Those villages were within each persons Dunbar number and had a unified notion of shared interest and tribal identity. I think the argument that we never had privacy or that it is unnatural needs to be put to rest.

Automated facial recognition is explicitly for one interest group to monitor an "other." In most cases, it is a state and its party interests monitoring subjects, or one class monitoring another. It's a weapon and there is nothing benevolent or benign about it.

Confused; that argument seems to be endorsing the idea that there was little privacy, then denying it?

And agreed no doubt misused facial recognition will be an issue. Just not a personal-relationship one; it'll be a government one.

Argument distinguishes whether you're being identified by an "us," or a "them," and in the medieval small town case, it is an "us," where at scale, it is necessarily a "them."

When you add urbanization and modern identity groups, you are going to be a "them," to someone, and providing them with a technological weapon begs to have the balance corrected.

In case A, a village member knows a private fact about you.

In case B, an arbitrary person or collection of people across the globe know private facts about you.

The hypothetical individual in case A has _drastically_ different incentives regarding disclosure or use of that information. I wouldn't even call it superficially similar.

The modern example would be that your roommate knows fact X, vs. some larger group, or the entire world, knows fact X.

The former can, but not necessarily will, lead to the latter.

Hm, disagree. Socially, its only important if someone you have to deal with, knows something about you that they shouldn't. That the set 'people you have to deal with' is larger now is true, but maybe not critical.

Larger groups don't act the same way as smaller ones.

If your sister dies tomorrow, you'd probably be quite upset.

If I die tomorrow, you wouldn't care even if you found out.

Consider that your roommate, parent, village member, whatever, finds out that you're gay. It's a small group. They have the information to know whether that getting out would be good or bad for you, whether you'd like that information to be disclosed.

On a global scale that discretion just doesn't exist at all. Facebook doesn't _care_. A random worker who sees that information doesn't _care_. The information can make its way to someone who _does_ matter to you (or at any later point suddenly you may matter to them).

You seem to be arguing from the position that people in these villages were good to each other, and that bullying wasn't a thing. You clearly never lived in a small town.

Not at all.

> They have the information to know whether that getting out would be good or bad for you, whether you'd like that information to be disclosed.

Nowhere did I state that they will necessarily act benevolently. The fact is that they have a choice.

At a large scale that decision making process doesn't exist. Your actions become 'data'.

You can move away from bad roommates or out of your village. You can't move out of the world.

Speaking as a lead developer of a leading FR system, in the majority of cases, the FR user is a private organization with large public traffic: department stores, malls, schools, universities, stadiums, and yes: municipalities (cities). The majority of the purpose clients use FR: 1) commercial users such as stores and malls have serious problems with organized theft; 2) schools, universities, stadiums and municipalities use them for public safety, the people in their galleries are people who have made actual threats and active fugitives; The use of FR by police is very infrequent, as they simply (sad to say) don't seem to have access to technical competence to actually use the systems. And then there is the glaring fact that when deployed, the majority of FR systems they go unused simply because understanding how to use the FR system requires more time than anyone there has. Some "integrator" installs with a weak understanding of their purpose, and then it collects dust.

"Active fugitives." Here, the way drivers find out about adminiatrative license suspensions are police ALPR cameras on patrol cars alert cops to pull people over and charge them, causing them to pay for a tow, among other consequences.

Presumably these "fugitives" include parents with kids at the stadium who are behind on support payments or have outstanding parking fines, or perhaps something else that will initiate a high risk police encounter that will at best disadvantage them in a background check?

I've worked in privacy policy in government and the people building FR techs are equipping monkeys with guns.

Sure, someone else will do it, but at least weapons manufacturers have rules about who they can sell to.

To a degree, I agree it is monkeys being given guns. Guns they can't load, don't know where the trigger is, and are pointed at blank walls. I see great hesitation from all private/corporate users to allow any access to their FR galleries or system by outsiders. Partially it is to cover that they don't know how to use it, using it "never seems to work" (because they don't bother to read the manual, view the videos, or really anything. It's shocking.)

I think we'll get regulation of gallery sharing, which will effectively halt the ability for total surveillance.

Everyone assumes this tech is much better than it actually is. For media, treating it like an end to freedom is good for their click-revenues. But in actuality, FR is a kinda weak sensor that needs to be backed with additional identifying technologies to be practical. Defeating FR is childs' play. Even the very best...

While pre-moderns lacked anonymity, they had a very real distinction between private and public. For example, John Owen, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell and one of the most influential Oxford academics of his day, lost 11 children some of whom were in adulthood. Yet despite his voluminous writings, there is absolutely no mention of these personal events.

And while one individual isn't enough to prove a point, it is illustrative of the pre-modern distinction between private and public life. One may even suggest our lack of privacy is the result of our general willingness to erode the boundaries of public and private.

This is a completely false, irresponsible analogy.

A villager knowing a fellow's face is not analogous to a facial recognition surveillance system. A distributed group of people who know each others' faces do not communicate perfectly. Meaning one person can only know a small bit of a recognized individual's activity. In order to construct a full(-ish) picture, cooperation amongst the community (of peers) needs to occur.

Compare this with a camera network covering an entire city. The community's consent is not needed. The effort required to examine a person's activity is trivial. The dynamic and implications are completely different.

> In the medieval days of villages, everybody knew everyone's face. There was little in the way of privacy.

Yeah. And they were horrible places for anyone who didn't perfectly fit into them. The smallest deviation could lead to your death and many people had to hide their true self behind something they projected for others to see.

A big part of it for me isn't that there's a facial recognition system or license plate scanner in place, it's that the records from those systems will live forever and be used for who knows what in the future. It's a bit of a silly example but in William Gibson's newest book there is an AI system the police use that goes through decades of old records of all kinds to find things about people. That's what I'm afraid of, having to trust future police/agents with the data.