London show explores hidden world of facial recognition

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. Whole Foods and other retailers are testing facial recognition as a way of eliminating check-out tills in stores.

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.

“It’s a kind of fingerprint of your facial expression,” said Lieberman, who has helped design an eye-tracking system for people with paralysis.

“This project involved a lot of trying to understand, how do you quantify expression?” he said at a preview of the exhibition on Monday. “How do you turn expression into numbers,” in order to compare one expression to another.

The limits of such technology become clearer in the accompanying