Is Facial Recognition Really Such a Bad Idea?

The use and misuse of facial recognition technology

A picture paints a thousand words, so they say, and in the tech world, an image of your face can be used for everything from law enforcement to access control. Facial recognition has finally come of age and companies and governments across the world are not just exploring but implementing the capabilities that facial recognition systems offer.

Facial recognition can be viewed as the ultimate biometric – after all, your face is a representation of you as a person and it makes psychological sense, as much as technical, to use it to perform digital tasks related to your identity. Facial recognition systems combining a number of variables based on facial characteristics to determine the identity of an individual. Facial recognition is big business too, with the market worth expected to be valued at $7.76 billion by 2022. (1)

But facial recognition technology is no stranger to controversy. Recently, the Amazon Facial recognition platform, Rekognition, was found to have incorrectly identified 28 congress members as known criminals. And facial recognition, by definition, has privacy implications and smacks of the totalitarian “Big Brother” from the book 1984. This sort of view is strengthened by research from Georgetown University which found that one in two American adults is included in a law enforcement facial recognition system. (2)

In this article, I’ll take a look at the sort of facial recognition applications we are seeing that are a positive force for the use of the technology. I’ll also, conversely look at why we perhaps need to be cautious when we use powerful and intimate technologies like facial recognition.

Where is Facial Recognition Being Used Across the World?

Facial recognition technology is being used as an access control measure for a number of services. This (Read more...)