Portland, Maine passes referendum banning facial surveillance

Re:Portland, Maine passes referendum banning facial surveill... by lmkg on Wednesday November 04, 2020 @02:31PM (#24992255)

With ubiquitous surveillance, you can build a database of the location activity of all citizens. This is problematic for several reasons, with top-of-mind right now being targeting individuals for political reasons, but also stuff like what if the database gets hacked, and general fourth- and fifth-amendment concerns.

With a ban in place, the ability to build such a database drops significantly because you need a pretense for every image or piece of video you acquire. You can acquire and send for processing security camera footage when there was a crime, but when there was no crime? How do you justify acquiring the security footage, and how do you justify asking for it to be processed. Whether the footage available to facial recognize is ubiquitous or not makes a qualitative impact.

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Re:Portland, Maine passes referendum banning facial surveill... by fitz13 on Wednesday November 04, 2020 @02:59PM (#24992501)

Good points, well made. Especially about the hacking.

My only other thought is that a government/organization interested in using/misusing such a database would be willing to invent a pretense.

I'm not sure how heavily to weigh the precedent of government surveillance skirting these kinds of protections. I assume that Portland doesn't have a FISA court rubber-stamp equivalent, but I can't know for sure.

Either way, I think you're right that adding speedbumps to the process is a good thing, especially for data security. I just hope that people don't consider this too much of a victory, although it is definitely a victory.

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