02 March 2020
An article in Slate argues that facial recognition technology revitalises some very long-standing problems concerning policing and the presumption of innocence.
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"The government has always sought a way to file away and compare the faces of the guilty, but until very recently the technology only allowed for it to occur in a much more rudimentary way. Before there was the fingerprint, or even the police file, there was the rogues’ gallery, which you could find in most U.S. police departments. The gallery was a large wall or cabinet filled with photographs of alleged criminals that could be used as a way of identifying repeat offenders and coordinating surveillance, and as an example for witnesses... As cumbersome as this technology was, its use in the early 20th century posed the same ethical questions about guilt, innocence, and the nature of governance that we continue to grapple with on an exponentially larger scale."
Facial Recognition Technology Is the New Rogues’ Gallery (Slate, link)
First Success Against Facial Recognition in France
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