Facial recognition is quickly becoming a common tool in many aspects of life. It’s being used in stores to recognize customers as soon as they walk through the door. This can then feed back into Facebook and other social media in order to send you ads for the store. That of course gets fed into other algorithms so that you will be sent ads for similar stores.
Another increasingly common use of facial recognition software is in device security. Phones, tablets, and PCs are now often unlocked by scanning the user’s face. If you don’t think your face is getting stored by Google, Apple and others to keep for some undisclosed purpose, then I have some swamp land on Tatooine I’d like to sell you.
Then of course there is the security use of this software. You may have noticed cameras popping up here and there in a city near you. They’ve been in some places like Washington D.C. and London for years. These cameras constantly scan and record activity. Initially, this would have simply been to record any criminal activity so that the perpetrators could be swiftly apprehended. However, with facial recognition, they are constantly scanning faces in the crowd, looking for criminals.
You might ask why that’s wrong. After all, don’t we want criminals apprehended? Of course we do. However, it should not come at the price of being treated as a criminal without having actually done anything. How many people were asked if they wanted cameras everywhere recording their every movement?
Come to think of it, how many people were asked if they wanted any of these new developments? Okay, when it comes to the screen unlocking it’s fair to say that people are agreeing to it when they buy the device and selecting their security preferences. But the rest of it? How many of us really want to be fed a bunch of ads just because we walked into the local GAP? Or even be bothered with a pop up asking us to opt in or out? And why does anyone think we would all like to be scanned to see whether or not we are wanted for any crimes? How hard would it be for that kind of technology to be used to locate not just criminals but people who the state does not approve of? Perhaps the most important question to ask is how, how do we find ourselves in a situation in which we even have to worry about the misapplication of this kind of technology?
There are too many reasons to explore here. However, one of the big ones is the simple fact that we have a hard time not doing something once we realize that we can, or even that we might be able to do a certain thing. Or to paraphrase Dr. Malcom in Jurassic Park “we are often so concerned with whether or not we can, but never stop to wonder if we should.” We develop a new technology and before we’ve even stopped to consider the implications, we are rushing ahead with new applications. Just think of nuclear technology. It has enormous potential for providing energy to the world but was first turned into a bomb. That tendency to leap before we look also manifests itself in the form of various justifications for whatever we are doing. For example, the fact that certain ‘ethicists’ openly wonder if consent is really necessary if people are being spied on without them knowing about it; ‘If they don’t know, does it really matter?’ The fact this question can even be asked and taken seriously by some should be deeply concerning to all. How many violations of liberties, how many crimes and injustices can be justified with exactly that same ‘reasoning’?
How do we stop this? How do we fight this tendency of human nature without becoming luddites? By remembering that we are all individual human beings, full of dignity and worthy of respect as unique creations. If something is going to be happening to us, even something innocuous, we had better have a say in it. Only by treating each other in this way, with true respect, can we hope to preserve any kind of society that respects individuals and their choices.
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