This is nothing new. Public spaces have no right to privacy and you are allowed to record phone and video unless on private property or in special cases.
Literally grab any basic streaming camera, use opencv or yolo with ffmpeg to extract images from live video and find faces and crop faces into a picture to upload via yandex or pimeyes. Then return a confidence rating.
This has been around for years, total nothing burger of a headline except its a smaller form factor.
This is right up there with the guy who said Dropbox wasn’t useful because you could run your own FTP server. Efficiency and barriers to entry are transformative – what you’re describing is like equating a flintlock musket and a modern machine gun on the grounds that they’re both firearms.
For the hacker news crowd I agree, but for the average public and law I feel this at least warrants thinking about if we need additional protections as I feel the surveillance we have today and what we had when the laws were written and what the general public expects mismatch drastically.
If I get a password prompt in public am I expected to run into the nearest private property because legally I could be recorded and my input recorded and extracted ?
With respect to passwords, biometrics and password managers (or better yet, public key infrastructure) is the solution. Not privacy booths. If I had my way, apps wouldn't let users pick their own passwords: they'd email users 30+ character generated passwords that they couldn't possibly memorize and thus force people to use password managers.
Unfortunately, enforcing strong passwords drastically discourages new user signups. I remember when the security team enforced stricter password policies at Dropbox new signups dropped by a factor of 10 (by "stricter" I don't just mean length + special chars, they experimented with banning all of the 100K most common passwords). It just isn't economically sustainable to enforce strong passwords.
More here: https://www.404media.co/someone-put-facial-recognition-tech-...