Your Faceprint Tomorrow
For years, facial recognition technology has been one of the great bogeymen for civil liberties advocates. The ability to be recognized and tracked across public spaces represents an epochal shift in the nature of privacy, something akin to being fingerprinted everywhere one goes. Like fingerprinting, facial recognition is a biometric, meaning that we can never modify what it measures; barring a horrific event (one it’s better not to contemplate), your faceprint will remain unchanged. And as with a fingerprint, your faceprint is a singular piece of data, a unique user name and password combination that follows you through the world. That’s a problem if, say, a biometric database gets hacked; the Indian government’s biometric database, which contains information like retina scans on 1.19 billion people, has been hacked repeatedly, with ID information selling on WhatsApp for $5 to $10. You can change a hacked password, but not a face....MORE
Long considered the province of security agencies—the FBI maintains an enormous facial recognition database comprising information on millions of Americans—this ominous technology has crept into the private sector, finding a keen reception from social media platforms, which are, like their government counterparts, invested in tracking their customers. Several years ago, Facebook announced that its own facial recognition engine could recognize faces with a level of accuracy rivaling that of human beings. But such declarations are mere mile-markers on the way to bigger things, namely the commercialization and widespread adoption of this technology of control. Based on the events of the last few months, it seems we’re approaching just that.
As Slate recently noted, the use of facial recognition technology has already spread to the more mundane corners of the commercial sphere. KFC has employed a facial-recognition-based recommendation program in China, as has a burger joint in California. Walmart has promised to use it to analyze customers’ emotional responses, while the upscale retailer Saks Fifth Avenue has dabbled in using the technology to identify known shoplifters and VIP customers. At LAX, airlines are testing facial recognition as a replacement for boarding passes. In China, public toilets use the tech to ration toilet paper.
In the last couple of weeks, untold numbers of social media users have given their likenesses away to Google’s Arts & Culture app, which has a selfie feature that compares your face to those found in famous works of art. That most users likely upload their selfies without a second thought only shows how we’ve been trained not to value our own privacy, or to have a sense of ownership over our data. Beyond the impositions of the FBI or TSA, it seems that this is how facial recognition will move through society: by way of a trained passivity and, at times, the promise of entertainment and convenience.
That brings us back to Facebook, which in December introduced “optional tools to help people better manage their identity on Facebook using face recognition.”...
