Tech faces up to limits

LONDON — Don’t judge by appearances. It’s an age-old piece of advice that is being roundly ignored by corporations, governments and law-enforcement agencies around the globe.

British police use facial-recognition technology to scan crowds for suspects. Owners of the latest iPhones can unlock their phones with face ID.

Modern technology means your face is both your identity and a commodity — but as an exhibition going on display in London shows, that technology is far from perfect.

“Face Values,” the U.S. entry at the multinational London Design Biennale, explores how computers’ ability to read faces is changing the world, with implications for privacy and individuality that we still don’t fully understand.

“We are on camera 50 times a day and there are all these software companies that are deriving information from us,” said R. Luke DuBois, one of the exhibition’s designers.

Curated by New York’s Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, “Face Values” includes two interactive pieces that explore the scope and limits of what technology can learn about you from your face.

Artist and computer programmer Zachary Lieberman invites visitors to sit in front of a screen as a computer maps their expressions, compares them to others’ and produces an analysis of the sitter’s emotion.

The limits of such technology become clearer in the accompanying piece by DuBois, director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at New York University’s engineering school.

Visitors sit in front of a screen and are asked to display a specific emotion. The system calculates the individual’s age, gender, race and emotional state. The results are both intrusive and sometimes inaccurate. One visitor, attempting to project calmness, registered as afraid. Another, asked to look disgusted, was told she appeared happy.

DuBois said the technology is only as good as the data that goes into it and the sets of images that companies and organizations use to compare emotions are often inadequate.