Back in the 1920s, barnstormers crisscrossed the country, dropping into farmer’s fields to offer rides in their exciting new technology, the airplane. These daredevils pushed the performance limits of their aircraft—and all too often, crashed.
They also provided an example that’s been repeated time and again throughout history: People rapidly applying new technologies to new uses, and a lack of regulation causing real and imagined problems.
We’re now at a similar point not only with face recognition, but also with many other fast-moving technologies with privacy implications, such as always-listening speakers and phones, GPS that tracks our every move, and, of course, social media. While my recommendations below apply to those technologies as well, I’m focusing on face recognition because there’s currently talk about banning it.
I appreciate that any technology that collects data about the public can cause legitimate concerns about privacy and civil liberties. But much of the recent reporting about face recognition is based upon partial truths and misunderstandings. The Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) released by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology this past December, makes clear that different face recognition systems have different performance levels with different test groups, such as sex, age and race. But that doesn’t mean deliberate bias, only that some vendors’ systems perform better than others—which is typical of all emerging technologies. Competition is a powerful motivator: Vendors will learn from the FRVT report and improve.
Because of the inherent complexities of face recognition, it’s easy—and, in some cases, beneficial—for some stakeholders to mischaracterize how the technology works and its ..
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