Saturday, January 27, 2024

Is Facial Recognition a Useful Public Safety Tool or Something Sinister? Benefits outweigh concerns!

This article below is kind of a book review!

Facial recognition is another topic prone to alarmism and hysteria!

Facial recognition in the hands of dictatorial regimes like Russia, China, and Iran are dangerous! However, these regimes will use this technology anyway. "The Chinese government has deployed over 700 million surveillance cameras; in many cases, artificial intelligence analyzes their output in real time. Chinese authorities have used it to police behavior like jaywalking and to monitor racial and religious minorities and political dissidents. Hill reports there is a "red list" of VIPs who are invisible to facial recognition systems. "In China, being unseen is a privilege," ... Meanwhile, Iranian authorities are using facial recognition tech to monitor women protesting for civil rights by refusing to wear hijabs in public. ..."

As far as forensics is concerned face recognition is an addition to dactyloscopy (finger print identification).

Face recognition may also help e.g. find abducted children, exonerate innocent people and much more. 

Claims of racial bias are as spurious as usual:
"Some privacy activists argue that facial recognition technologies are racially biased and do not work as well on some groups. But as developers continued to train their algorithms, they mostly fixed that problem; the software's disparities with respect to race, gender, and age are now so negligible as to be statistically insignificant."

Images on the Internet are in the public domain:
"... As Hill documents, the billions of photos in Clearview AI's ever-growing database were scraped without permission [???] from Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and other social media sites. The company argues that what it is doing is no different than the way Google catalogs links and data for its search engine, only that theirs is for photographs. The legal memo leaked to Hill was part of the company's defense against numerous lawsuits filed by social media companies and privacy advocates who objected to the data scraping. ..."

"This book traces the longer history of attempts to deploy accurate and pervasive facial recognition technology, but it chiefly focuses on the quixotic rise of Clearview AI. Hill first learned of this company's existence in November 2019, when someone leaked a legal memo to her in which the mysterious company claimed it could identify nearly anyone on the planet based only on a snapshot of their face. ...
"We have developed a revolutionary, web-based intelligence platform for law enforcement to use as a tool to help generate high-quality investigative leads," explains the company's website. "Our platform, powered by facial recognition technology, includes the largest known database of 40+ billion facial images sourced from public-only web sources, including news media, mugshot websites, public social media, and other open sources." ..."

Is Facial Recognition a Useful Public Safety Tool or Something Sinister? Your Face Belongs to Us documents how facial recognition might threaten our freedom.

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