this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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I agree with that the abusive cops and ice is insane in the US, and it should be stopped. I also believe that the US is a corrupt nation in nearly every place of the government and surrounding instances.
But a question surround this, what if the US wasn't corrupt and the judges would actually follow the law (juries wouldn't be able to exist for most cases) and hypothetical if the US had privacy laws for everything besides businesses wouldn't this be the same punishable offence that would protect citizens?
In GDPR countries (among others) nobody is allowed to do something like this with face recognition because the law works for everybody. (Some people are trying to destroy this in some countries, though).
At the same time, if the government is allowed to use facial recognition and other anti-privacy measures to identify people where there is no ground to, then why shouldn't the people be able to do that?
Edit: I am not from the US and my look on life and trias political situations is different than what the fuck is happening in the US
IDK the specifics of GDPR (and GDPR is relatively new, so it will continue to evolve for some time...)
In my view: the police are public servants, salaries and pensions paid by taxes. They have voluntarily chosen to serve as public servants. Whole hosts of studies show that police who are actively involved with the communities they police, seeing, being seen, being known by the neighborhoods they work in, those police are more effective at preventing crime, defusing domestic disputes, etc. than faceless thugs with batons and guns who only show up when they are going to use their arrest powers to shut down whatever is going on.
If I were to write "my version" of the GDPR that I think the US should enact, there would be clear exceptions for public servants, including police and politicians. Now, you can get into the whole issue of "undercover cops" which is clearly analogous to "secret police" which may be a necessary evil for some circumstances, but that's not what is going on with OP's website. OP is providing a tool to compare photos to a public database of photographs of public servants - not undercover cops. By the way: performance is spec'ed at 1 to 3 seconds per photo comparison, so 9000 photos might take 9000-27000 seconds to compare, that's 2.5 to 7.5 hours to run one photo search.
Considering people all across the world tend to generalise I don't think it's a good idea to share all the personal details of a cop. I would rather prefer we just having transparency in the general administration (annual reports) and their salary.
I also dislike that the law should have exceptions. The more exceptions a law has the complexer it gets and the more some people can abuse it.
Fining a complaint about a police office can also be done on their badge number, and that should be enough. If a police is just bad at their job, but a good person (so they fuck up some other way), then they shouldn't be at risk of being attacked/stalked or whatever by the people they arrested, which is what a public database of the people doing their job allows for. People should be held accountable for their actions and everybody should be held accountable in the same manner.
Just because a photo is made in public doesn't mean it is a public photo, or at least it shouldn't mean that. Again, to protect civilians.
I think there's a balance to be struck. Should the cop's home address be shared? No. Should their face, badge number and service record be public? Absolutely. I also agree that all public servant's salaries (including employees of publicly traded companies) should be public.
Agreed, but something as complex as "the police" isn't going to have one solution fitting all circumstances. Whatever the solution is, it should be simple enough to explain, clearly and accurately, to an average 12 year old.
Any database, public or private, can be endlessly abused. This is the crux of the GDPR.
Yes, but that has always been less than perfect in practice. Transparency is always the answer. Increased transparency with increased accountability for inequity is the right direction to be moving, not all at once, but gradual continuous progress in the good direction is what we should be seeking. Unfortunately, people lately are standing up and cheering for what they call a "good direction" that is composed of more lies, corruption and ultimately more secrecy about what's really happening.
That's going to be the tricky part about a future where 200MP 60fps video cameras cost less than $100, and digital storage costs less than $100 per TB.
I feel that outlawing or otherwise restricting the use of cameras in general will go poorly. It has been hobby-level practical for the past decade to drive around with license plate reading software, building your own database of who you pass where and when, and getting faces to go with that tracking data isn't hard either - setup a "neighborhood watch" of a dozen or more commuters and you'll have extensive tracking data on thousands of your neighbors, for maybe a couple thousand dollars in gear. Meta camera glasses may be socially offensive, but similar things are inevitable in the future - at least in the future where we continue to have smartphones and affordable internet connectivity.
