Many studies have shown that face recognition technology is more likely to misidentify people of color than white people. These cases of “mistaken identity” are not anomalies. So, face recognition is also a threat to equal opportunity in places of public accommodation. This technology also caused a public skating rink to erroneously expel a Black patron. So, face recognition is a threat to Black lives. Every arrest of a Black person carries the risk of excessive or even deadly police force. Their names are Michael Oliver, Nijeer Parks, and Robert Williams. Its use has led to the wrongful arrests of at least three Black men. Racial Justiceįace recognition also has an unfair disparate impact against people of color. Face surveillance can likewise track our movements. This includes police use of GPS devices and cell site location information to track our movements. Supreme Court has repeatedly placed limits on invasive government uses of cutting-edge surveillance technologies. Government use of face recognition also raises Fourth Amendment concerns. … t seems likely that a face-mapped individual could be identified from a surveillance photo taken on the streets or in an office building. Facebook can also identify the individual’s Facebook friends or acquaintances who are present in the photo. Once a face template of an individual is created, Facebook can use it to identify that individual in any of the other hundreds of millions of photos uploaded to Facebook each day, as well as determine when the individual was present at a specific location. In the words of a federal appeals court ruling in 2019, in a case brought against Facebook for taking faceprints from its users without their consent: All based on a unique marker that we cannot change or hide: our own faces. Taken together, these systems can quickly, cheaply, and easily ascertain where we’ve been, who we’ve been with, and what we’ve been doing. Face recognition technologies are more powerful by the day. Surveillance camera networks have flooded our public spaces. Privacyįace recognition violates our human right to privacy. Let’s begin with the ways that face recognition harms us. As to business use, many communities are looking to a watershed Illinois statute, which requires businesses to get opt-in consent before extracting a person’s faceprint. A growing number of communities have banned government use of face recognition. So, governments and businesses, often working in partnership, are increasingly using our faces to track our whereabouts, activities, and associations.įortunately, people around the world are fighting back. And unlike our passwords and identification numbers, we can’t get a new face.
Our faces are unique identifiers, and most of us expose them everywhere we go.
#Face sketch free
Face recognition technology is a special menace to privacy, racial justice, free expression, and information security.