Are we all facing an uncertain future?
A whiff of dystopian creepiness has long wafted in the air whenever facial recognition has come up.
Books, movies and TV shows have portrayed the technology as mainly a tool of surveillance and social control – aimed by unseen others at you, for their purposes, not your own.
Though several Android smartphones and now Apple’s iPhone X have the tech – it remains novel. This year could mark a tipping point in the adoption of facial recognition technology across new areas of our lives – as we shop or communicate with friends and, eventually, as we enter buildings or perhaps turn on our vehicles with a glance rather than a twist of the key.
Many forms of surveillance – cellphone location tracking, social media analytics and the CIA’s reported ability to remotely activate the microphone on an individual’s smart TV – were borne of such popular consumer advances. Only later, typically through leaked documents and investigative reports, did it become clear how popular technologies were turned on their users. ‘‘The big danger with facial recognition is that we are targeted everywhere we go and in everything we do,’’ said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU. ‘‘The acceptable uses could soften up the terrain for less acceptable uses.’’
The potential for widely deployed facial recognition systems has particularly concerned privacy experts, who have warned about a future in which our faces and other biometrics are used to track our every movement, our political activity, our religious lives and even our romantic encounters.
Recent research at Stanford, meanwhile, contends that a range of private facts, including an individual’s sexual orientation, could be read through sophisticated analyses of facial images with the help of artificial intelligence. The Android devices that use facial recognition keep the data on the device, although hackers have demonstrated that some of these systems can be tricked by photographs of users – something Apple says cannot happen with the iPhone X.
Many privacy experts also regard facial recognition technology as a relatively simple, safe and reliable way to authenticate the identity of a smartphone’s owner, helping protect the massive troves of personal data kept on devices and giving the technology a positive privacy impact in the view of some experts.
‘‘I don’t think we should reflexively reject facial recognition. The question should be, by what means and for whose benefit?’’ said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. ‘‘Facial recognition has both good uses and bad uses from a consumer perspective.’’
Privacy experts have fsought to raise awareness about the massive commercial databases kept by Facebook and Google, both of which in some circumstances use facial recognition technology to identify people depicted in photos users upload.
Also slowing the spread of the technology has been the daunting technical challenges of accurately analysing faces in anything less than optimal circumstances.
People in low light, wearing hats or glasses, or simply standing at an odd angle from a camera have long challenged facial recognition systems – as have people with darker skin – leading to false positives and negatives when analyses are made.
Apple’s system creates what Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, called ‘‘a mathematical model of your face’’.
‘‘The chance that a random person in the population could look at your iPhone X and unlock it with their face is about one in a million,’’ Schiller said.
Nate Cardozo, a senior lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation expressed less concern than some others that the introduction of facial recognition for device security will erode resistance to other uses of the technology.