Naqeeb Ahmed
What's Going On With Facial Recognistation Technology Around The World
How does my cell phone know that's me? And how does Facebook know that's me? And why is Facebook always asking if I want to tag myself in these photos? Well, both are using facial recognition technology. So what's going on? Facial recognition is not a new thing. It was pretty simple. People would use a ruler to take measurements of your facial features, likehow long your eyebrows are, the position of your eyes,the curve of your lips, and so forth.
Today, the process is much faster. Now, we use more like deeplearning-based method, which raised the recognitioneven higher than humans can do. So almost perfect. That's WonSook Lee, a professor in the school of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Ottawa. She has 15 years of expertisein facial recognition, facial modeling, and computer animation. Wait, did she just say the accuracy rate of facial recognition is almost perfect? So almost perfect. So almost perfect. Almost perfect? There are all these headlines about facial recognition being racist or having preprogrammed biases. Why was Amazon's"Recognition" misidentifying dark-skinned women butidentifying white men? That's basically because they don't have a lot of database for African people. If we recognize the gender,or if we recognize the age, and then also if we recognize ethnic groups with their skin tone, we can raise the recognition system better.
Gotcha. So if Amazon's "Recognition"was having trouble identifying dark-skinned women, programmersneed to feed it more images of dark-skinned women and show them in various scenarios. Different lighting, various angles, in different outfits,wearing hats and sunglasses, all things that would increase the accuracy rate.
So theoretically, if the facial recognition software has enough variety of images of me, it should be able to recognize me a hundred percent of the time, even if I fed it an image of me in a darker scenario with glasses on and short blue hair.
Now I don't care if Facebook misidentifies me as someone else, but what about when facial recognition misidentifies people at the airport? Or when law enforcementuses it to make an arrest? Caucasian people recognize Caucasian very well, but they don't recognize Asian people very well. They don't recognize African people very well either. People are depending on familiarity, that kind of thing. Machines can do more objective work if they are trained enough with various people with enough data. Luckily, it's not leftup to just the machines. And if facial recognition gets it wrong, there are other methods inplace like fingerprint, iris, ear, and palm recognition. But this still doesn't address the security and privacy concerns that come with this new technology.
Let's start with facial recognition in airports. According to a recent report from BuzzFeed News, the US Customs and Border Protection stated that they're using this technology to, one: identify non-US citizens who use fraudulent travel documents, and two: provide a quicker check-in process. But there are concerns that the US government is using this technology to create a digital identification library of millions of Americans without their consent. CBP says they're not storing the photos, but it's hard to prove if that's true or not. The US Customs and Border Protection claims they do delete photos after 12 hours and that they also give US citizens the option to opt out of checking-inwith facial recognition and check-in manually. The reality is not many travelers know that they can opt out of the technology. Another concern is the US Immigrationand Customs Enforcement using facial recognition. ICE says it's using the technology to protect the US from cross-border crimes and undocumented migrants they say threaten national security and public safety. But there are concerns that this could be used as a tool that violates human rights if there aren't clear protections and restrictions in place.
It's unclear how this will shake out in the US. But in China, we're already seeing how the overuse of facial recognition can get out of hand. The country is using facial recognition for mass surveillance and to give their citizens social scores. A citizen's social scoreis based on their economic and social reputation and can be affected by bad driving, jaywalking, posting fake news online, or just buying too many video games. So when people passand your face is shown, and if they have a database of the person, we can recognize the person. And if there are CCTVs everywhere in the city, let's say there is a targeted person, government want to know or whatever, and actually they can follow the track and then find outeverything about a person. Their face is linked to their government records, social networks, and tracked behavior through CCTV cameras. Good and honest behaviors can lead to discounted airline tickets. Committing wrong deeds can cause problems like banning you from flights and trains or taking away your dog.
The Chinese government believes this social credit system can help society be better by rewarding good behavior and denouncing bad behavior. But it does feel like well And citizens have reported concerns about their privacy and the lack of checks and balances on this system.
Indian Government also accepted that it has start using facial recognition technology . And also arrest the people involved in Delhi Riots 2020 , but they say they are using it with Driving License database and the question is can one photo is enough for Facial Recognistation? or the Indian Goverment had already database of their people? We don't know how many people were arrested on the basis of facial recognition technology or how the Facial Recognistation technology decided that they are involved or which type algorithm are used by it.
Facial recognition is a powerful tool, and with great power comesgreat responsibility, right? It could wind up being great for automation, finding missing people, or just checking you in at the airport. But should companies and governments even have access to all this data? What sorts of guidelines
should they follow? Will the government use it in limited ways like just for law enforcement? Or will they use it publicly to embarrass citizens like China's social credit system? How can they guarantee
that the data they collect will be deleted? What are they going to doin case of a data breach? Or how will they prevent one? These are questions that are still in discussion, and it doesn't sound like there are going to be any simple answers anytime soon. Facial recognition is here to stay. But there needs to be more terms and services and guidelines and regulations that will help protect the rights,security, safety, and privacy of the people who are affected by the technology. Otherwise, its use might become widespread faster than it can be regulated. And if the India adopts the samesocial credit system as China, I don't wanna be banned from taking flights just because I jaywalk all the time.
