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There's Nothing to Worry About
All is well, all is well...
By David "Spam Me and Die" Fiedler
Sigh...nothing to write about today.
It's just business as usual. Nobody -- except perhaps criminals, or anyone else with something to hide -- should be remotely concerned about a real-time facial recognition system being tested in London. After all, it's only targeted at known criminals (for now). What it does is compare people's faces, caught by cameras as they walk down the street, with digitized faces of known criminals, and alert the police to their whereabouts.
Presumably, since Great Britain portrays itself as a civilized nation, the police won't simply arrest these people for walking down the street. But the possibility always exists, especially as civil liberties laws there have continually been weakened. And who knows if the technology will be sold to, say, China?
Anyway, everything else is good news. It's true, of course, that a 17-year-old boy was arrested and charged in Sweden with copyright violations, simply for having a Web page with links to "illegal MP3s". But he got off (on a technicality), so there's nothing to worry about there.
You might start to get paranoid if you're a teenager, though, after hearing about an 18-year-old in Texas who didn't even do anything.
It was his friend that took the picture of a car. The car in question belonged to his high school principal, and it was parked in front of a teacher's house on Saturday afternoon. Well, it turns out that the principal is a married man and the teacher an unmarried woman, so the boys talked about it. The boy got suspended, according to the principal, for "being disrespectful toward an adult by fostering rumors", a charge which I suspect is not on the list of suspendable offenses. The friend who actually took the picture is a star baseball player, and nothing happened to him.
So I guess as long as you keep your nose clean and your eye on the ball, you have nothing to worry about.
-- D. Fiedler
David Fiedler is Editor-in-Chief of WebDeveloper.com, and his opinions are definitely his own.
Last modified: Tue Jan 4 04:34:58 EST 2000
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