In general, most people, want to believe that just because they are out in public, that they aren’t at the same time susceptible to being tracked via facial recognition software, as to their personal identity. That is to say, most people desire to go about their business, without feeling that they are always being watched, or are liable to being watched. While law enforcement cries out for the continual “need” for this or that tool to reduce crime, or for public safety – we do so find that in reality, what law enforcement wants is often in lockstep of what one would find in the most restrictive of police states and further to the point, a population that is continually under watch, is a population that is not truly free in their movements or their activities.
There are a lot of valid reasons why we should be concerned about the probable abuse of facial recognition software, which is that, by virtue of that facial recognition software, particular people of interest, can thus literally be followed as they go about their business from one place to another, which thereby includes their interactions with other people, who then are also thereby subject to being tracked by that same facial recognition software, ad infinitum. Those that truly believe that life is better, because they will be safer, when everyone of some degree of suspicion is continually tracked, don’t seem to realize that the very tool that could, in theory, be of benefit to them, can also be turned against them, at the most inopportune time, should they themselves or the people that they are associated with, stray away from the prevailing norm of behavior so expected out of them.
Those that are in law enforcement are prone to selling all sorts of narratives, of which, there is always going to be that one more thing, that will help make everybody safer, and will help solve crime; but what is seldom discussed, is the true price that we as a people will pay in regards to the sacrifice of our liberty and of our freedom. Not to mention the inconvenient fact that facial recognition software is the very same tool that clearly creates an American construct in which equality under the law, fairness, and justice, will quite obviously take a backseat to the pursuit of safety, reduction of crime, and the surveillance state.
Those of the public that cry out the loudest for the need of facial recognition software, along with those so utilizing such, as in law enforcement, should themselves be on the frontline of what it actually feels like to be tracked, monitored, and followed, all of the time, when they are out and about in the public sphere. There are many a thing that a given person does, which can be at a minimum, misconstrued by those that have an agenda to pursue. That is to say, those that seem to feel that they have absolutely nothing to hide, might so find, that an embarrassing public conversation so monitored, or an unanticipated confrontation, or a noted visit to some agency or to someone that they thought would be held confidential, are the very type of things that they might well rue being publicized; for when we as a people, are always tracked, everything is subject to being known.