I don’t understand this comment. The police sometimes have to arrest people based on descriptions and other fallible data points. It’s unfortunate when the wrong person is arrested (and false arrests should obviously be minimized), but it’s not reasonable to expect police to get this right absolutely 100% of the time. If someone is a fugitive then they are very unlikely to reveal any information that identifies them with certainty.
Also, police in the US use the same technology: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/public_informa...
It's always been wrong and still is wrong, but the reasons changed over the years. Americans have traditionally been adverse to mass surveillance and I don't think that changes much today. The government just does it in sneaker ways nowadays.
If there was some guarantee all that data wasn't going into some government sanctioned back end, we can start to compare it to police out on the street.
>However, fundamentally, being arrested for looking like someone else is not a new phenomenon.
Was always wrong and still is wrong.
But if you want a modern difference: companies these days (even minimum wage) are really strict about arrests. Even a false arrest can cause complications in a background check, so there is more potential (albeit indirect) slanderous effects from mistaking people nowadays.