Widely available face recognition could potentially threat societies in cities.
What would we gain from this? Targeted ads when walking in to your local store? Never having to tag another photo again? (that one is just awesome, but what else?)
Personally this is a tech that I would gladly postpone as long as possible, or at least until the whole tech-thing has stabilized. Most governments still want and think it is within their right to censor internet and is as eager as ever to criminalize cryptography - do we want such immature governments to have this tool in their arsenal as well?
>Personally this is a tech that I would gladly postpone as long as possible, or at least until the whole tech-thing has stabilized.
Don't think this whole "tech-thing" is going to "stabalize" anytime soon. And by anytime soon I mean 'ever'. :)
I think that a fundamental problem with increasing invasions of privacy facilitated by rapidly changing technology is that the melting away of privacy occurs almost immediately as the tech becomes available.
It happens on two fronts. A)Governments adopt tech towards this end almost universally, and push (and often surpass) the legal limits imposed by law, and B)Citizens continually degrade it themselves in exchange for services. Just look at Facebook, and how seemingly every service we use is stripping out information about us to build or integrate with a social graph.
You get this effect where younger generations are born with an ever increasing tolerance of privacy stripping technologies, combined with governments continually pushing past the boundaries of whats allowed. When they do go over the line, they merely deny it until they are caught (if they are), and then change the law to make their behavior legal, with no sanction for past transgressions. The population, ever evolving to respect privacy less, does not fight this.
Unless there is a cultural shift to revise, reiterate, and anchor respect for privacy to a Constitution-sized stone, I think we will see the same trend continue in perpetuity. Especially when you consider what has happened despite our Constitutional privacy protections.
The conflux of private enterprise profit seeking and government desire for control is an extremely powerful dynamic operating against privacy, and it is operating against it every day, by degrees. You are going to get your targeted ads as you walk into a store someday (probably sooner than later), and law enforcement will almost certainly have trivial access to it without a warrant, as they do to many now. I don't see this dynamic changing, and obviously technological advancements aren't going to wait around for us to sort these complex issues out.
There are plenty of potential benefits, for example I flew home (to England) a couple of days ago and rather than queue for a while to have someone check my passport I was able to pop my passport onto a scanner then have the machine check my eyes to see if I am who I claim to be, which meant that in 30 seconds I was out the other side. Facial recognition could speed that up even further.
You could get home and your front door would automatically unlock as you approach it, get into your car with genuine keyless entry rather than just the kind that means the keys are in your pocket, pop into Starbucks and be handed your regular drink (or something you ordered on a phone) by somebody who has never served you before, etc.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of arguments against this technology, and I'm not even saying that the good points will end up happening (there's plenty of technological improvements Starbucks could make with existing fairly basic technology already), just that it isn't hard to imagine more than just Facebook-style photo tagging.
Personally I'm not too fussed about the success rate of checking who gets into the UK, while I do care about how long it takes me to get home from abroad, so... don't really mind whether it's good security or not.
The same technology could possibly identify weapons that people had. A side effect of that would be that we could make a very legitimate argument to demilitarize the police force, if a crowd is unarmed, the police should not need guns, tasers and pepper spray are adequate.
Likewise, we would have more recordings of police interactions and be able to lower those corruption rates, as it is now they are currently resisting allowing people to film them.
Socially, if you want anything remotely reasonable to happen here, and the technology is only going to progress and get better, I think we need need to counter weigh the benefits with costs to the police. Maybe they don't need guns any more, I know most of them will be against that, if they can tell who and how many people are in a given building at any time, maybe they don't need SWAT teams. Likewise, if they are looking for specific individuals they can identify more ideal times to apprehend that person with out violence.
Existing iris scanners can be deceived by pictures of other people's irises. I do not doubt that facial recognition will be fooled by people making masks (to fool infrared scanning).
The basic principle of biometric reading is the equivalent to sliding your photo under the door to a guard. The guard checks the photo against an already existing set of photos and lets you in. They don't check that the photo is of you - which is a common failing when you let marketing design your security.
This is because everyone thinks a biometric is some sort of password. It is actually a username. You are stating I am the person whom my fingerprints/face/retinas state I am. Then the guard should challenge that person with that face to provide a password that is known to be held by that face.
Its a common fallacy that leads to people having their fingers chopped off to steal their fingerprint-recognising cars.
What would we gain from this? Targeted ads when walking in to your local store? Never having to tag another photo again? (that one is just awesome, but what else?)
Personally this is a tech that I would gladly postpone as long as possible, or at least until the whole tech-thing has stabilized. Most governments still want and think it is within their right to censor internet and is as eager as ever to criminalize cryptography - do we want such immature governments to have this tool in their arsenal as well?