Virtual Police Lineup
When I saw my brothers playing Tiger Woods golf on PS3, the character creator struck me as something that could eventually be useful to police sketch artists. Without having a whole lot of drawing ability, one could still use this tool to create a sketch of an alleged criminal. In fact, if a possible victim was able to run the software, they might be able to create a sketch on their own. Now someone has taken this one step further and created a virtual police lineup. We aren’t quite in the big brother society of V for Vendetta yet, but if you look at the CCTV system in England, it doesn’t seem too far away to have software that would compare a virtual sketch with faces caught on CCTV. Possibly this could be limited to cameras in the alleged area of the crime. The software would compare facial features to find possible matches. Possible matches could be put into a virtual police lineup. I actually feel that a scenario like this is pretty scary and perhaps awful. There are some protections like the Data Protection Act, which one band actually used recently to help film their music video. I will admit that I haven’t read the act and don’t know if people caught in this virtual dragnet would have to be informed that film of them was used. However, I doubt it considering how hard it would be to identify someone in the camera and tie them to an address if they weren’t a Person of Interest. Just because a scenario is scary doesn’t necessarily mean that the government won’t try. Even if the government (in this case of England) would shy away, I expect some private company would be more than willing to try it out. Minority Report was another movie with some very bad ideas. Call it Pre-Crime or call it guessing, but people in the movie were definitely convicted before they committed the crime. There wasn’t a court case, much less a presumed innocent phase. So I guess technology is wonderful, but unfortunately, because of the way it is used, technology is scary.