Through a Face Scanner Darkly

An anonymous reader writes in with a story that raises the issue of how public anonymity is quickly disappearing thanks to facial recognition technology. "NameTag, an app built for Google Glass by a company called FacialNetwork.com, offers a face scanner for encounters with strangers. You see somebody on the sidewalk and, slipping on your high-tech spectacles, select the app. Snap a photo of a passerby, then wait a minute as the image is sent up to the company's database and a match is hunted down. The results load in front of your left eye, a selection of personal details that might include someone's name, occupation, Facebook and/or Twitter profile, and, conveniently, whether there's a corresponding entry in the national sex-offender registry."

Comments

Re:I do not look forward to this.

[DarkOx]

WOW you read a whole lot of things into what I wrote, that I never said. As long as we are name calling, I am going to apply the "waste of space" label to you as well since you apparently can't parse our shared language.

We have laws, which declare the guy peeing in the bushes a sex offender; until that changes if he enters a guilty plea or is found to be guilty, said individual is a sex offender. That is not an avocation or an attempt to use a technicality to protect or preserve a broken system; its a very simple factual statement about how the system works. If people like you refuse to accept or understand the facts than I promise you have virtually no chance at changing the system.

I don't fail to distinguish moral and ethical from legal; which is why I used the Scarlet Letter as a reference to both the sex offender list and the Hawthorne novel, which most educated English speakers in the USA (and we are talking about US laws here) would recognize as a parable about the moral hazards of permanently fixing labels to people. I went on to question if such a punishment was justified (without mentioning the consequences we are all aware of, and I thought needless after the Scarlet Letter reference ), and if the labels actually of any practical use to the rest of society.

Next time you might try reading and listening careful to what others write an say before you attack them. There are lot people with bad ideas and bad values out there and in a political system such as ours its about aggregating numbers of people who share your opinions, if you want to win. You might want to be more careful to not mistake potential friends as foes, its going to make things much harder for you.