Your face is the key to unlock your secrets
These days, with facial recognition technology, you’ve got a face that can launch a thousand applications, so to speak.
Sure, you may love the ease of opening your phone just by facing it instead of tapping in a code. But how do you feel about having your mug scanned, identifying you as you drive across a bridge, when you board an airplane or to confirm you’re not a stalker on your way into a Taylor Swift concert?
The divisive debate over the use – or potential misuse – of facial recognition that has been raging on for years is heating up again.
Just last week the face-off between supporters of facial recognition and the privacy advocates who want to curtail or legislate its use bubbled to the surface, following a vote by government officials in San Francisco to ban use of the technology by local law enforcement. San Francisco becomes the first major municipality in the U.S. to take such an action, though likely not the last.
In March, a bipartisan bill was introduced by Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and Roy Blunt, R-Mo., to strengthen consumer protections by prohibiting companies that use facial recognition technology from collecting and resharing data for identifying or tracking consumers without their consent.
Facial recognition is spreading to every corner where you live, work, shop and travel. Cameras are trained on your face at the airport, in store aisles, even when you’re driving.
Your face could someday be the key to unlock your car.
All these may leave you wondering: Who has access to my facial data? Where is this data stored and for how long? Is the use of facial recognition about safety, surveillance and convenience, or a way for advertisers or the government to track me?
And then there’s the question of what happens if there’s a breach and your facial data is combined with other personalized financial data that may have been collected on you.
“You can’t reset your face like you reset a password,” says Matt Cagle, a technology and civil liberties attorney with the ACLU in San Francisco. “The stakes of a data breach with biometric information are really quite high.”
Is facial recognition accurate?
Critics also point to false positives, or people being misidentified, particularly among minorities.
Findings from an MIT study, for instance, claim the Amazon Rekognition system has performed poorly compared to Microsoft and IBM in identifying a female’s gender and faces from darkerskinned people. Amazon Web Services global vice president for public policy Michael Punke has disputed the findings, even as he has called for transparency.
Similarly, after reviewing an internal email from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Wall Street Journal reported in April that facial recognition flunked an early test to identify possible criminals at the busy Robert F. Kennedy Bridge.
So why the false positives? One criticism is bias – not that the machines are inherently set against anyone, but that the people who are, in essence, teaching the programs to identify features aren’t providing them with a diverse sample in the first place.
“Even if the technology were perfectly accurate, it still poses a threat to public safety and civil rights,” Cagle insists. “Imagine stepping outside your door and walking down the street and the government knowing who you are, where you’re going and even the expressions on your face, and it would be able to do this without lifting a finger?
Yet Peter Trepp, CEO of FaceFirst, a facial recognition company which works in loss prevention and fraud and whose clients include some of the nation’s largest retailers, says the use of the technology “is not nearly as scary as some people would have you believe.”
Though not yet perfect, accuracy rates as high as 99.98% are dramatically improving through machine learning and neural networks, according to Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum.
“That is a stunning advancement,” she says, while acknowledging that biased results still exist, with women generally harder to identify than men.
A report issued last week by the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law put the potentially flawed photos used in face recognition systems in stark terms: “Face recognition technology has improved immensely in the past two years alone, enabling rapid searches of larger databases and more reliable pairings in testing environments. It doesn’t matter how good the machine is if it is still being fed the wrong figures – the wrong answers are still likely to come out.”
Testing facial recognition in stores
Businesses are in various stages of testing and implementing the technology.
Kroger is testing facial recognition as part of a pilot program in two stores, one outside Cincinnati, another near Seattle. The video cameras can approximate a shopper’s age and gender, but the information is kept anonymous and the data is not stored, says Erin Rolfes, corporate affairs manager at Kroger’s Cincinnati/Dayton division.
Kroger isn’t revealing much about the purpose of the tests. “As with any pilot, we’re using this as an opportunity to learn,” Rolfes says.
Walgreens is testing digital cooler doors with screens and cameras in six stores from a company called Cooler Screens. The retailer can target ads on those screens, activated when a shopper appears in front of them. A Walgreens spokesperson indicated that no biometric data is captured on a person’s age, gender or height, and at the moment only a motion sensor is in use.
Trepp of FaceFirst, who also wrote a book called “The New Rules of Consumer Privacy,” estimates that his company has saved retailers many hundreds of millions of dollars in shrinkage over the past few years. “We catch bad guys and avert crime every day of the week,” he says.
But Trepp also sees potential consumer benefits. Recognized shoppers might get special offer coupons or be able to check out faster.
“Think about the connection to the online shopping world,” Trepp says. “You log in, they know who you are, they know your shopping history, your ZIP code, your gender, and they can make recommendations about things you might want to buy. The brick-and-mortar world wants that as well. They want to know you when you walk through the door and engage you and make that a better experience.”
Legislating facial recognition
Meanwhile, not everyone is in favor of looming legislation: The nonpartisan Information Technology and Innovation Foundation rejects the SchatzBlunt bill on the grounds that facial recognition applications are still in their infancy and thus the proposed legislation is too much, too soon.
“It’s really not about the technology, it’s about putting in place rules that govern its use and limit its abuse,” says ITIF president Robert Atkinson. “There’s no need to rush into this.”