The Dangers Of Facial Recognition Technology
Facial recognition technology raises important ethical and social concerns that need to be carefully considered and addressed.
Wired Magazine recently reported that Uber Eats drivers in the UK were fired because of the company’s faulty facial identification software. Uber requires their drivers to submit selfies on their cell phones to confirm their identity. If the technology fails and can’t match images of the drivers with their accounts, drivers can be kicked out of the system and may be unable to work until this is resolved. I experienced this technology when I was a driver.
Many workplaces now use facial recognition in recruitment to replace traditional time cards and to monitor workers’ movements and “productivity.” Retailers and restaurants can use it to harvest data on our purchases and target us with specific messaging and products.
There are increasing examples of how this technology has caused controversy around facial recognition. This has led dozens of universities and well-known retail brands like Wal-Mart and Target to say they won’t use the technology.
Madison Square Garden is highlighting this issue because they have been exposed as one major company who has used facial recognition technology to target its critics.
Madison Square Garden Uses Facial Recognition to Ban Its Owner’s Enemies
MSG Entertainment, the owner of the arena and Radio City Music Hall, has put lawyers who represent people suing it on an “exclusion list” to keep them out of concerts and sporting events.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, Kelly Conlon, 44, a personal injury lawyer from Bergen County, N.J., was chaperoning her 9-year-old daughter’s Girl Scout troop on a trip into Manhattan to see the “Christmas Spectacular” at Radio City Music Hall.
Before she could even glimpse the Rockettes, however, security guards pulled Ms. Conlon aside and her New York jaunt took an Orwellian turn.
“They told me that they knew I was Kelly Conlon and that I was an attorney,” she said this week. “They knew the name of my law firm.”
The guards had identified her using a facial recognition system. They showed her a sheet saying she was on an “attorney exclusion list” created this year by MSG Entertainment, which is controlled by the Dolan family. The company owns Radio City and some of New York’s other famous performance spaces, including the Beacon Theater and Madison Square Garden, where basketball’s Knicks and hockey’s Rangers play.
Its chief executive, James L. Dolan, is a billionaire who has run his empire with an autocratic flair, and his company instituted the ban this summer not only on lawyers representing people suing it, but on all attorneys at their firms. The company says “litigation creates an inherently adversarial environment” and so it is enforcing the list with the help of computer software that can identify hundreds of lawyers via profile photos on their firms’ own websites, using an algorithm to instantaneously pore over images and suggest matches.
So far, campaigning against facial recognition has focused on banning government and law enforcement use of the technology, but solely focusing on government use doesn’t fully address the issue. Should facial recognition like the above be allowed?
Should this technology be banned in all places of public accommodation, like the city of Portland did with this ordinance?
The city of Portland, Oregon, on Wednesday banned the use of facial-recognition technology by city departments — including local police — as well as public-facing businesses such as stores, restaurants and hotels.
Portland joins a growing number of places in the United States, such as San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston, that have outlawed city use of the surveillance technology, which is meant to identify a person from an image of their face. But its decision to prevent both local government and businesses from employing the technology appears to be the most sweeping ban yet by an individual city.
Facial recognition technology has grown in prevalence — and controversy — in recent years, popping up everywhere from airport check-in lines to police departments and drugstores. Yet while it could add a sense of security and convenience for businesses that roll it out, the technology has been widely criticized by privacy advocates for built-in racial biases and potential for misuse.
Facial recognition technology has the potential to be misused or abused in various ways, which can pose serious risks to individuals and society. It can be used to track and monitor individuals without their knowledge or consent, potentially violating their privacy. This technology can be prone to errors, which can lead to misidentification of individuals and can have serious consequences, particularly in the criminal justice system where misidentification can lead to wrongful arrests and convictions.
Has anyone thought about the reality of facial recognition systems becoming more likely to make errors for certain groups of people who look similarly? What about governments and other organizations using facial recognition technology to exert greater control over their populations, potentially infringing on civil liberties and human rights? This is happening now in China. See HERE.
An excerpt from a Harvard Law Review article was sent to me by framersqool who writes here on Think Things Through. He will be writing more about this topic in the future.
MAY 20, 2013
Harvard Law Review
[p.23:] Government use of persuasive surveillance is still in its relative infancy, but since the technologies of surveillance and Big Data analytics are available to the state as well as to private companies, we can imagine the government becoming increasingly able to engage in Target-style persuasion in the future.
The bottom line about surveillance and persuasion is that surveillance gives the watcher information about the watched. That information gives the watcher increased power over the watched that can be used to persuade, influence, or otherwise control them, even if they do not know they are being watched or persuaded. Sometimes this power is arguably a good thing, for example when police are engaged in riot control. But we should not forget that surveillance represents a persuasive power shift whether the watcher is a government agent or a corporate marketer, and whether the target is a rioter or law-abiding citizen.
