Facial Recognition Technology and the Dangers
Facial recognition is a feature that technology companies are implementing in almost everything they do. From unlocking your phone to securing payments, facial recognition is seen as the gateway for both today and tomorrow.
But though we might be seeing only the good part now, after all, facial recognition features are far too advanced. But at the same time, there are various concerns too. Though it can be considered as a technological convenience, it can also lead to a surveillance society too.
And this is not something that we should be concerned about happening in the future. This is something that we see today. For example, in Shangai and Shenzen, this technology was used to identify pedestrians at a red light crossing. And this was not a random incident but a test. China is expected to have 600 million of such cameras be installed throughout the country.
Conducted Tests
While that might be in China, there is news closer home too. In the United States, Amazon had marketed a service named Rekognition that used facial recognition system. But this feature was also used by the Oregon and Orlando police when faces of criminals were detected among videos of surveillance cameras.
Many governments, including America, are doubtful regarding this feature and are using a variety of tests to figure out if this service needs to be implemented or not. Countries like Belgium and England tested this feature, and hundreds of volunteer travelers had their face recognized by this feature.
Though the idea of face detection might sound fancy, there is also considerable risk too. There is the risk of data protection and there is also a risk of such information going to the wrong hands. This is also a violation of rights too. Everyone has the right to come and go anonymously, and this feature is a clear violation of this right.
Considerable Risk
But let’s just say that an amendment is brought to bring this feature into force. Even then, great measures need to be taken to ensure that the technology used is perfectly working, with a very low chance of being wrong. The acceptable level of error would have to be low. But even with a low error percentage also, the system got various faces wrong.
For example, Amazon’s software Rekognition mistook 21% of the US Congress members as criminals, even with an 80% reliability. So if we want this technology to be used in a much more wider scale, then we need to be sure that we can trust this technology.