Even if it's outlawed, that data will be collected. What laws can do is restrict public facing uses of it. Young people today need to grow up knowing that, laws or no laws, they will be recorded their whole lives.
Making picture in public of others is alreasy not allowed under GDPR, but only if somebody complains you will get into issues most of the time.
We need to stop the bullshit excuses people like you are using to allow for the recording or eveeything it really needs to stop. You are already no allowed to have a camera watching the public streeth
So much for all the security cameras.
People like you need to get your heads out of your own asses an look around at the real world, as it is today, and contemplate for a moment where it is inevitably going. Bitching about how improper video recording is on internet forums is likely to achieve exactly nothing against the commercial interests who will continue to make and sell the technology.
Unless you are the police running a traffic enforcement camera, no?
Well, the US Supreme court did explicitely say cops have no expectation of anonymity while doing their job. This is completely legal. Its premised on the idea that cops arent there to be abusive but to uphold the law, which is not always actually true. The root of the problem is cops behavior themselves rather than the recording or identifying of them. Up until very recently cops at least had their names visible and were required to show ID upon request.
The answer is that I don't think it matters because the US or any other society will never reach some utopic standard of privacy. So long as we live in a world where facial recognition is possible - it is better to regulate it strongly than attempt to prohibit it.
In a modern globalized world the old privacy is dead, no matter how you look at it. Going forward something new will need to be built out of the ashes, be it a new privacy or something better/worse.
Well yeah it is better to regulate it but that should include that you aren't allowed to use the data from it to track people etc. We already have protrait right in the GDPR so it is already hard to use.
Kindly, I believe your blind faith in your societal institutions to be at best naive and at worst a danger to liberty. I mean this as a genuine warning meant to be heeded, not a personal criticism directed at you. I'm an American. This exact blind institutional faith I see you and many other Europeans frequently espouse online was a core part of what caused the civil collapse of my own society. It will happen in yours too if you guys aren't careful. The prevalence of this way of thinking amongst Europeans I meet online is a dangerous omen. You guys remind me a lot of us back in the 90s. Please. Take it not from an ignorant American, but from a global citizen who has already been down the rough and tumble line.
I think I'll just quote you from another comment you made in this exact same thread, because you encapsulated it better than I ever could:
This is a fiction. It is a noble lie you are told by people with power. Think semantically. What is corruption? What is "money," "power," etc? In your mind, in countries that you believe to be "one of the good ones," one where by your description the nation "isn't corrupt enough for people to really buy into it"... who controls the nation and how? Realistically, you aren't going to be able to provide an answer to that question that is free from discussing existing corruption, because your idea of supposed societies that cross some arbitrary threshold of being "pure vs corrupt"... doesn't exist in reality. There exists not one corruption-free government, now or ever, in the history of mankind.
This sounds fantastical from your POV but I do mean it as a genuine warning to be heeded. First it starts with gradual scrapes and nicks at the block of reason... stuff exactly like this that everyone engages in on some level, to some degree - it is a transmogrification of the social conscious... soon yet the fascists carve their own damnable Michelangelo from the marble, instead.
The system in the US is different than what we have in NL, nontheless is it good to be vigilant yes I agree, but I have also seen plenty of laws, rules and regulations here in NL and the EU. I also know that some people in the EU are trying to destroy things like encryption because it is abused by crimnals.
There are also plenty of examples of why our tax system is broken at times and people can abuse it. I have seen it enough first hand and at a further distance.
But we still have an open selection for the government and loads of different people from different parties to vote onto which makes it a lot harder fo somebody to do something similar in the US and buy votes etc.
Part of my work is signaling corruptions, well mainly fraud and financing of terrorism etc, but still. The transparance in The Netherlands really helps with preventing it.
But yes I am vigilent, we are lucky that our government failed with Geert Wilders
A core tenet of the law is the right to trial by a jury of your peers.
Jury trials have a very similar flaw to democracy.
Think of an average person you know, how stupid are they? Now, realize that half the people out there are stupider than that.
An average randomly selected jury is going to be composed of 50% below average intelligence people.
Of the US law yes, but that's not the case everywhere.
