Facial Recognition Technology and the Right to Privacy
Weekly Update #19
Dear Members and Advocates,
On Monday March 18, CNET, a media outlet for news on technology and consumer electronics, published an article that scared the hell out of me. The article was about the use of facial recognition in different applications. Some of the applications completely obliterate any semblance of privacy, and for persons on the registry will literally leave us marked with a virtual scarlet letter on our faces.
I know that facial recognition technology exists in my iPhone – I use it to unlock my phone and login to certain applications. That’s a cool utility for it and I don’t think much about it because it’s on my personal phone that never leaves my side. When I learned that Facebook uses facial recognition to identify people in pictures, I became a little concerned. Literally, the Facebook app can scan hundreds of your pictures and identify the people in them. Because I’m not on Facebook and there’s nothing more than a pop-up label with your name on it, I’m not losing sleep over it. But after reading yesterday’s article I lost sleep.
Apparently, Ring (the smart-home company owned by Amazon) filed for a facial technology patent that would monitor neighborhoods for known sex offenders and those on “most wanted” lists and could then automatically notify law enforcement. You read that right! In a patent filed on June 7, 2018, Ring proposed to use facial recognition technology to compare the captured video to criminal record databases and could then notify the police. In other words; when you walk up to a friends house, the Ring doorbell could not only know ‘John is here’, but ‘John is here and he’s a registered sex offender and we’ve notified the police that he’s at Tom’s house’. Holy Cow!!!
Obviously you can forget about getting invited to another dinner party at Tom’s house, but what about some of the other possibilities? Will Tom be flagged as ‘associating’ with sex offenders? What if you live in Brevard and unbeknownst to you there’s a playground within 1000 feet of your buddy Tom’s house – can that be used to incriminate you? Other than police, who has access to this Ring data and what can they do with it?
Diving deeper into the technology and it’s applications, I learned that it’s being tested all over. Not just at airports and banks but at red-lights or anywhere there’s a connected camera – which is practically everywhere! I may not have “sex offender” tattooed on my face, but I might as well if facial recognition software is going to append the label to me wherever I go.
Thankfully organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU are pushing back against this privacy issue. While we may not be able to prevent its development, we can hopefully block some if its uses. Also, the use of these new technologies is further illustration of how pervasive this label has become wherever we go and in whatever we do. There’s no doubt we’ve come a long way since 2003 when (now) Justice John Roberts compared being on the sex offender registry to “filling out a Price Club application”.
Sincerely,
The Florida Action Committee
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I own a ring doorbell, this is indeed very problematic. Depending on the setting you don’t have to ring the bell. All you have to do is walk down the street, it picks up any movement. You won’t be able to walk down a street without people staring at your every move . To see if they can figure out a reason to call the police. On the subject of the label “ sex offender registry “ it’s no different than the term Nigger, it has the same connotation , and purpose for the user.
Face recognition software is already being used at Wal-Mart and other retail outlets to track Americans! You think it was a coincidence that teacher that ran off with the student in 2017 was recognized at a Wal-Mart? Here are the pictures the software found of Tad Cummins and his former student: https://www.divorcecourt.com/2017/04/06/crime-story-wife-of-tennessee-teacher-who-ran-off-with-student-files-for-divorce/ Additionally, your license plate may be run at various locations: https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr Big brother is here in a bigger way than Orwell could have ever imagined!