Law enforcement agencies use the technology to identify known criminals and to find missing children or seniors. Airports are increasingly adding facial recognition technology to security checkpoints. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security predicts that by 2023 97% of travellers will be subjected to facial recognition.

Facial recognition can also be convenient. In the same way that fingerprint or voice recognition grants access, facial recognition may become a laissez-passer to offices, banks, museums, senior citizens’ homes and hotel rooms.

Although possible, it is hard to fool facial recognition technology, and so it can help prevent fraud. In addition, when people know they are being watched, they are less likely to commit a crime so facial recognition technology is a deterrent.

So much for the pros. There are cons. The biggest drawback is the threat to an individual’s privacy. Facial recognition is considered invasive, inaccurate, and lacking proper regulation and oversight. Several cities are thinking twice about real-time facial recognition surveillance because the risks of using the technology outweigh the benefits.

Amazon’s Rekognition software, which has been used by police departments throughout the USA, has been found to perform poorly when identifying an individual’s gender if they are female or darker-skinned. Such biases in the software put marginalized communities at risk and make people of colour more likely to be the victims of wrongful arrest.

The slippery slope of facial recognition technology leads to real-time, non-stop surveillance, where daily activities such as shopping and visiting as well as activities like attending a political protest are monitored, recorded and archived. There is no way of knowing how such information will be used in future or who will have access to it.

Civil society groups are demanding an immediate moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement and other government agencies. They want public consultations on reform of privacy legislation at all levels, including regulation and oversight of its use.

Information privacy rights, which include biometric identification, require carefully crafted legal mechanisms that cover all eventualities and bind all potential users of personal information.

Artificial intelligence applications and facial recognition technology can be powerful and useful tools when used appropriately. But for this to happen, lawmakers and civil society will have to constrain and monitor their use and abuse.

Photo: helloabc/Shutterstock

Photo: Anna Hoychuk/Shutterstock

Electronic tagging has always been controversial. Today it is being touted in the name of health security.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, intrusive monitoring tools adopted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic may further normalize the surveillance of individuals by governments and private entities.

Governments have been promoting “wearables” (devices worn on the body) in their efforts to monitor and contain the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. But many such tools raise problems that may undermine the public health goals for which they are being adopted, and lead to unintended consequences for privacy, association, and freedom of expression.

“Wearables” can be mandated by the government or made voluntary (although apparently users don’t always understand exactly what it is they’re being asked to do). “Wearables” may contain an electronic sensor to collect health information (by measuring vital signs) which acts as an early warning to identify likely COVID-19 patients before they show any symptoms. They can also be used to detect and/or log people’s proximity to one another (to enforce social distancing) or between the “wearable” and a person’s mobile phone or a stationary home beacon (to enforce quarantine).

For quarantine enforcement, the devices might also use a GPS receiver to inform authorities of the wearer’s location. Some use Bluetooth radio beacons to let authorities confirm when the wearer is within range of a phone that is running a contact tracing app (rather than leaving the phone at home and going outside in violation of a health order). And some “wearables” may be low-tech wristbands carrying a QR code, which authorities may regularly ask the user to photograph with a mobile app.

The global market for wearable devices is expected to top $52 billion by 2022, the allure being that smart watches and other “wearables” act as an extension of a smartphone. They give instant access to apps, email, text messages, and the web. That raises questions. Who gets to see all or part of the data? How securely are data stored? How much is divulged in the name of national security?

The technical term the US government uses to refer to tracking its citizens’ movements is “physical activity surveillance”. Privacy is not a priority – and all the more so in other countries, such as China, where surveillance is aimed at state coercion and control. But hey, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you!

Photo above: R. Classen/Shutterstock

A recent article published by OneZero notes, “In an attempt to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic, more than 25 governments around the world have instituted temporary or indefinite efforts to single out infected individuals or maintain quarantines. Many of these efforts, in turn, undermine personal privacy.”

OneZero explores tech and science: “the undercurrents of the future”. We Mapped How the Coronavirus Is Driving New Surveillance Programs Around the World by Dave Gershgorn, acknowledges that, “It’s a complex trade-off: Governments need information to create containment strategies and know where to focus resources. At the same time, governments have a way of holding onto tools that undermine citizens’ privacy long after the moment of crisis has passed.”

Credible news reports say Chinese authorities are tapping publicly located cameras to run facial recognition searches as well as tracking individuals in more than 200 cities via a smartphone app that grades their health and assigns them a classification of green, yellow, or red. The app sends that data to the police and acts as a pass for entry into certain public places.

In Dubai, cameras used to catch speeding motorists focus on license plates to discover if they are deemed essential workers and if so whether they are actually going to their place of work.

In Russia, with more than 100,000 cameras around Moscow, the government is using facial recognition and phone-based location tracking to monitor people under quarantine. Local governments have been asked to create their own surveillance systems.

“The most common form of surveillance implemented to battle the pandemic is the use of smartphone location data, which can track population-level movement down to enforcing individual quarantines. Some governments are making apps that offer coronavirus health information, while also sharing location information with authorities for a period of time,” writes Gershgorn

Similar monitoring is taking place in the USA, the United Kingdom, and other countries of Europe. Tracking is often voluntary, but its implications are more worrying when, for example, corporations are supplying data about individuals to government organizations. Akin to banks telling government where individuals use their bank cards.

No surveillance without safeguarding privacy!

Photo above: Giggsy25/Shutterstock

Ordinarily, the private life of an individual was not open to scrutiny, while public life was the concern of law and order and decency. In communication terms, privacy meant that only the addressee could open letters or telegrams and telephone operators would not listen in to conversations. Unauthorised disclosure could be sanctioned.

In “Privacy is the new wilderness we must protect” (openDemocracy 2 August 2019), Maciej Ceglowski calls for an updated concept of privacy as a public good if we are to save our rights as individuals in today’s digital world.

Ceglowski calls this ambient privacy – “the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.”

The digital surveillance system functions effectively and efficiently because it is automated. Computers monitor and sift, identifying key attributes, making connections and assessing probabilities. Commercial entities and security services use that data: the former to compile marketing trends and the latter to assess imminent culpability. China is using deep-learning systems to search in real time through video feeds capable of capturing millions of faces. State security is building an archive that will be used to identify suspicious behaviour in order to predict who will become an “unsafe” social actor.

In this context, Ceglowski argues:

“Our discourse around privacy needs to expand to address foundational questions about the role of automation: To what extent is living in a surveillance-saturated world compatible with pluralism and democracy? What are the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds into a corporate database? What does it mean to be manipulated from an early age by machine learning algorithms that adaptively learn to shape our behavior

The alternative is a world with no ambient privacy and little data protection, dominated by hostile governments and big corporations. It is the kind of dystopia that George Orwell identified in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in which “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”

What shall we do to prevent it?

Photo above: SHENZHEN, CHINA: Facial recognition technology at street to identify jaywalkers and automatically issue them fines by text. Offenders faces are displayed on screens at crossings. Photo:  StreetVJ/Shutterstock