OK, Let’s Face It

Early facial recognition programs made mistakes all the time. Dark skinned people were (are still?) harder to inventory and identify, glasses obfuscated visibility, but artificial intelligence learns from volume exposure and correction. Scans of passing people, quite the thing in television police dramas these days, at least for those using the most updated technology, are exceptionally accurate now. According to the April 14th Technology Policy Blog from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Facial recognition has improved dramatically in only a few years. As of April 2020, the best face identification algorithm has an error rate of just 0.08% compared to 4.1% for the leading algorithm in 2014, according to tests by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). As of 2018, NIST found that more than 30 algorithms had achieved accuracies surpassing the best performance achieved in 2014.” 

As you are undoubtedly aware, the world has grown significantly from a universe of CCTV and security cameras. Cameras can have exceptional resolution, and ever-expanding libraries of photographs are often collected without the permission of those in the photos or even those who took the pictures – collected from social media, police files, even government sources which are not supposed to share that information, etc. Data storage is virtually unlimited today, and artificial intelligence can race through millions of photographs in a faction of a second to find a match. Combine all of this data and those technologies, and we not only “know what you did last summer,” but if you are in a big city and are out in public, we can probably find out where you are right now. Whether it’s tracking the GPS data from your mobile phone, seeing you on camera, or a combination, you just might be being tracked right now.

What makes this so much worse is the dramatic death of statutes and regulations protecting the public from this intrusive capacity. David Lazarus, writing for the January 29th Los Angeles Times, tells us: “‘Using facial recognition, companies can turn photos of your loved ones into sensitive biometric data,’ said Andrew Smith, director of the [Federal Trade Commission’s] Bureau of Consumer Protection… ‘Ensuring that companies keep their promises to customers about how they use and handle biometric data will continue to be a high priority for the FTC,’ he said.

“Be that as it may, there’s a lot of money to be made with such cutting-edge technology. Experts tell me consumers need to be vigilant about privacy violations as some of the biggest names in the tech world — including Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple — pursue advances in the field… ‘Since there aren’t federal laws on facial recognition, it seems pretty likely that there are other companies using this invasive technology without users’ knowledge or consent,’ said Caitlin Seeley George, campaign director for the digital rights group Fight for the Future.

“She called [one company’s alleged practices of trolling for online photographs] ‘yet another example of how corporations are abusing facial recognition, posing as much harm to people’s privacy as government and law enforcement use.’” Of course, the problem is that facial recognition, despite its potentially disturbing privacy issues, is only growing in use. The FBI’s use of facial recognition after the January 6th Capitol insurrection, their request of the public for any photographic or video information that they might have, all have contributed to the arrest of over 200 people who apparently broke into the Capitol that day. Good use?

Some tech companies are holding back, seeing the potential for abuse and the inevitability of increasing state and federal regulation: “Microsoft said last year that it wouldn’t sell its facial recognition software to police departments until the federal government regulates such systems. Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on allowing police forces to use its facial recognition technology.

“But law enforcement is just one part of the equation. There’s also the growing trend of businesses using facial recognition to identify consumers… ‘Consumers need to know that while facial recognition technology seems benign, it is slowly normalizing surveillance and eroding our privacy,’ said Shobita Parthasarathy, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan.

“Not least among the potential issues, researchers at MIT and the University of Toronto found that Amazon’s facial recognition tends to misidentify women with darker skin, illustrating a troubling racial and gender bias.

“Then there’s the matter of whether people are being identified and sorted by businesses without their permission… Facebook agreed to pay $550 million last year to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging the company violated an Illinois privacy law with its facial recognition activities.” Lazarus. Students at UCLA railed when the university administration proposed installing facial recognition to allow approved students to enter approved buildings. Shortly thereafter, the University pulled back, saying, “We have determined that the potential benefits are limited and are vastly outweighed by the concerns of our campus community.”

Do we ban this technology, add serious disclosure requirements, license those who can use it or lie back and let self-regulation set the tone? We know that self-regulation approach will never work, but it is absolutely mandatory for Congress to begin to impose limits, assess liabilities for misuse and designate a regulatory schema to do what Congress is supposed to do: protect people. Can we force data bases to purge illicitly obtained photographs? Define “illicit.” Who makes sure? Private business is not encumbered with constitutional limitations in this arena, so unless laws are passed expect privacy to be trampled, crushed and beaten senseless. Every day, more facial recognition, increasingly sophisticated, is being rolled out, and more photographs are finding their way into massive data bases. The more Congress waits, the worse it will get.

I’m Peter Dekom, and where does facial recognition sit in your vision of America if you had your way?