I mean, it's pretty clear given tweets given to us today by the US president that he'd LIKE to use it in an authoritarian manner. He literally said he wants to remove all courts and judges from the immigration process and have ICE be able to exercise deportation options unilaterally and with 0 tolerance or oversight.

So right now: yeah it's probably an authoritarian system. But in the long term, we need a better understand of the legal and social implications of facial recognition before we can really trust governments at scale to use the technology within a framework that preserves our values.

Right now, it's best to deny them access to it.

The argument is that use of this software is inherently authoritarian, in and of itself.

No object ever in society is "inherently authoritarian".

Authoritarianism is a behavior of a country's leaders, not a label on some unwanted technology.

E.g. Sniper rifles are not authoritarian in an of themselves. The use of sniper rifles to snuff out dissent is.

And that's why this debate is dishonest. Because if you support facial recognition software for the police as another tool for the good guys, you get smeared as supporting authoritarianism.

When in fact, if you deeply wanted to remove authoritarian behaviors, you would add more checks and balances to the system to prevent unchecked behavior from our leaders.

The founding father's knew that and designed the constitution that way.

I agree that the existence of the software is benign. I said the use of it is authoritarian.

And sure, I didn't make it explicit, so let me make it explicit now: the use of the software to identify real people is authoritarian.

If you use it to classify random cat pictures then that's obviously not authoritarian.

First, thanks for responding.

But saying two things are equivalent doesn't make it so.

My phone tags people in them. Are you saying that is authoritarian? Because to me, it seems like a really nice tool to tag people in photos.