John Oliver Warns Against Facial Recognition’s Violation of Our Privacy and Its Use by Law Enforcement

This is unexpected: John Oliver doing a segment that’s not entirely about the coronavirus or the protests against police violence feels almost like a return to normalcy. Obviously we won’t delude ourselves into thinking we’re on the path to recovery—we’re not gonna rush out to the malls and the beaches and the Vegases of the world any time soon—but when we saw the main segment from this week’s episode of Last Week Tonight was about facial recognition, it felt like we were getting back to looking at the kind of ongoing crises buzzing away in the background today, and not just the huge, immediate, existential ones that have flared up over the last few months.
Of course, the dystopian fear of a world consumed by facial recognition is only amped up by the thought that it’s being used to track protesters, and once Oliver brings that up we’re reminded once again how thoroughly stuck in 2020 we still are. Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs spent DECADES trying to build up that number’s reputation and the last four months have just totally destroyed it.