Facing up to facial recognition
Last December, FacialNetwork.com launched NameTag, an application for Google Glass able to analyze facial characteristics, search for them in a data base on the cloud, and then present the wearer with relevant information about the person that has been identified.
This development should have surprised nobody: it is something that many of us have been talking about for some time as inevitable, one of those things that is going to happen, whether we like it or not, what the Americans call, “an idea whose time has come.”
Watching NameTag’s promotional video gives an idea of the potential: yes, it still takes some time for the results to come through, and the test stage is being carried out using faces that are already logged in a data base, but the concept is clear, and slow transmission speed has never been an obstacle to new digital trends.
We simply look at somebody, and we eventually receive some information about that person, with all the ramifications.
As said, there is nothing new about this. As well as already having been used for applications such as Picasa or iPhoto, it is also used by police in some jurisdictions, and of course, in the United States is being funded and put to use by certain federal departments.
Google’s position is, for the moment, clear. It says that it has banned facial recognition technologies for Google Glass on the grounds of respecting privacy, at least until it has developed protection protocols, but this has not stopped its I/O for 2013 including a session given by two of the company’s engineers called, “Voiding your warranty: hacking Glass”, accompanied by the warning: “Disclaimer, you’ll be stepping into uncharted and unsupported territory!” This is precisely the message that we all know is sufficient for hackers the world over to start trying to develop facial recognition apps for Google Glass.
And of course, that is precisely what is happening: developers are creating such applications and looking for ways to get them to Google Glass users in the same way that we can install non-official apps on our smartphones.
A recent article in The New Yorker magazine titled Through a Face Scanner Darkly, rephrasing the book by none other than the great Philip K. Dick, looks at the consequences of this latest technological development: a “memory on steroids” that will allow us to “remember” everybody that we meet, or not remember them, but simply to identify them, even if we have never met them before, and that links us inexorably and indelibly with our ego-search via an application or search engine can extract from us using our facial characteristics as the master key.
This is where we now are: it is possible to pass somebody on the street, take a photograph of them face on of minimal quality, particularly now that there already applications to take a photo simply by blinking your eye—and without having to say out loud “OK Glass, take a photo”—, then send the photo to a database and receive a selection of personal details of them: name, occupation, social network profile… or, in countries like the United Kingdom or the United States, discover if they are on the sexual offenders register.
It’s already here. We are not talking about science fiction or about dystopian visions of the future. We need to think seriously about this, based on the techno-fatalist approach of, “this is going to happen, whether I like it or not.” Because, at the end of the day, we are talking about devices that we cannot control, about databases that we have no say over, a face that we cannot remove, and procedures already developed to put the information, literally, in front of our eyes. The world keeps changing, for better or worse.
(En español, aquí)
