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It's not that simple. First, people cost a lot, whereas the computers and cameras being used here are cheap. It isn't practical to stake out an entire city and keep notes on the movement of all the people in it using human agents, but this computerized technology makes that completely practical. Second, individual agents might notice and log down a few people they see, but won't recognize most of those people, and their notes would have to be correlated with the notes of hundreds or thousands of other such agents. But this computerized system in essence is the Argus embodied, for all of the cameras will feed their data to a single system which can and will cross-correlate the data in an instant. This system makes it completely possible for someone in the police force to enter a query into a computer asking for all times and locations of sightings of a specific individual. And there is no guarantee that this will only be used to "track known criminals"; it can be set up to take any new unknown face and add it to the database. When, in future, someone wanted to know what you had been doing, they'd obtain a photo of you, digitize it and let the system "recognize" it, and then pull up all the data about you which had already been captured. Who? That, indeed, is the most important question. Anyone who had access to the computer system, either legally or illegally. Cops, bureaucrats, hackers, you name it. The city council of Tampa must be mad. "Tampa is really leading the pack here," said Frances Zelazny, a spokeswoman for Visionics Corp., which produces the "FaceIt" software. That's for damned sure; leading right into the grandmother of all lawsuits for invasion of privacy. (discuss) Addendum: Someone in Congress has noticed and isn't happy about this. I have a feeling that this will soon be deinstalled. |
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