I personally don't think juries should do more than give extra input to the judge. The judge should follow the law exactly and tif they don't, the average person should be able to file a complaint about them not doing their job and they should be investigated.
(I also work in a field (accountancy) where you can file complaints to be for very cheap if I don't do my job correctly)
Curious: how often in your field are people harassed out of work by politically motivated complaints?
Around here, restaurant owners are very vulnerable to that kind of harassment - they can literally be put out of business just by people complaining to the health department, with no real basis to the complaints. Its one thing that keeps restaurant owners out of politics.
Not that often, since it is a very formal matter to sue a registered accountant over here. It costs like 50 euro to complain or something and the accountant can lose his title from it.
https://www.nba.nl/tools-en-ondersteuning/publicaties/2025/jaaroverzicht-klachtencommissie-nba-2024/
Yeah, 50€ will stop the drunk at the pub from filing a complaint on his mobile for a lark, but in the greater scheme it's no barrier at all for people intent on serious harassment.
That's almost always on the table with complaint investigations against licensed professionals of all kinds.
The bigger trick is: who are the regulators that execute the decision making process, how onerous is it to fight it, etc. A lot of what goes down around here on the "bad side" of all that is that certain actors familiar with the system will develop relationships with the regulatory body and launch complaints sufficient to significantly harass license holders (or any regulated person) just enough to really bother them, but not quite enough to trigger a fight with lawyers in the courts and appeals processes. In a competitive arena like running a restaurant, the harassment can be expensive and time consuming enough to tip the balance between profitable, and shutting down.
The plebs and the regime never have the same rights, in any country
FR is definitely used in GDPR countries.
For police it's so- called 'tightly regulated'.
For private use forbidden but 'there are exeptions'
Based on trias politcal yes you do.
If your country is corrupt then yes the people with money have power. Not every country is corrupt enough for people to really buy into it.
"Based on trias politcal yes you do." what are you trying to say?
And I said nothing about corruption or 'people with money'
Again, what are you trying to say?
Sorry, but I assume everybody here at least has a basic level of understanding on the political system most democratic countries are at least somewhat based on.
Trias Political is the sense that you have the government, the police and the judges. Everybody needs to follow the law, the government makes that law, the judges judge who gets punished and how long and the police enact that punishment. (Very broadly explained).
If the system works like intended or at least close to, then everybody has the same rights and need to follow the same low. You are were talking about "the regime" what regime are you talking about? Generally people mean the 1%er's or at least the actual rich. Corruption is what allows the inequality between people, but removing the corruption can also cause issues. Just look at the situation in Brazil.
Facial recognition is not something any company can just use in a GDPR country in the way they do in China or in this example. Again, we have rights.
My original comment was more an "if" question about what IF the US actually functioned like a democracy instead of a consuming focussed, angelo-saxton country.
" Sorry, but I assume everybody here at least has a basic level of understanding on the political system"
I certainly do and know the pretty concept of separation of power, if you have trouble with spelling and forming coherent sentences that's another matter.
When you say "most democratic countries " That means you believe in the solely theoretical concept of democracy, it doesn't exist.
Or what countries do ypu think have that?
And LOL at using China as a negative example of FR.
England for one is far worse.
And no I do not mean the 1%ers which is a silly concept. I mean the regime/government whose rights and powers far exceed the powers of normal citizens.
Even when the theory/law doesn't say that in your imaginary democratic state.
"a consuming focussed angelo-saxton country" again, what do you mean?
That is exactly what we in the west call democracies.
It is merely an ultra-capitalist ,so consumer and profit focused concept. The rights are there on paper.
If the police weren't unaccountable invaders, and just, liked, issued annoying tickets or whatever instead of murdering children and doing to crowds of peaceful civilians things that would be war crimes if done to uniformed enemy soldiers literally any tike they assemble, or even if the obes who actually did that stuff were punished literally at all when they did, i don't think anyone would have even thought to do this.
They are abd they do and they don't, though.
What does this mean?
Edit: read further down that you're in a country that doesn't guarantee jury trials so I'm guessing you're referring to some kind of criteria not being met to trigger a trial by jury