France is planning to incorporate facial recognition technology into a mandatory digital identity for its citizens.
Alicem is the name of France’s face ID program. Facial recognition will be the only way for citizens in France to create a legal digital ID, through a one-time enrollment that compares a user’s passport photos with a selfie video taken on the Alicem app.
However, France’s government insists that, unlike China’s, its ID system won’t be used to monitor citizens, or integrated into identity databases. It says face scans will be deleted when the enrollment process is over.
Hotels (and transit, and banks) in China have been doing this for a while now. If this is any similar, it would be some awkward police-sanctioned box with a webcam and RFID reader to first scan the person's ID card, and then make sure the person's face is the same as the photo on the ID. Note that a national ID has been strictly required for a long time already, and the general idea is to make sure nobody is borrowing someone else's ID to get service, something really easy to do given that Chinese IDs are like US Social Security numbers--easily stolen, sold for cheap, and not easily replaceable.
Debates on all the hairy facial recognition issues aside, the main concern has been one that existed for decades, that people are being de-anonymized as a matter of policy for trivial things like entering a friend's apartment block or using a vending machine. Facial recognition is an enabler for sure, but even if ML didn't exist at all, authorities could (and here, would) just require IDs and the logging of IDs for every trivial transaction.
This is why we need to take our constitution seriously folks. It’s not about carving out exceptions to parts of it we don’t like. It’s about saying “Unless you have reasonable suspicious they’re involved in a crime then you can pound sand.”
“If you have nothing to hide...”
No! You don’t have to prove your innocence to the government. The burden of proof is always on them. What’s they collect enough information they can make anyone they want into a criminal. AND THAT’S THE POINT.
The specific technology is irrelevant from a philosophical standpoint. What I mean is that fundamental rights enumerating individual freedoms for people were thought out and documented into law by the founders of the US. Even though they didn't realize there would be jet planes, the internet, or cars the founders thought about what it truly means to be free and for the government to be limited from trampling our rights. People have allowed these freedoms to be slowly restricted one at a time basically giving over control of their lives to the government. Technology enables a level of control and surveillance that could never have been imagined 300 years ago and so it has become even more important for us to fight back and remove the ability of our government to oppress. If we don't then in a few hundred years time our children will be slaves to a complete surveillance and control system that we probably can barely imagine today.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 33.1 ms ] threadAlicem is the name of France’s face ID program. Facial recognition will be the only way for citizens in France to create a legal digital ID, through a one-time enrollment that compares a user’s passport photos with a selfie video taken on the Alicem app.
However, France’s government insists that, unlike China’s, its ID system won’t be used to monitor citizens, or integrated into identity databases. It says face scans will be deleted when the enrollment process is over.
Debates on all the hairy facial recognition issues aside, the main concern has been one that existed for decades, that people are being de-anonymized as a matter of policy for trivial things like entering a friend's apartment block or using a vending machine. Facial recognition is an enabler for sure, but even if ML didn't exist at all, authorities could (and here, would) just require IDs and the logging of IDs for every trivial transaction.
“If you have nothing to hide...”
No! You don’t have to prove your innocence to the government. The burden of proof is always on them. What’s they collect enough information they can make anyone they want into a criminal. AND THAT’S THE POINT.
Is anybody actually reading what these Google whistleblowers are saying ??
Hong Kong is in bad shape at the moment!