Technology

In GDPR countries (among others) nobody is allowed to do something like this with face recognition because the law works for everybody.

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.

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.

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.

the judges would actually follow the law (juries wouldn’t be able to exist for most cases)

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.

In GDPR countries (among others) nobody is allowed to do something like this with face recognition because the law works for everybody.

Lmao, in france facial recognition is being rolled out all over and we got laws explicitly prohibiting the filming of cops (ofcourse, the only reasonable action to take against the documented brutality of the pigs /s)

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'

I'm not from the U.S. either, so a lot of that is coming from a place of ignorance, so bear with me please. But the way I understand it, is that the website just lets you look up name and badge number - things that police officers (at least in most jurisdictions) are obliged to provide upon request, but often fail to do so in recent U.S. developments. So one could argue that this is more about access to information that should be available anyway, rather than doxxing people for the fun of it, right?