“Big Brother is watching you” was the recurrent theme of George Orwell’s seminal, futuristic classic “1984”. Thirty-four years after the actual year, we are almost living in that world described by Orwell, with surveillance cameras everywhere and worse, easy ways to identify your face from the nearly eight billion other faces around the world.
This process called Facial Recognition is a step forward from fingerprinting and Iris Scanning, which are both used for access control and identification at many places. Instead of the fingerprint or iris (which are unique to each individual), one’s whole face is used for ID purposes in this instance.
As with everything else, there are two sides to this story. If you have certain smartphone models such as the iPhone X, you are probably already using “FaceID” to unlock it and even pay for some purchases. In the future your face could literally be your passport as you will be tracked and tagged at each airport on your trip with just your face.
You might be able to pay for your groceries just by looking at a camera in-store. Facial recognition is already being used in commercial settings, like in stadiums that read the reactions of fans during the course of a game to improve targeted advertising. It is being marketed to retailers who want to identify shoplifters. However, there is a frightening prospect that your privacy and rights could be compromised as your face more or less becomes a property of Governments and even private entities. People are becoming unhappy about facial recognition as it is unpleasant by nature.
Fight for the Future, a digital rights advocacy group in the USA, is calling for a ban on government use of facial recognition. The group says the technology is just too dangerous to civil liberties to allow government agencies to use it, even with regulation. “This surveillance technology poses such a profound threat to the future of human society and basic liberty that its dangers far outweigh any potential benefits. We don’t need to regulate it, we need to ban it entirely,” it said in a statement.
While law enforcement agencies sometimes say the technology is valuable for identifying and locating suspects, critics worry it could effectively lead to surveillance states, where people are automatically tracked as they travel from place to place within countries and internationally. Databases of people’s faces are being compiled without their knowledge by companies, governments and researchers, with many of the images being shared around the world, in what has become a vast system fueling the spread of facial recognition technology.
Earlier in 2019, investigative journalists found out that IBM had been scraping images from Flickr to train its facial recognition programs without telling the people featured in photos on the platform. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and several other agencies around the world have been collecting photos of people entering and leaving airports for its own facial recognition program.
This technology learns how to identify people by analyzing as many digital pictures as possible using ‘neural networks,’ which are complex mathematical systems that require vast amounts of data to build pattern recognition. In other words, it is just one step short of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The combination of AI and facial recognition is even more frightening.
Most of the leading tech companies in the world including Google, Facebook and Amazon are active players in this field. Amazon is actively marketing its ‘Rekognition’ software which the company says mainly benefits law enforcement agencies. Rekognition has been used in police trails in the United States to let law enforcement agencies scan faces in public spaces and match them up with those in police databases.
But Facebook’s ‘DeepFace’ system is even more complicated – and more worrying. Every day, Facebook users upload hundreds of millions of photos to the world’s number one social network. The software scans those photos in search of faces it recognizes. As users either agree or disagree with the recommendations of who should be tagged, Facebook’s algorithms get better. Facebook says it holds “the largest facial dataset to date”.
Unlike Amazon’s Rekognition, Facebook’s system does not need an external database of face photos since Facebook has all the data and photos uploaded by its membership. Experts say Facebook has enough data to potentially pose a facial recognition nightmare. Facebook has already lost face, so to speak, with a US$ 5 billion fine imposed on it after the massive Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal and many people worry that facial information could go the same way.
The only positive factor so far is that Facebook is currently bound by an agreement with the US Federal Trade Commission that says it has to first obtain ‘affirmative express consent’ before going beyond a given user’s specified privacy settings. That agreement only lasts another 12 years, though. The problem is that by that time, facial recognition software would have become much more advanced than they are now and many existing legal barriers could be gone for good. However, some countries and cities have already banned the use of facial recognition software, pre-empting such concerns.
Another major worry is that facial recognition software is still not completely accurate. An American Civil Liberties Union study conducted in 2018 found that Amazon’s Rekognition software incorrectly matched members of Congress with other people who appeared in police pictures. However, police forces have generally welcomed the system as the only recourse available earlier was the hand-drawn or computer-drawn Identiti-Kit pictures of suspects.
Facial Recognition is not yet widespread in Sri Lanka, apart from individual users who use it to unlock their phones. But technology has a habit of conquering every country, so we have to be prepared for it. Do we have laws in place to regulate facial recognition software? Most countries still do not, but it is time we give serious thought to it.
Indeed, it might be useful for Security Forces and law enforcement agencies which have to tackle global terrorism, drug trafficking and transnational crime which are getting increasingly complicated. At the same time, there are valid privacy and human rights concerns that arise from the use of facial recognition databases and programs. A balance has to be evolved – much like we have learned to live with security imperatives for the last 40 years or so.
Every technology has its pros and cons – just to give one simple example, television has some really excellent programs, punctuated by some excruciatingly bad programs. But we do not keep the television set turned off perpetually because of the latter. We have to use facial recognition software in a positive way instead of using it to invade people’s privacy and liberties.