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Agreed.

I don't see much benefit to pushing back against the technologies themselves; they're here, they're easy to apply, and we're well past the point where trying to ban them will just push them underground. Misapplication of the technologies and erosion of fundamentals of evidence-based action are a real problem.

Contrast the California police using genealogy datasets to narrow the realm of potential "John Doe" serial killers. As court evidence? Shouldn't be admissible. As a tool to focus the search to a subset of the population? Extremely good idea.

Similarly, the face-recognition camera can tell the authorities where to turn their eyes but should never be the be-all and end-all of adjudication; they're too easy to fool (as Maryland discovered when it started auto-ticketing cars that blew through red lights at camera-tagged intersections, only to find a wave of high-schoolers thinking it was hilarious to tape a photo of an unliked teacher's license plate across their own and then blow through an empty intersection at 80 MPH at 2AM).




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