Abuse of face recognition: a game where no one wins
Abuse of face recognition: a game where no one wins
We know that this law promulgated by the Portland City Council to prohibit the government from using facial recognition technology has its roots in a major issue on "whether facial recognition technology should be banned" opened in the United States in June this year. debate.
In support of the "BLM" (black life) protests in the United States, technology companies represented by Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon have expressed their refusal to provide facial recognition technology services to the U.S. police. Among them, IBM directly announced that it would abandon the facial recognition business. Radical can be seen in general. At the end of June, the Technical Policy Group of the American Computer Association (ACM) called for publicly urging US lawmakers to immediately suspend the use of facial recognition by companies and government agencies on the grounds of documented racial and gender biases.
In fact, before this, cities such as San Francisco and Boston had banned the use of facial recognition technology for police enforcement on the grounds of gender bias and misidentification. Now, with the promotion of members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, the local councils and governments of many U.S. states have begun to discuss and prohibit facial recognition technology for law enforcement.
Although the police’s facial recognition software had flaws in the past, there have been cases of misidentification and arrest of suspects, but the technical problem seems to be solved by improving the technology. Now for political correctness, they have directly overturned this technology.
On the other hand, we have also seen that the little people have also acquired the "dragon slaying technique" against the big ones. Radical protesters have also spared no effort to obtain police identity data.
Before the introduction of face recognition technology, some anti-surveillance organizations adopted a crowdsourcing approach, which is to rely on Internet users to identify the identities of police officers in police violent law enforcement videos, or directly upload photos of police officers in uniform, and finally pass those You can search the public database that records law enforcement officers to find the names and badge numbers of police officers.
Now, these open-source databases are becoming a way for developers like Howell to obtain photos of police officers, and face recognition technology can quickly determine the identity of police officers in current law enforcement operations.
Of course, this is an advantageous way for people who suffer from violent law enforcement to prosecute these law enforcement officers, but at the same time, the application of facial recognition technology may lead to abuse by more radical personnel. Because these police officers will also have a private life, they will also travel with their families and children. Once some people can use this tool to track these police officers, it is likely to put these police officers and their families in a more dangerous situation.
Ordinary people are worried that the official abuse of facial recognition technology will be unfairly treated because of misrecognition and racial prejudice, but now law enforcement officials are being followed or retaliated by radicals because of the possible abuse of facial recognition technology.
In order to highlight this contradiction, a French artist Paolo Cirio recently launched an exhibition called "Capture" on the Internet, and released 1,000 facial photos of French police officers. This is from the Internet and some photographers who participated in the protest. Photos obtained there. After he compiled these photos, he claimed that this was the first step in developing a face recognition application.
Immediately after, he received pressure from the French Ministry of the Interior, and he immediately removed the photo. The artist's position is precisely to prohibit face recognition. He hopes that officials will be aware of the pressure that face recognition technology brings to people, whether it is the public or law enforcement. But now the official approach is only to solve the "problem-proposed person", not to solve the problem.
