Edit, I wanna preface this question with the fact my bike was stolen from right next to a camera. The theft is on tape but the perp wasn’t identified
In: Culture
Something to keep in mind when it comes to civil rights is that while you may trust the current uses of a technology, every technology that you implement will have some future use that you might not have foreseen.
Think about nuclear technology. There’s the electricity generation capability, but then there’s also the weapons capability. A country researching power can easily (well… not easy at all, but bare with me) turn that same research towards weapons.
So public video surveillance and facial recognition. Seems cool, good for crime fighting, all kinds of things. Also gives anyone with access to the cameras the ability to know who is where at every moment of the day. Think of the protests going in Hong Kong right now. Imagine anti government protests happening in your home country, where the president (or whatever equivalent) decides to jail or fine anyone who was at the protest, and uses this tech to do that.
Think back to the 50s and 60s during the civil rights era. The FBI planted agents within those civil rights organizations. Even organizations that had not committed any crimes, as a means of surveillance. More recently the exact same thing happened to environmental organizations. Not that they committed any crimes mind you, but rather they were causing economic disruption.
Once you allow the government to have a power over you, like tracking everyone’s movement all the time, you might not like how they chose to use it. Like, I would have trusted Obama with that power, but now Trump is in office and if you think he wouldn’t track his political enemies you’re a fool.
So trump gains the ability to know the location of anyone at any time. Think of how he would use that against immigrants. If you tend to be more republican in nature, imagine a democratic president using facial ID cameras outside of every gun store in America… Or every planed parenthood clinic, or every gay bar, or every church or every small time pot dealer.
The thing is, it’s human nature for power to corrupt. We all know that saying. So the oblation of an informed public is to be aware of the potential for abuse of new systems or technologies and place constraints on them before they become to big and too in use to constrain.
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