11/9 Essay: Read this November 2nd article on a change in use of facial recognition technology by Meta (formerly Facebook) (hat tip to Arthur). What are your general thoughts on government and private company utilization of technologies that are able to recognize a face and/or match a human face from a digital image or a video frame against a database of faces? What advantages or benefits could/do such technologies provide? What role (if any) should a government play in regulating their use by individuals or companies?
I think that facial recognition is without a doubt a grey area between privacy, technology, and the law. I am inclined to agree with banning it because currently facial recognition doesn’t seem to yield a quality of life much better than the amount of privacy you give away by being subject to it. I think that even between government and private company utilization it makes the most sense if neither have it because people’s privacy and identity would be in the hands of disconnected entities which most likely don’t have their best intent in mind.
For the government, if facial recognition software to match a face with a database of faces was implemented many Americans would be unsettled by the idea of the government keeping files on them and them losing anonymity. For this reason I fully disagree with public facial recognition, however, if recognition was to be used in any way I believe that it could be safer utilized for strictly criminals and the justice system. The regular law-abiding American has done nothing to warrant their monitoring and record holding of their face, but perhaps an American released from jail for a crime of a certain grade warrants the use of this technology on them more. By following the law you retain all of your freedoms and privacy but when you seriously break it this could serve as a safety measure for other citizens in some way. Even then, there are questions raised as to what facial recognition would be used for and if it would be accessible to a body like the police force .
Privitized facial recognition seems to be a very different story than the federal side. I believe, besides facebook now, that many social media sites or other image based practices already have some kinds of facial recognition features or the ability to easily implement them. As far as I know there have not been any major crisis with this and the government hasn’t created any strict laws surrounding it so it doesn’t seem to have ever really been used in a harmful way, at least yet. I think with the level of anonymity in privitized companies even with the creation of laws fully forbiding facial recognition, it doesn’t seem possible to prevent any of it from happening at all; it seems more reasonable that laws could just prevent some of the greater privacy breaches privitized busines could have. I still disagree with allowing companies to use it publically and in a database form though because once your data is stored somewhere there is always the possibility of someone malicious acquiring it. I can’t really thinkg of a major malicious act someone could commit with facial regonition software, but there are a lot of smart people around and I’m not particularly interested in figuring out either.
Local facial recognition seems to be the most useful implimentation to me and also main reasoning to not allow widespread storage and databases of peoples faces because of it’s use for security, ie. unlocking phones with facial recognition. I think that it is probably a practice that once we start using it more in advantagous ways it becomes more dangerous for companies and others to keep track of your face. If we start relying on facial recognition for banking and social security then data collection of faces immediately becomes much more dangerous. In conclusion, I’d say the government should forbide data bases of people’s faces because of the privacy and their security concerns, but local side implementation with something very presumably harmless like snapchat filters shouldn’t be a problem.