New prevention tools

Although this is a technical question,I think we’re rapidly entering a philosophical area here. Because when it is about crime prevention in the digital world, it is always about the tension between freedom and control. On the one hand, of course, we could go for full control and use camera surveillance everywhere, use facial recognition and AI to be able to predict  future actions of the recorded persons, try to evaluate emotions, have networked databases of all investigating authorities and thus perhaps place every citizen  under a little general suspicion. This is something that needs to be discussed in society. How much control do we want, do we need, to protect ourselves and how much freedom can we allow ourselves? I find Andy Warhol’s statement about digitisation significant. At the end of the 60s, Warhol said that in the future it would be possible for everyone to have 15 minutes of fame. In the 50 years since this statement, his thesis has not only proved to be true, but perhaps even turned into the opposite. Perhaps the wish in the coming years will not be 15 minutes of attention and fame, but 15 minutes of anonymity.  To be unobserved for a while. Nevertheless, it is of course important to me to emphasise that we as a society must  give the state a strong mandate for the exercise of prevention, because prevention will always be a question of awareness and also of the means of money. No citizen will be able to protect himself comprehensively on his own,  and therefore we need to discuss how much protection, how much control we grant the state and at the same time how our freedom can be organised in the digital world.

• https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/ClearView-sammelt-Milliarden-Fotos-aus-dem-Netz-fuer-Gesichtserkennung,clearview-sammelt-milliarden-gesichtserkennungsdaten-100.html
• https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article205622207/Gesichtserkennung-Lehren-aus-dem-System-Clearview.html