The difference is that ubiquitous facial recognition allows for near seamless tracking of individuals and explicitly without a warrant or their consent. It's an important milestone because it moves us from a "reasonable book keeping" level of tracking to full blown seamless tracking and again importantly, without our consent.

To imagine it a bit more viscerally, imagine instead that the system had no cameras and instead required you to submit your daily movement report at the end of each day. An agent walks from door to door and you hand him your written report of exactly what you did today and that gets entered into the Government Saftey and Oversight Commission Database. What are they going to use all that data for? There are only a handful of good reasons, but a disproportionate list of bad reasons that explicitly limit freedom.

Second to that. Would you be as comfortable going to a strip club or a fringe political gathering or a conference for a controversial topic if you knew you had to put it in your report? It has a chilling effect on freedom of movement and pushes fringe activities that are perfectly safe and legal into the darkness.

you people are pretty stupid. ATMs have tracking, point of point of sale has tracking, your phone, internet it's all tracked and linked back to you.

I think you’re right. Maybe we should skip the facial recognition and install RFID tags behind our eyes, after all, they basically know all of that info already anyways.

No one said they didn't track anything already. But they don't have the full picture yet. Many people pay cash for things. Currently no tracking if you just visit somewhere and don't pay for anything. Not everyone has GPS enabled on their phone.

Ubiquitous facial recognition fills in all of this missing data well enough, and without you doing anything but walking out your front door.

Your government has your data, but this scheme would require that it gets mine, too.