No Longer Just Another Face in the Crowd

Emerging Commercial Use of Facial Recognition Technology

HL Sensory Overload

Published in

Homeland Security

5 min readSep 19, 2015

HLSensory Overload: We’re Everywhere You’re Going To Be

Each face could now be in a datasbe used for commercial purposes…so, now what?!?

Like many new privacy-robbing technologies, facial recognition is advancing far faster than legislators can come up with laws or even rules to govern its use. In the absence of such laws, the developers are going to use it to its maximum potential.

Many of us are most familiar with facial recognition technology today through the use of Facebook, which is employing the technology to identify faces in photos that are posted on the site. Their application of the technology is so advanced that it can recognize a person with the same accuracy as an actual human being. And, if you don’t like the fact that Facebook has captured your and tagged your face — too bad. Even if you don’t have a Facebook account, the company associates pictures of you from other sources and adds it to their database. And the more pictures it can find, the more accurate the database, and the more valuable the data that is sold to whoever is willing to pay.

In its current state, facial recognition works best in a controlled environment, such as identifying a person from a photo uploaded online or in person, or when a person is photographed as they are booked into jail. That person will be looking directly into the camera and the lighting conditions will be optimal. In an uncontrolled environment, when a person is just a moving face in the crowd, the technology has a hard time recognizing and identifying individuals. As facial recognition capabilities inevitability advance however, there will come a time when the technology will be able to pick out and identify individuals with great accuracy.

Consumer Profiling with Facial Recognition

This becomes a scary prospect when you consider that more and more companies are incorporating the technology into their business model. There will come a time when the technology will be able to identify you as you walk through the mall. This is exactly the kind of situation that was brought into discussions focused on regulating facial recognition in the future.

The Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced in 2013 that it would begin meeting with stakeholders to develop a code of conduct for how the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights applies to facial recognition technology. The goal was to develop the best ways to address consumers’ rights to control, transparency, security, access and accuracy, focused collection, and accountability. However, talks fell apart and a number of prominent privacy groups walked out after they could not come to agreement on one very basic scenario: Would a company, with whom you had never interacted before, need to ask for permission before identifying you walking down the street?

Issue of Consent

The breakdown of the talks comes down to the issue of consent. Should companies be required to obtain the consent of a person before using facial recognition on them? Many privacy advocates say yes. Privacy groups advocate for opt-in policies, which require a company to request permission before performing facial recognition on an individual. This would pose a major problem for companies who wanted to use this technology. How would stores in a mall obtain consent from people walking by, or even into, their store?

The use of facial recognition in public places also invokes Fourth Amendment issues. By appearing in public, will this suddenly mean that you have given up your Fourth Amendment rights and consented to a search of your face through an identification database? This becomes more convoluted when you consider that facial recognition can be used to track individuals’ movements.

Following their withdrawal from the discussions, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and other groups issued a statement, which explained:

We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy. People have the right to control who gets their sensitive information, and how that information is shared. And there is no question that biometric information is extremely sensitive. You can change your password and your credit card number; you cannot change your fingerprints or the precise dimensions of your face. Through facial recognition, these immutable, physical facts can be used to identify you, remotely and in secret, without any recourse.

What a Facial Recognition Camera looks like

Discussions facilitated by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration are still ongoing, but how can we hope for a balanced policy with only one side of the conversation at the table? And in the absence of any kind of agreement with the industry, what is becoming of the data that is already being collected? Also, how many times are consents buried in terms of use agreements that are agreed to as a condition of using a piece of software, or even entering a public space? And even if you think your image has been illicitly or illegally captured and added to a database, how will you know and what rights do you have to get it expunged? We don’t know either.

Source for this article are included below.