Facial Recognition Tech Will Soon Be Everything

Written by Brooks Canavesi on September 25, 2018. Posted in IoT

In the future, your face will be your key to the world. If you look around today, you can already see this future taking shape. Facial recognition technology is popping up everywhere these days—even where you would hardly expect it. But will facial recognition bring the future we want or the future we dread?

It All Started with an iPhone

No, Apple doesn’t deserve credit for inventing facial recognition (the credit goes to Woody Bledsoe, Helen Chan Wolf, Charles Bisson, and other pioneers of automated face recognition), but the company has achieved what many other companies before it have been unable to achieve: make face recognition mainstream. In 2017, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, went on stage to demonstrate Apple’s latest and greatest smartphone, the iPhone X, and showcase all of its new features. One such new feature was Face ID, a facial recognition system designed and developed by Apple exclusively for the iPhone X. It took a few tries, but Federighi eventually unlocked the iPhone X with his face and single-handedly shifted the attention of the entire tech industry to facial recognition. It has been nearly a year now since that historic demonstration, and facial recognition no longer feels new. “I think we’re seeing it ripen and fall off the tree. This seems like the moment where it’s really going to begin affecting our lives,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. Indeed, companies now seem to be pitching facial recognition software as the future of everything from retail to school shootings. Let’s take a closer look at some of the more talked-about use cases of facial recognition technology to better understand where it is and where it’s going.

Shopping Revolution

A year before Apple made facial recognition mainstream with the iPhone X, Amazon surprised the world with its first Amazon Go grocery store. What sets the Amazon Go chain apart from Walmart or Tesco is the checkout experience. The customers simply enter the store, open the Amazon Go app, grab anything they want, and walk out—no cashiers, no self-serving checkout stations, no delays. The Amazon Go experience is made possible by the fusion of several cutting-edge technologies, including computer vision, deep learning algorithms, and sensor fusion. These technologies automate much of the purchase, check out, and payment steps associated with a retail transaction. I personally visited the Amazon Go store in Seattle this August near Amazon HQ and can attest that the experience was magic. While Amazon doesn’t use facial recognition technology in its stores (the camera in its stores are used to detect which items a customer took), it serves as an excellent example of how the future of retail could look like. Walmart, for example, has patented technology that would enable cameras to capture shoppers’ facial expressions to measure how satisfied with their shopping experience they are. Software company FaceFirst is marketing its facial recognition technology to retailers as a theft-prevention solution. According to its survey, 56 percent of shoppers are open to using facial recognition to guard against crimes such as shoplifting, which costs retailers roughly $50 billion annually. “Most large retail chains have data about known organized retail criminals that have stolen from them in the past, but natural limitations on both human memory and perception makes identifying them when they re-enter a store very difficult,” says Peter Trepp, CEO of FaceFirst. “Face recognition solves this problem by instantly identifying these individuals and alerting in-store personnel who can prevent theft or fraud from happening. That alone decreases theft and justifies having the technology on site.” By 2022, technology-enabled checkouts are expected to account for $78 billion a year in the US, up from just about $9 billion today, according to a report from Juniper Research.

Big Brother Is Watching

Some schools in the United States have implemented facial recognition technology to prevent gun attacks. Officials at the Lockport school district in New York spent most of its $4 million state “Smart School” grant on a surveillance system known as Aegis. “We always have to be on our guard. We can’t let our guard down,” Lockport Superintendent Michelle T. Bradley told the Buffalo News. “If we had a student who committed some type of offense against the code of conduct, we can follow that student throughout the day to see maybe who they interacted with,” another school official added. The district’s decision to bring facial recognition to schools has sparked a nation-wide debate about the ethical aspects of the technology. In China, however, facial recognition in schools and elsewhere is already part of daily reality for most of the country’s 1,4 billion citizens. In some Chinese schools, facial recognition systems are used to monitor student performance, catch cheaters, and check whether students are paying attention in class. The system can record whether students feel happy, sad, surprised, and so on. The gathered data can then be used to evaluate the performance of the teachers. Outside schools, the Chinese government has created a massive network of surveillance cameras with facial recognition capabilities, and it uses them to locate criminals, shame jaywalkers, or even deal with toilet paper theft, among other things. The police in the country is also making use of the technology, with special glasses that scan faces in a crowd to locate criminals.

Growing Privacy Concerns

It’s impossible to deny that facial recognition technology has many legitimated uses, but it’s difficult to draw a line between what’s useful and what’s intrusive. “Facial recognition is a tool, and it can be used in a variety of different ways. We can be comfortable with some uses of the tool—like, to help us unlock our phones. That doesn’t mean we should be comfortable with all uses, like surveillance by law enforcement,” says Clare Garvie, a privacy lawyer with the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to defend and preserve individual rights and liberties, facial recognition cameras don’t belong in schools since they pose serious privacy and safety risks and make students feel like they are constantly under suspicion. The potential for the abuse of facial recognition technology has even prompted Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, to call for public action and corporate responsibility. “If we move too fast with facial recognition, we may find that people’s fundamental rights are being broken,” he wrote in a recent blog post. “This technology can catalog your photos, help reunite families or potentially be misused and abused by private companies and public authorities alike.”

Conclusion

We are moving toward a future where facial recognition technology watches over every step we make. Like any technology, facial recognition can be used for both good and bad. At the moment, we are at an important crossroad that will determine which uses of facial recognition we’ll find acceptable and legal in the future and which won’t be allowed.