From Fast Company, May 7:
In a unanimous vote on Monday, a San Francisco government committee pushed the city closer toward instituting a complete ban on government uses of face recognition technology. It would be the first US city to do so: As police, government agencies, and businesses gravitate toward the technology, there are neither federal laws nor strong local rules that govern its use. Many of us seem wary of surveillance systems designed to automatically identify or profile us in public, but that doesn’t seem to matter too much, and that is what is most concerning.....MORE
“[T]here’s a fundamental flaw in our justification for these technologies,” Accenture’s Responsible AI Lead Rumman Chowdhury wrote on Twitter last month, referring to the San Francisco proposal. “Do we live in a sufficiently dangerous state that we need this? Is punitive surveillance how we achieve a healthy and secure society (it is not)?”
My question about any new technology that is being rapidly adopted—AR, VR, big data, machine learning, whatever—is always “why?” Why do businesses or governments want face recognition? “‘We’ aren’t justifying these technologies,” I replied. “Those in power are, who mostly stand to profit from it. This is either through making/selling the gear, or using the tech to reduce headcount by replacing folks. This isn’t about society or even civilization, it’s about money and power.”
But money and power aren’t the only reasons behind the push to adopt facial recognition.
Cooperation is how humans have managed to survive as long as we have, and the need to categorize some people as “the other” has been happening since there have been humans. Unfortunately, misconceptions and speculations about who some of us are and how we might behave have contributed to fear and insecurity among citizens, governments, and law enforcement. Today, those fearful ideas, in combination with a larger, more mobile, more diverse population, have created a condition by which we know of each other, but do not know each other, nor do we often engage with each “other” unless absolutely necessary. Our fears become another reason to invest in more “security,” even though, if we took time to be social, open, and cooperative in our communities, there would be less to fear, and more security as we looked out for each other’s well being.
Experimenting with surveillance on each other
However, instead of that approach, we’ve been clocking each other. One way we began to enhance our ability to identify the “other” was through the use of surveillance cameras. As surveillance video became more affordable, many types of businesses increased their surveillance capabilities by adding cameras to their physical locations to discourage theft and violence. Security guards would monitor video feeds as well as (or instead of) watching people, but over time, cameras replaced many human guards. In this way, the idea of surveillance video became a psychological deterrent as much as a policing effort: Yes, we were being recorded, but we didn’t know if anyone was watching the recording, nor did we know if they would act on what they had seen.
As surveillance cameras have become smaller (and cheaper), they have been included in more consumer products, offering people the opportunity to incorporate this technology in their daily lives. Our smartphone cameras, Ring branded doorbells, and tiny surveillance cameras hidden in AirBnB’s (and many other places in society) have become normal. Surveillance has become distributed between governments, corporations, and each one of us who carries a smartphone or video camera.
Compared to more generalized surveillance, cameras in the home have an advantage in defending against the threat of the “other.” A home is a relatively contained environment, and any anomalies can be easily identified and reported by the homeowner or their software in real time. Homeowners are vigilant about their properties and may use additional apps that feed them local crime news, and in many cases also hire a third-party security company in tandem for extra observance. There is less data to process in the private home environment, too, as well as neighbors who look out for unusual practices, adding an additional layer of “knowing” and community knowledge to the surveillance process.
But there is one major flaw in the use of surveillance camera technology in society writ large: the profusion of cameras generating an abundance of footage has created a processing problem. There are masses of footage, backing up every camera you can see—and the many cameras you can’t—but there simply aren’t enough people or resources to process and make sense of those recorded images. Even when a crime is spotted, the perpetrator likely made their escape hours, or days, prior to the footage being seen, if it’s seen at all. That monitoring deficit makes the technology easy to circumvent. That monitoring deficit has emboldened some people to innovate work-arounds (a process referred to as “covert agency“)....
