But they don't scale up with numbers or across geographically. The scary thing about automated processes of facial recognition is precisely the ability to scale to everyone and everywhere.
And ol' Grandma Francine doesn't scale. Her bad behaviors can't bend the very social fabric of society, nor is she corrupting the public square by abusing her knowledge of the townspeople to sell them things and "nudge" them and manipulate them; Grandma Francine is very talkative but not necessarily that bright, certainly not "we hired every PhD who we could get our hands on and turned them loose with an open expense line to buy hardware with" sorts of smart and manipulative.
In addition, moving was even more devastating then than it can be now. Mutual aid and social networks were everything, outsiders not trusted.
You would have to suspect that the Chinese government aren’t missing this aspect.
Wouldn't surprise me if China essentially made privacy illegal some time in the future.
If you're even a halfway decent data scientist or cyber security professional you'd be 10x more effective at actually munging through data and finding people. Even simple things like munging through millions of records with regexes are hard for them.
It's not surprising to me that they think low tech ways are the most effective. The tools they use are really horrible and pale in comparison to basic shell scripting, let alone scipy.
It's already easy to track someone down but it requires manpower, which limits the scope of tracking and requires the tracker to have a real motivation.
What's scary about mass surveillance is tracking of anyone and everyone for any reason at any time with very little required effort.
The cheat will be caught far sooner, and the PI will be out of a job.
Of course those who aren't cheating will also be caught, as the cameras identify people who look very similar, and the courts listen to how the camera has a 1 in a million chance of being wrong (therefore will identify 350 people in the US as being the same person).
It's DNA evidence problems all over again.
Isn't this something that the insurance company would be able to confirm by forcing the person to undergo a medical exam? Seems hard to imagine that such a disability can be faked well enough to fool a doctor.
> He tells me he’s most familiar with the low tech ways
FTFY. Interesting story though, always neat to see how people like that operate.
> It's common on the Internet.
FTFY :^)
Fixed that for you.
He tells me the low tech ways are the most effective :\