This article appeared in today’s Guardian, from London. Note the number: 250 MILLION CAMERAS! Not to be paranoid, but we can now safely say that someone is watching our every move. Excerpts from the article are italicized. My comments are interlineated …
Nearly 250 million video surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the world, and chances are you’ve been seen by several of them today. Most people barely notice their presence anymore — on the streets, inside stores, and even within our homes. We accept the fact that we are constantly being recorded because we expect this to have virtually no impact on our lives. But this balance may soon be upended by advancements in facial recognition technology.
The cameras are undoubtedly concentrated in urban settings and have not reached the smaller, semi-rural towns like good old Laramie, Wyoming. But … the University has them and people I’ve spoken to inside of the Campus Police Department say that it is only a matter of time before they install recognition technology.
Moreover, the cameras are not yet highly networked. So, while they are of use to the local urban police forces and perhaps Homeland Security, they are not accessible all at once. Or, at least I’d like to think so.
Soon anybody with a high-resolution camera and the right software will be able to determine your identity. That’s because several technologies are converging to make this accessible. Recognition algorithms have become far more accurate, the devices we carry can process huge amounts of data, and there’s massive databases of faces now available on social media that are tied to our real names. As facial recognition enters the mainstream, it will have serious implications for your privacy.
Seriously, however, when we are in public is our privacy really all that paramount? It has long been an unrecognized but no less important tenet of the counseling psychology profession that what we do in public matters as much, if not more, than what we do in private. We should expect to be recognized and conduct ourselves accordingly. However …
A new app called FindFace, recently released in Russia, gives us a glimpse into what this future might look like. Made by two 20-something entrepreneurs, FindFace allows anybody to snap a photo of a passerby and discover their real name — already with 70% reliability. The app allows people to upload photos and compare faces to user profiles from the popular social network Vkontakte, returning a result in a matter of seconds. According to an interview in the Guardian, the founders claim to already have 500,000 users and have processed over 3 million searches in the two months since they’ve launched.
FindFace will certainly help those who are name- or face-challenged (or both). What’s not to like? My fear, however, is that the links to financial records won’t be too far behind, and that’s where the manipulating and compromising with begin. To wit:
What’s particularly unsettling are the use cases they advocate: identifying strangers to send them dating requests, helping government security agencies to determine the identities of dissenters, and allowing retailers to bombard you with advertisements based on what you look at in stores.
Network security rigor has been and will continue to be crucial. Provided that security professionals uphold their ethos and enforce boundaries, we should be ok.
Still, there are other reasons to be concerned:
FindFace is already being deployed in questionable ways. Some users have tried to identify fellow riders on the subway, while others are using the app to reveal the real names of porn actresses against their will. Powerful facial recognition technology is now in the hands of consumers to use how they please.
But should we be worried?
Tracking people in the real world might start to look more like it does online, causing changes to our behavior. That’s no small adjustment. Just as with social media, we will continually have to worry about what footage will be preserved forever and how it will shape our reputation. We’ve already seen how stalkers and criminals use enormous amount of personal data on social media to learn everything they can to target their victims. It’s not hard to imagine a company’s human-resources department in a few years searching for your face on YouTube when you apply for a job. They can observe how you behave in public, find you in a crowd, and access videos and photos where you appeared but weren’t tagged — and which you may not even know exist.
To that I say, “So what?” the answer is simply never to do anything you don’t want shared with a million people in 22 seconds flat. Or, in the words of Mark Twain, “Conduct yourself in private so that you’d never hesitate to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.”
Finally, if it makes you feel any better, the technology has some ways to go:
To be clear, the technology still has some major hurdles to overcome: It’s far less useful in poor lighting, at strange angles, and when video quality is low. But we leave our “face-prints” everywhere we go, which means our movements can be tracked and stored on an unprecedented scale. We’d be wise to start preparing for the consequences now.
But the reality is that it’s nearly impossible to stop the use of a technology once it’s available to everyone. Losing anonymity comes at a cost. We will have to decide whether we really want a world where there are no more strangers and everything we do in public is analyzed indefinitely.
Tarun Wadhwa, the author of the foregoing, is an entrepreneur who is writing a book on the global rise of digital identification systems. Follow him on Twitter @Twadhwa You can follow me on Twitter @Joseph_V_Russo
