Article originally published on Medium: https://medium.com/@bentkwillis/facial-recognition-cd550fac5e76

Introduction

The use of Facial Recognition — the process of identifying or authenticating a person using their face — has become increasingly popular in recent years, with the technology being implemented in various forms at airports, sporting events, and public spaces, as well as being used in consumer tech and by governments from around the world.

While there are many good and legitimate uses for facial recognition, there are cases in which the technology may have a detrimental effect on society when abused by big corporations, government and law enforcement. Some examples of such abuse and the potential legal, social, and ethical implications are covered in this article.

Facial Recognition Art Mural, Hollywood CA

Legal Issues

Currently, the law regarding the implementation of facial recognition for various purposes is being studied and debated in many developed countries. At present, there is a lot of concern, not just about the ethical and social issues surrounding facial recognition, but also current and future legal issues. These legal issues relate to mass biometric data collection and processing, as well as lack of up-to-date legislation that should tightly regulate how this data is collected, processed, and stored while considering the privacy implications to people in society.

In the United Kingdom, laws surrounding facial recognition are currently limited, and few cases challenging the use of live facial recognition by authorities have been brought forward. Part of the issue is that no guidelines or laws exist to decide and distinguish when the technology should be used to monitor and identify individuals — e.g. at the time of certain public events, regulation of the scale of the live monitoring.

Further, a lot of data is collected with facial recognition, and there are concerns about how much people are being watched, along with questions of the impact of a system being hacked and sensitive data accessed. So, it may be beneficial to introduce guidelines about how data collected by facial recognition systems should be used, how it is kept and for how long, and how it is processed.

If these guidelines are not followed, government and corporations must be held accountable, ensuring that the tech is being used for legitimate reasons, and awarding penalties or other restrictions when this is not the case.

Social Issues

There are uses for facial recognition technology for reducing human trafficking and abuse.

AMBER Alert is a child abduction alert system that is used in several countries around the world, including the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, and Malaysia. This system takes any identifiable information about a missing person — such as their name, photo, unique physical characteristics, and other relevant details about their case — and makes it available to the public in the hope of increasing the chances of finding them.

Tech companies like Google, Amazon, and China’s Baidu have introduced new technologies utilising facial recognition capability to scan and analyse pictures of missing children in an attempt to identify them or at least narrow down the search.

In 2019, a 20-year-old university student from Shenzhen in China was reunited with his biological mother after he was kidnapped as a newborn baby by child traffickers in 1999. After many years of searching, the authorities had no hope of finding until the university student submitted his photo to a missing persons website, where it was analysed and compared against photos of missing children. After DNA test results confirmed the match, the student was reunited with his biological mother.

Ethical Issues

The ethical and legal issues of facial recognition are closely related when it comes to its privacy and security concerns. Especially where legislation does not yet exist to regulate the use and extent of the technology, and in turn, failing to protect people’s privacy and safety.

Many experts and political activists are concerned about how accurate facial recognition is and if there are biases in these technologies, especially as numerous studies have revealed that facial recognition is often inaccurate at identifying people from ethnic minorities.

Fight for the Future, a technology activist group which has advocated for Net Neutrality, privacy, and has aided in gathering support for Chelsea Manning also fights for a ban on Facial Recognition in the United States and shows users where facial recognition is currently in use today, saying that facial recognition tech is an invasive technology and that it can be used for surveillance.

The deputy director of Fight for the Future, Evan Greer says about facial recognition technology “It’s deeply invasive, and from our perspective, the potential harm to society and human liberties far outweigh the potential benefits.” And says “Facial recognition really doesn’t have a place in society”.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there is a multitude of practical uses and exciting and revolutionary future uses for facial recognition — such as use in identifying the public quickly, finding missing people, and making consumer tech easier and more seamless to use.

However, along with these beneficial uses, there are a variety of social, legal, and ethical implications. This includes mass collection and processing of people’s biometric data, posing privacy and security issues especially when data is in the wrong hands, and invasion of people’s privacy, causing potential harm to freedom.

A solution to this is to ensure that legislation is kept up-to-date in line with the development and widespread use of facial recognition, to protect the freedom of people without limiting innovation.

References

Zhang Jianfeng. 2017. China Breakthroughs: New technologies give hope to missing children’s families, [Online]. Available at: english.cctv.com

People’s Daily Online. 2019. Chinese police use facial recognition to find children missing for 10 years, [Online]. Available at: telegraph.co.uk

Harry Atwall. 2017. EAmber Scan: Face Recognition for Missing Children in the National Amber Alert System, [Online]. Available at: csbapp.uncw.edu

Citlali Tellez. 2019. Three ways live face identification systems can tackle social issues, [Online]. Available at: blog.gemalto.com

Yo! what happened to peace? 2014. Facial Recognition Art Mural, Hollywood CA, [Online]. Available at: flickr.com