Although facial recognition technology has been developed from as far back as the 1960s, it has only been a recent talking point ever since its presence can now be found in our everyday lives. Through facial recognition, celebrities with the likes of Ariana Grande or Kylie Jenner fashion themselves with Snapchat’s famous ‘dog filter’, or users of the iPhone X family — first launched in 2017 — can unlock their phones or authenticate payments from their phone with their face using the Face ID system.
Facial recognition technology found its most effective use for security purposes. Chinese police force utilises facial recognition technology that can identify citizens within three seconds and essentially help them track suspected criminals and fugitives faster. Albeit its marvel, there are some issues that arose from the use of this technology that we should at least be aware of.
Possible Breach of Data Privacy.
Biometric identification uses body measurements in order to identify and authenticate data that is connected to us. Facial recognition nowadays even allows us not to be physically present in order to provide our biometric data, using merely our photos. Imagine, just by recognising our facial features, artificial intelligence can now find our presence on the internet through our tagged photos in the social media.
As our internet use is more and more interconnected — such as using our Facebook accounts to log in to online payment system or online marketplace — facial recognition technology may allow the use our facial features to reveal our digital footprints, from the statuses we post to our online spending habit. We might have unknowingly waived our right to privacy and allowing companies and government to access our personal data just by providing them with our facial profile.
Unfortunately, not many regulations are available to guarantee us with the right to privacy, especially with new technologies being developed at a fast pace. The process to create new regulations usually takes so much time, it is generally difficult to keep up with the pace of technological development.
Racially and Sexually Biased Coding.
There have been reports that the accuracy of facial recognition is lower for certain ethnicities, such as when two women in China reported that their iPhones cannot tell them apart, and even gender biased, as found in research by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was resulted from under-representations of racial and gender diversity in the datasets that are used to train the facial recognition artificial intelligence. This leads to two pathways of consequences, one tend to be more benign and the other malignant. The more benign consequence would be that only light-skinned people and/or men can fully enjoy the benefits of facial recognition. In use for surveillance, the danger can be malignant, such as putting precarious group, such as black people — who already face biased racial profiling — in further danger of false profiling even false arrest.
Creating (Possible) Hoax Videos.
A team of researchers in the University of Washington have successfully created a video of ‘synthetic’ former President of the United States, Barack Obama using artificial intelligence that tracks not only Obama’s face but also his speech and even his mouth movements using 14 hours of Obama’s footage. The result is impeccable. In the era of hoaxes as a political tool in dividing people, the right technology in the wrong hands can result in further detriment political climate. Adding an optimistic note, Prof. Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman from the University of Washington is confident that avoiding negative consequences of technology is possible because the creators of facial recognition technologies are also equipped with all the knowledge to reverse engineer them.
The ultimate takeaway from the rather bleak consequences that facial recognition brings is not necessarily to avoid using the technology, but rather to be mindful of how we use the technology in our everyday lives. For example, think of how the social media company treats your personal data whenever you upload your pictures and allow their application to access your camera, or let developers know when you are experiencing flaws in their programmes so that they can improve the experience of their technologies for all. We can also exercise our right as citizens to demand better legislations that will ensure our safety, protect our privacy, or better yet prevent misuse of facial recognition technology and datasets.