“Should a company need your permission before scanning your face? And does the technology really work?” This digg.com teaser points to The Atlantic article excerpted below.
Who Owns Your Face?
In June, government talks about how best to regulate facial-recognition algorithms fell apart. But should a company need your permission before scanning your face? And does the technology really work?
We are our faces, in a way we are not our Twitter profiles, social-security numbers, or even legal names. We’re stuck with our faces. It’s prohibitively expensive to change them beyond recognition, if it’s even possible. Facial recognition and other biometrics bind data about us to us like nothing else.
In 2014, the U.S. Department of Commerce held talks about how and whether facial-recognition technology should be regulated. The talks, officially called the “privacy multi-stakeholder process,” were convened by the National Telecommunications and Information Association (NTIA), the government agency that advises the president on technology policy. The talks are still ongoing, but they no longer include the consumer advocates. User privacy groups, including the EFF and the Consumer Federation of America, walked out in June over what they said was industry obstinance. The industry and its lobbyists, they said, would not admit that users might want to consent to facial-recognition software in the most extreme instances imaginable, so it was no use participating in the talks.
The consensus among privacy experts is that companies’ ability to use facial recognition online far exceeds their ability to use it offline right now. “From a technological perspective, the ability to successfully conduct mass-scale facial recognition in the wild seems inevitable,” Acquisti told me. “Whether as a society we will accept that technology, however, is another story.”
“You, I, everyone has the right to take photographs in public,” [Carl Szabo] told Fusion. “Facial recognition can be applied immediately, or days later, or months later. If someone takes a photograph in public, and wants to apply facial recognition, should they really need to get consent in advance? Are they going to chase someone down the street to get them to fill out a form?”
For further reading: google.com, digg.com, digg.com,
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