These days, I'd be willing to bet that "ordinary street surveillance" uses facial recognition algorithms. It wouldn't be as effective as FB's, because FB has an enormous stream of training data coming in all the time. However, that could change if law enforcement got access to FB's data - hence this article.
Facial recognition software can only recognize you if your face is already in the database and identified as you. It's not going to magically know your identity otherwise, no matter how sophisticated it is.
On the other hand, I guess it could do some inference, such as: person X seen at location Y is also seen going in to residence Z every evening and coming out of the same residence every morning for the last 6 months, therefore there's a high probability that this person's address is residence Z, and since John Doe is the only person registered as living in that residence, person X is probably John Doe, etc.
> Facial recognition software can only recognize you if your face is already in the database and identified as you.
Right, which is exactly what would happen if law enforcement/governments could access FB's database.
That does not happen with ordinary street surveillance footage, as far as I know.
So you might have pictures of you taken by street surveillance cameras as you walk around in big cities, but your face isn't ordinarily going to be recognized by anyone.