<story><title>King County, WA bans facial recognition software</title><url>https://komonews.com/news/local/king-county-is-first-in-the-country-to-ban-facial-recognition-software</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cactus2093</author><text>Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use of computers in police stations, make them write up all their reports by hand. I truly don&amp;#x27;t understand why there would be a line at facial recognition, it&amp;#x27;s just a law against making a process more efficient.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at all. Don&amp;#x27;t replace the jury or public defenders with robots. But facial recognition could just be a way to look through a large amount of footage to find relevant clips that would then be reviewed in more detail by humans. Without facial recognition, you just pay cops overtime to look through footage themselves. It doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily affect the outcome of the process at all.&lt;p&gt;I think facial recognition just needs some help with its image, it&amp;#x27;s just a tool that would save tax dollars. Or a means to Defund The Police, if that&amp;#x27;s your thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Arainach</author><text>&amp;gt;it&amp;#x27;s just a tool that would save tax dollars&lt;p&gt;No, nothing is &amp;quot;just a tool&amp;quot;.  Surveillance technology enables all sorts of new attacks.  Automation makes things feasible.  Cheap storage that allows weeks or months of security footage to be preserved changes what&amp;#x27;s possible.  License plate scanners are &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; a technology that could be done with a bunch of cops on corners with notepads, but in aggregate they&amp;#x27;re a tracking of where everyone is and has been that could never be done without the technology.  Facial recognition is very similar.</text></comment>
<story><title>King County, WA bans facial recognition software</title><url>https://komonews.com/news/local/king-county-is-first-in-the-country-to-ban-facial-recognition-software</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cactus2093</author><text>Genuine question - why not ban cameras altogether? Or ban the use of computers in police stations, make them write up all their reports by hand. I truly don&amp;#x27;t understand why there would be a line at facial recognition, it&amp;#x27;s just a law against making a process more efficient.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s clear to me that there should be a line to prevent fully convicting someone of a crime without any humans in the loop at all. Don&amp;#x27;t replace the jury or public defenders with robots. But facial recognition could just be a way to look through a large amount of footage to find relevant clips that would then be reviewed in more detail by humans. Without facial recognition, you just pay cops overtime to look through footage themselves. It doesn&amp;#x27;t necessarily affect the outcome of the process at all.&lt;p&gt;I think facial recognition just needs some help with its image, it&amp;#x27;s just a tool that would save tax dollars. Or a means to Defund The Police, if that&amp;#x27;s your thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>paxys</author><text>Everything else that you described – computers, digital records – has simple algorithms understandable by the average police officer or citizen. You type a document, it gets saved. You can do a full text search on it. You can pull up an old case and look at photos. You can quickly cross reference. All these tasks could be done step by step by a person and it would just take more time.&lt;p&gt;When it comes to facial recolonization or AI in general, could anyone really tell you why the computer decided to flag your face and why another similar one was rejected? Would you accept a search warrant when the judgement wasn&amp;#x27;t based on any human&amp;#x27;s perception but something which came out a black box? Who makes sure that the data sets used to train the models was 100% free of bias?</text></comment>