While I do appreciate your present concerns which are of far greater import to you today than those I consider, I believe that those concerns are blinding you to historical reality. This is not unique to you, and I have similarly been constrained in my considerations heretofore.

"You are naive to think that this system benefits the average person. It will never be used against the powerful but will end up being a tool that will benefit the powerful further against average citizens."

First, facial recognition already constrains the powerful more than average folks. Paparazzi taking pics of famous people far more strongly impacts them than you or I.

More generally, you can consider the industrial revolution, which has been a massive change in personal liberty and practically created centralization, as an example. As it began families were broken up and children sent to school until able to be exploited in factories, because this freed parents to work in factories, as well as destroyed the craft industries people previously conducted with their kids to produce the economy that supported them and competed with factories. It is hard to see that event as beneficial to those families. They certainly didn't like it, and Luddites were one expression of that opposition.

Yet, if you look back on seemingly unrelated matters but peripherally affected, people's lives were dramatically improved as a result of industrialization, if only after first causing horrific disruption and harm. Hygiene, science, and transport were all products of industrialization, and no one can deny the huge benefits in health, mobility, and knowledge people today have realized as a result, even as centralization has dramatically decreased the relative wealth of families versus their rulers.

Today, decentralization has already begun to decrease the parasitism of individuals that created the economic disparity industrial centralization drove. The ability of individuals to employ means of production to avoid parasitism and keep the profits of their production to themselves continues to grow across all industry, and this is the inevitable result of industrialization itself. Physics has mandated that improved efficiency attained with decentralization, and this ultimately returns civilization to the dynamic of the crafter society that industrialization replaced, while retaining the benefits that were derived from it. All the various decentralized mechanisms are not possible to stuff back in the lamp. Those genies, myriad of them, have been summoned by physics and become the base for the next 'best thing' that will follow.

Centralization is incapable of addressing decentralization in toto because of how it works. Concentrating the power of many individuals in an institution also limits their diverse attention and necessarily deploys that power on limited matters. If it does not, the advantage of that institution is eliminated. One or few of the decentralized mechanisms can be overpowered by institutions deploying centralized advantage, but all of them cannot, because they are individually deployed, rather than centralized in institutions. An action undertaken by a million people can be countered by an institution of some thousands, but a million different actions undertaken by a million people cannot.

Facial recognition tech will affect society in unexpected and seemingly unrelated ways, as individuals adopt it as a result of this iteration. You mentioned harassment and problems that have come from people stalking your sister. None of those problems stem from this technology. Some stalkers physically act to do harm, and your possession of facial recognition tech may well save your life, and that of your sister by enabling you to head them off before they do harm. More broadly, general possession of facial recognition tech will strongly discourage such physical and potentially violent stalking, greatly decreasing the risk you and yours suffer as a result. More broadly yet, nefarious institutions that use gang stalking, unlawful surveillance, and various criminal activities that harm free people will be far less able to project force without consequence after broad dissemination of facial recognition tech.

It is my sincere hope that any problems you suffer as a result of this advance in the power of individuals and our technological arsenal are completely overcome by benefits it will bring. Nothing is guaranteed, nor perfectly predictable. Facial recognition tech did not create the problems you have noted, and I don't see it can increase them significantly, despite your reasonable fears it will. Conversely, objectively considering how this technology will improve your personal, community, and national security strongly suggests you will personally benefit, if not from this particular iteration, but from that iteration's promotion of the technology broadly throughout the populace.

Corrupt cops, burglars, car thieves, rapists, stalkers, and an unending list of criminals will be more constrained from acting to harm you and your sister by you and your community deploying facial recognition, and you will be more free and secure as a result. It is not naivety that causes me to think so, but objectively viewing history, and considering reality today.

I am grateful for your views and the discussion you have made possible by honestly expressing them. I hope your alarm and circumstances don't prevent you from understanding my response, nor that nothing I say is intended to denigrate or harm you and yours in any way.

Thanks!