Face Recognition & Privacy: Never the twain shall meet?
Face Recognition (FR) is quite common. There are a lot of real world use cases that benefit from FR. At the same time, FR opens up concerns on privacy and security of a person’s data. This article talks about a brand new FR service, called Visage.FR and how it helps navigate FR capabilities safely for you and your clients!
What is Face Recognition?
Face recognition is the ability to match a human face to various unknown faces. It opens up a plethora of use cases:
- Have 1000s of personal photos? Only want to retain photos having certain people and delete the rest? Use FR!
- Build a system that can unlock your front door by just looking at your face!
- Find friends or family in long forgotten trip / meet photos!
- Build an entry system that only allows certain people to enter a specific area.
- Build an ID verification system that allows you to confirm someone’s identity.
- Recognize faces in a video (livestream or from a file)!
- … and many more! Use your imagination!
FR as a technology has progressed a lot in the past couple of years especially and is now used in many places like unlocking your phone with your face, finding colleagues / family / friends in photos (e.g. Facebook), in secure entry portals and so on. The list is endless.
However, certain key issues remain…
Key issues with FR today:
- Security: How secure are the solutions that deal with my photos?
- Privacy: Are my images private? Who or what gets to look at them?
- Data Retention: Is my image and derived data retained? For how long? Why?
These are very critical and hard questions to ponder and answer and also relate to the practice of ethical AI. I believe that any FR solution that can address these, should be a candidate for you to evaluate.
Enter Visage.FR.
What is Visage.FR?
Visage.FR is a publicly available cloud service that allows you to build face recognition into any type of application. It guarantees privacy of your data by a) not requesting unneeded information, b) not asking for any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) like names or even labels, and c) maintaining ephemeral environments for each request and destroying them as soon as the request has been processed.
How does it solve the issues mentioned above?
- Security — Visage.FR runs on highly secure cloud servers that use industry standard encryption and protection
- Privacy — Visage.FR neither stores your images or data derived from images. As soon as your FR request is served, all your data is permanently deleted. Period
- Data Retention — this becomes a non-issue since Visage.FR does not store any data at all
Like the proverbial icing on the cake, Visage.FR also:
— Requires no sign up or registration!
— And is completely free to use!
Want to know more? Head over to the Visage.FR website here!
Thank you for reading this article! I am the creator of Visage.FR and welcome any comments or queries you may have. I am an independent technology consultant experienced in the areas of Mobile Apps, Cloud and Microservice architectures, Machine learning and big data analytics. Most recently I’ve a) bootstrapped, designed and built a healthcare biofeedback platform, b) built a big data analytics pipeline and c) pioneered new methods in the field of natural language processing, d) helped automate business processes using machine learning, and e) Stabilized and refined an ETL testing product that was reporting major field issues. If you or your organization are looking for help in digital transformations, drop me a message!
