Law & Justice: February 2020 Archives

We Shouldn't Expect Law Enforcement to Balance Our Privacy Needs, That's What Our Political Representatives Are For

We citizens obviously want law enforcement agencies to have a strong incentive to catch criminals, and we shouldn't expect them to balance that incentive against our needs for privacy. We citizens and our elected representatives need to be the ones doing the balancing, knowing that we'll sometimes have to push back against the very people who work to protect us. The final paragraph in this article about a data breach of Clearview's facial recognition software highlights the tension.

Facial-recognition technology--which matches photos of unidentified victims or suspects against enormous databases of photos--has long drawn intense criticism from privacy advocates. They argue it could essentially mean the end of personal privacy, especially given the proliferation of security cameras in public places. Some law-enforcement officials, meanwhile, see it as a tool with enormous potential value.

They're both right. How to balance privacy against crime risk is a political question, not a law enforcement question.