crux of the GDPR.
Yes, but that has always been less than perfect in practice. Transparency is always the answer. Increased transparency with increased accountability for inequity is the right direction to be moving, not all at once, but gradual continuous progress in the good direction is what we should be seeking. Unfortunately, people lately are standing up and cheering for what they call a “good direction” that is composed of more lies, corruption and ultimately more secrecy about what’s really happening.
That’s going to be the tricky part about a future where 200MP 60fps video cameras cost less than $100, and digital storage costs less than $100 per TB.
I feel that outlawing or otherwise restricting the use of cameras in general will go poorly. It has been hobby-level practical to drive around with license plate reading software, building your own database of who you pass where and when, and getting faces to go with that tracking data isn’t hard either - setup a “neighborhood watch” of a dozen or more commuters and you’ll have extensive tracking data on thousands of your neighbors, for maybe a couple thousand dollars in gear. Meta camera glasses may be socially offensive, but similar things are inevitable in the future - at least in the future where we continue to have smartphones and affordable internet connectivity.
Even if it’s outlawed, that data will be collected. What laws can do is restrict public facing uses of it. Young people today need to grow up knowing that, laws or no laws, they will be recorded their whole lives.
Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 2 days ago
Making picture in public of others is alreasy not allowed under GDPR, but only if somebody complains you will get into issues most of the time.
We need to stop the bullshit excuses people like you are using to allow for the recording or eveeything it really needs to stop. You are already no allowed to have a camera watching the public streeth
MangoCats@feddit.it 2 days ago
So much for all the security cameras.
People like you need to get your heads out of your own asses an look around at the real world, as it is today, and contemplate for a moment where it is inevitably going. Bitching about how improper video recording is on internet forums is likely to achieve exactly nothing against the commercial interests who will continue to make and sell the technology.
Unless you are the police running a traffic enforcement camera, no?