Government and private company surveillance may be leading us down a slippery slope. Increasing surveillance can create a sense of being constantly watched and monitored, which can lead to a loss of freedom and autonomy and may result in people feeling self-conscious and inhibited in their behavior and decision-making.
Surveillance systems can be used to disproportionately target certain groups, such as racial or ethnic minorities, or individuals with certain beliefs or characteristics. This can lead to discrimination and unequal treatment. And most importantly, surveillance systems can be misused by those who have access to them. For example, surveillance footage may be used to stalk or harass individuals, or to gather sensitive information for nefarious purposes.
There will be more written on this site about the dangers of surveillance. Stay tuned.
Clayton is the founder and publisher of the social and political commentary newsletter Think Things Through and the host of the Think Things Through Podcast.
Twitter: @claytoncraddock
This is curiously serendipitous to my own turn of mind just this morning as I found and read this from my inbox.
A question which has challenged and at times tormented me throughout my life, but was especially present in it this morning as I awoke to begin my day, is:
Do my fellow Americans actually despise freedom?
Which of course begs a great many more questions, as to what, instead, compels the actions and decisions, as well as inaction and indecision, of this mysterious and in my eyes mostly incomprehensible notion that there exists some 'American Way' which is apparently so desirable a thing to aspire to.
And of course, contrary to the simplistic challenges I have consistently received from fellow Americans over a lifetime whenever I have suggested that the conditions they accept have little to do with freedom, no, I don't have all the answers. No, I don't necessarily offer some comprehensive alternative one may simply open like a package from a store and put to immediate use.
But what has stumped and more often than not infuriated me all this time is the mass tendency to go along with each new behavioral trend issued by pop culture, to adopt each new shiny thing offered by consumerism and immediately begin to treat it as a necessity which cannot be done without. And even more bizarrely, to allow one's behavior to be entirely a product of the desire to conform at all costs, and yet somehow assert that to conform with the latest trend is somehow an expression of one's uniqueness as a person.
Why does anyone not only tolerate but enthusiastically embrace an emergent way of life, in which one is continually subject to multiple forms of surveillance? More than once I have heard one version or another of a very frightening rationale among my fellow Americans:
"If you aren't doing anything wrong, you should have nothing to hide."
The very same mindset, of course, which saw South African police under apartheid storming through neighborhoods of unimaginable squalor searching for dissenters against apartheid. Which sent squads of leather-jacketed Gestapo agents pounding on every door in town following a rumor that someone might be hiding Jews or downed Allied pilots. Which had two fine young men of no particularly fanatical persuasion demanding that I undress in front of them and bend over and cough while they stared at my asshole in the local county jailhouse.
After all, if I was not indeed hiding drugs or weapons in my rectum, why should I object to anyone checking just to make sure?
As I stood upright again and began to don the ill-fitting orange jumpsuit they handed me, I just sighed and sort of chuckled to myself, and said, 'what a sad thing, to see such decent young men turning themselves into robots.'
Which of course auto-cues the standard Nuremberg Defense:
'We're just doing our jobs.'
I was there because someone had aimed a high-end surveillance device at my license plate nine months before, and sent me a ransom demand in the mail based on its AI-generated search of my records which showed no evidence of liability insurance. Rather than capitulate to paying $174 and further agreeing to remain under surveillance by the state for another two years, neither condition having been submitted before nor approved by any court of law before being demanded of me by bureaucrats, I had sold my car, bought a bicycle, and told the bureaucrats they were quite welcome to take a long walk off a short pier but not before they got out of my face and fucked themselves.
It had been a classic Orwellian example of how two plus two must equal five: my assertion that the due process of law does not include bureaucracies acting as a law unto themselves had turned out to be the incorrect response, and for it, at that bureaucracy's convenience after a delay of nearly a year since my refusal to comply had engineered a secret arrest warrant my own town's police department claimed never to have been aware of, and I was hauled off to jail one winter night by a sheriff's deputy.
But which among us was truly free, in the booking office of the jailhouse? The ones who paid for their daily bread by staring up a grown man's asshole? The lady crew chief who mitigated her embarrassment over how she had failed to incite the proper bovine submission from me in front of her subordinates, by warning me that my cellmates might rape me in the showers if I keep up this 'attitude?' (Is there something about sodomy as a skillset and weapon of compelled compliance, that gets these people out of bed each morning?)
It's a powerful metaphor, of the idea that to live in accordance with whatever latest demands are placed on oneself by whoever or whatever has the power to demand them, is to bend over and take it.
Why do Americans have more respect for those who bend over and take it, as a means of sustaining their ersatz freedom of going along to get along, than those who refuse to on every occasion?
'Go ahead, make my day' has given way to 'go ahead and cuff me, would you like to look up my ass too?'
And I just still can't work out WHY.