Facial Recognition: Use It or Diffuse It?
May 24, 2021
Facial recognition technology is an important application. Doors can unlock when the technology “recognizes” a person. Investigators can take a zero leads situation and generate a list of possible matches for a surveillance photo. Google can “look” at an image and offer similar pictures. Perfect? What smart software is? Figure 30 to 85 percent accuracy in my experience. Why the wide variance. There are individuals who wear Cyberdazze shields like this:
Not many smart software programs can ID the person in this high-resolution image.
I spotted two interesting takes on facial recognition.
The first is explicated in “Time Magazine Lauds Clearview AI Despite Its Sketchy Facial Recognition Tech.” The article about the Time Magazine endorsement of Clearview AI states:
Time Magazine released its inaugural list of the 100 Most Influential Companies, featuring an array of large and small corporations that “are helping to chart an essential path forward.” Disturbingly, among its choices of “disruptors” is Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition start-up known for illicitly scraping Americans’ images and demographic information from social media and selling the data to law enforcement. By celebrating a company that engages in illegal mass surveillance, Time is complicit in the degradation of our privacy and our civil liberties.
The idea is that Time Magazine is cheerleading for an outfit which is not benefiting those in the US.
The second is expressed in “Amazon Pauses Sales of Facial Recognition Software to Police Indefinitely.” This write up indicates that Amazon’s self-imposed ban on the sale of its facial recognition software will continue.
What’s interesting is that technology is linked with an application of pattern recognition methods. The topic is fraught because it is an intensely subjective discussion flavored with some technical information.
In my experience, technology diffuses and does so inexorably. “Knowing” is often sufficient to allow a third party to replicate a technology and apply it. Laws and rules can be imposed to prevent this technology diffusion. The only way to prevent this dispersal is via secrecy; that is, the “information wants to be free” truism makes clear that communication from one who knows to one who doesn’t initiates an often irreversible process.
Facial recognition is propagating and quickly. Apple and Google are using privacy as a marketing tactic. Neither firm is going to turn down the dollars that come from the information those firms gather. Unlock a phone with your face. Yep, facial recognition linked to specific data about location, time, and actions. Wander through the airport in Quito and a quite efficient system developed outside the US records, analyzes, and stores those data for reference. Those weird images on the GOES card. Absolutely a useful image.
My point is that talk about facial recognition is interesting, but it is unlikely to alter the use of the technology. Time Magazine may be right in IDing Clearview AI as an important company. It is. Amazon may be doing marketing when it won’t sell its facial recognition to law enforcement. But what about Amazon’s partners?
The good ship facial recognition has sailed.
Stephen E Arnold, May 24, 2021
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