The biometrics dilemma
The class action law suit brought by a Chicago man against Facebook in April 2015 over its photo tagging facial recognition system moves forward after a judge decided last week that it violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act and ruled against a motion to dismiss by Facebook.
A similar lawsuit has been brought by an Austrian privacy activist, Max Schrems, which has forced Facebook to partially delay some functions related to facial recognition, and also influenced the case that led to the EU end the safe harbor agreement with the United States after it decided European citizens’ data transferred between the EU and the United States was not being adequately protected.
This is an issue that has far bigger repercussions beyond Facebook. Sure, the idea of developing a facial recognition data base was an obvious move, given that users provide a photo of themselves to open a profile. Facebook pitches the feature as just another convenient way to stay connected with friends, but privacy and civil rights advocates say the data generated by face-recognition technology is uniquely sensitive, and requires extra special safeguards as it finds its way into the hands of private companies.
Our cities are now littered with CCTV cameras, meaning that we are going to see more and more cases such as the case of Russian photographer Egor Tsvetkov, who took hundreds of photographs of anonymous people and then ran their images through a facial recognition program and then looked for them on Russian social network Vkontakte, used by more than 350 million people in Russia and former Soviet republics.
Additionally, but not related to Tsvetkov’s experiment, some users of the Russian forum Dvach, similar to 4chan, biometrically processed the faces of porn actresses and those of other women who had appeared naked on the web, searched for information about them online and then sent dossiers to their families and partners.
The program Tsvetkov used, FindFace, has been discussed online by security firm Kaspersky in an article called “You can’t replace your face, says face recognition”, highlighting how easy it is to track somebody down from a photo and to then harass or bully them, a practice known as doxing.
Biometrics has attracted critics from both ends of the spectrum: nobody likes the idea that the authorities can monitor our movements at all times. Similarly, it is worrying that anybody can take a snap of us with a smartphone in the street and then identify us. Biometric technology is now sufficiently sophisticated and accessible and can be used by anybody with a smartphone.
So where do we draw the line here? More to the point, is it even possible to draw a line. This technology cannot be un-invented, its use cannot be restricted, and it can be used by just about anybody. Is there really any point going after Facebook over its facial recognition technology, when it is so easy to download apps that do the same thing? Facial recognition is here to stay, even if it challenges all our notions of privacy. Just how are we going to deal with this latest dilemma technology has unleashed?
(En español, aquí)
