THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2022 - TECHNOLOGY - FACIAL RECOGNITION

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2022 - TECHNOLOGY - FACIAL RECOGNITION

Oh No, another “elephant in the room”.  (By the way, as I understand that phrase, it means that there is a topic that is so obvious right in front of us and we either can’t see that topic (aka - the elephant), or we just don’t want to face that topic (if we don’t recognize the elephant, it will go away).  Facial recognition can be very negative.  Even in a crowd, facial recognition can identify an individual (and really pretty much all individuals in that crowd).

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(From What is facial recognition? How facial recognition works | Norton)

“FACIAL RECOGNITION Facial recognition is a way of recognizing a human face through technology. A facial recognition system uses biometrics to map facial features from a photograph or video. It compares the information with a database of known faces to find a match. Facial recognition can help verify a person’s identity, but it also raises privacy issues.

The facial recognition market is expected to grow to $7.7 billion in 2022, an increase from $4 billion in 2017. That’s because facial recognition has many commercial applications. It can be used for everything from surveillance to marketing.

But that’s where it gets complicated. If privacy is important to you, you probably want some control over how your personal information — your data — is used. And here’s the thing: Your “faceprint” is data.

How facial recognition works

You might be good at recognizing faces. You probably find it a cinch to identify the face - of a family member, friend, or acquaintance. You’re familiar with their facial features — their eyes, nose, mouth — and how they come together.

That’s how a facial recognition system works, but on a grand, algorithmic scale. Where you see a face, recognition technology sees data. That data can be stored and accessed. For instance, half of all American adults have their images stored in one or more facial-recognition databases that law enforcement agencies can search.

So how does facial recognition work? Technologies vary, but here are the basic steps:

Step 1. A picture of your face is captured from a photo or video. Your face might appear alone or in a crowd. Your image may show you looking straight ahead or nearly in profile.

Step 2. Facial recognition software reads the geometry of your face. Key factors include the distance between your eyes and the distance from forehead to chin. The software identifies facial landmarks — one system identifies 68 of them — that are key to distinguishing your face. The result: your facial signature.

Step 3. Your facial signature — a mathematical formula — is compared to a database of known faces. And consider this: At least 117 million Americans have images of their faces in one or more police databases. According to a May 2018 report, the FBI has had access to 412 million facial images for searches.

Step 4. A determination is made. Your faceprint may match that of an image in a facial recognition system database.

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Okay, facial recognition can be good

The pros and cons of facial recognition technology | IT PRO

You can find people (and felons):

Law enforcement agencies use facial recognition to identify criminals with no other means of identification and to locate missing people by comparing faces captured on camera feeds with those on watch lists.

Hey - how about missing children?  For sure:

Facial recognition has also been used to find missing children. Often, this is a result of the technology being used in tandem with advanced aging software, which can use photos of children at the time of their disappearance to predict what they look like. Police using facial recognition are privy to live alerts and can investigate potential matches in real-time.

Protecting businesses against theft.  Theft and shoplifting can be significant to retail businesses.  With facial recognition, the person entering the jewelry store can be identified as a known thief, and security systems can go into place.  (That is, the person can be watched and videotaped continually). 

In a similar fashion, airports (and airport screening) can monitor faces to see if terrorists are attempting to fly.  The source says, “The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has dedicated itself to using facial recognition on 97% of international passengers by 2023.

Border checks have also been sped up at some airports through the use of facial recognition cameras at passport-check gates.”

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THREATS:

“The threat to individual privacy is a significant downside of facial recognition technology.”

Can infringe on personal freedoms

Being recorded and scanned by facial recognition technology can make people feel like they’re always being watched and judged for their behavior. 

Violates personal rights

Provides opportunities for fraud and other crimes

Lawbreakers can use facial recognition technology to perpetrate crimes against innocent victims

Facial recognition is far from perfect, and cannot be relied upon to produce accurate results in place of human judgment.

The technology depends upon algorithms to make facial matches. Those algorithms are more effective for some groups, such as white men than other groups such as women and people of color due to a lack of representation within the data set on which the algorithm was trained. This creates unintentional biases in the algorithms, which could in turn translate to biases in whatever action the technology is informing, such as arrests.

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Now technology is improving, and with it, facial recognition is also improving.  One source said, “Facial recognition is pretty accurate, 99.97% accurate to be exact. And as stated before, the facial recognition algorithm only gets better as it compiles a more extensive list of faces to compare others against. The false fail rates tend to be low, less than one percent, and are being worked on daily.

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But, can Facial Recognition mean spying on people?  Can it mean spying on employees?  Can it mean that I can be following from point A to point B based on my face?  Ultimately, can my exact location be determined every second of every day?  With enough security cameras, I could be tracked.  

Could this lead to a “police state”, could a political party track every move made by the opposition party leaders?  Could the “secret” meeting between person A and person B be recorded both on video and audio?  

(Aside - from my view of God - the infinite, all-knowing, all-loving, all-present being can do this and a billion times better (aka - no mistakes in recognizing Karen White).  

What price privacy - what is the balance between privacy and security?  Will “thought control” happen next?  Is Big Brother watching you (and watching me?).

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In the right hands, facial recognition can make society safe from terrorists, but in the wrong hands, abuses can occur.  What to do?  (That’s a tough question).  

But, LOVE WINS!!

Karen White, October 20, 2022, ©