BORDERS U.K. USES FACE-RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY TO MONITOR CUSTOMERS Borders Books in the U.K. is employing SmartFace technology to compare
Slashdot is reporting that they've backed off in response to negative public pressure. So for the moment you don't need to wear a mask to shop there, though they're probably still using cameras, and in many parts of the UK the local government is also videotaping the street. David Brin's book "The Transparent Society" suggests that you might as well get used to it. Technological change driven by the Moore's Law effects in computing power are making video cameras and computer image processing get cheaper rapidly, so the marginal benefit of using them doesn't have to be very high to outweigh the marginal cost. The real issues are still getting data, but the costs of sharing data are low and getting lower, and the government intervention that forces everyone to use picture ID to do almost anything makes it easier. Brin's conclusion is that since we won't be able to stop it, we should work to make sure government activities are open and watchable by the public. Similarly, the cost of correlating non-image data has decreased rapidly - many of the information collection practices used today date from the 1960s and 1970s, when a "mainframe" might have a megabyte of RAM, less than 10 MIPS of CPU, 100MB of fast disk drive, and everything else was tapes and punchcards, and it required a large staff of people to feed it. These days you can get pocket computers with ten times that capacity, and a $5000 desktop Personal Computer can have a gigabyte of RAM and a terabyte of disk drive with the Internet to feed it data; that's enough for the name and address of everybody on Earth, or a few KB on every American, and online queries are much faster than the traditional methods requiring offline data sets. That means that not only can governments and a few big companies decide to correlate pre-planned sets of data about people, but almost anybody can do ad-hoc queries on any data it's convenient for them to get, whether they're individuals or employees of small or large businesses. So if there's any data about you out there, don't expect it to stay private - even data that previously wasn't a risk because correlating it was hard. European-style data privacy laws aren't much help - they're structured for a world in which computers and databases were big things run by big companies, rather than everyday tools used by everyone in their personal lives, and rules requiring making them accessible to the public can be turned around into rules allowing the government to audit your mobile phone and your pocket organizer in case there might be databases on them. American-style data privacy laws are seriously flawed also - not the fluffy attempts at positive protection for privacy that liberal Nader types and occasional paranoid conservatives propose, but the real laws which require increasing collection of data in ways that are easy to correlate, such as the use of a single Taxpayer ID for employers, bank accounts, drivers' licenses, and medical records, "Know Your Customer" laws, national databases of people permitted to work, documentation proving you're not an illegal alien, etc. There's lots more data that would be readily available, but the bureaucrats that collect it restrict access or charge fees that reflect the pre-computer costs of providing the information. If you need a reminder, go buy a house and look at the junk mail you get, or have your neighbor's deadbeat kid register his car with your apartment number instead of his and see what shows up.