📑 We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point.

Bookmarked Opinion | We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point. (nytimes.com)

Today, facial recognition technologies are receiving the brunt of the tech backlash, but focusing on them misses the point. We need to have a serious conversation about all the technologies of identification, correlation and discrimination, and decide how much we as a society want to be spied on by governments and corporations — and what sorts of influence we want them to have over our lives.

Bruce Schneier argues that simply banning facial recognition is far too simplistic.

In all cases, modern mass surveillance has three broad components: identification, correlation and discrimination. Let’s take them in turn.

As Cory Doctorow summarises,

Schneier says that we need to regulate more than facial recognition, we need to regulate recognition itself — and the data-brokers whose data-sets are used to map recognition data to peoples’ identities.