http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/parenting-dilemmas-in-the-age-of-facial-recognition/
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Rainier Ehrhardt/Getty ImagesFacebook has the largest photo bank of any company in the world.- Google+
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A picture is worth a lot more than a thousand words in the era of facial recognition.
With so many of our daily movements recorded so easily and artfully, it is hard to know how to react anymore to pictures being taken — and what will be done with them. Social norms are yet to be written, and the issue is all the more pronounced when it comes to pictures of children.
What if a bemused stranger starts taking pictures of your child in a public place? What if a music school posts pictures of your child on its Web site? What do you say to birthday party pictures on other people’s Facebook pages?
I have a young child, and I thought of these things in light of two parallel developments around facial recognition.
Google announced last week a new tool to allow users to obscure faces in videos that are posted on YouTube. It patted itself on the back for being among the first Internet companies to offer a visual anonymity tool.
“Whether you want to share sensitive protest footage without exposing the faces of the activists involved, or share the winning point in your 8-year-old’s basketball game without broadcasting the children’s faces to the world,” the company said in a blog post, “our face blurring technology is a first step towards providing visual anonymity for video on YouTube.”
The same day, a Facebook representative appeared on Capitol Hill to answer legislators’ questions about its use of facial recognition technology. Some 300 million photos are uploaded every day on the social networking site, making Facebook the largest photo bank of any company in the world. Where faces are part of the photo, Facebook can identify the people by name and “tag” them. The only way to avoid being tagged is to tweak your settings to disable it. (In “Privacy Settings,” go to “Timeline and Tagging” and check the “No One” box in answer to the question “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?”)
Facebook’s logic of facial recognition by default seemed to infuriate Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, who sponsored the legislative hearing. His most pointed question to the Facebook representative, Rob Sherman, came at the end. Can you assure users that the facial data will not be sold to a third party in the future, Mr. Franken asked. Mr. Sherman answered that no one can say how Facebook would evolve in the future.
I found this to be a refreshingly candid response. We are at the mercy of private corporations to decide how much control we have over how our pictures are used. One day, a benevolent Silicon Valley firm waves a magic wand and grants us a way to blur our image online. What about the next day? Could the company change its mind? Could another company develop new ways to profit from our pictures – and not tell us? And how will Facebook and all those application developers connected to Facebook use its rich repository of “faceprints,” as some people have called them, in the coming years? No one knows.
Keep in mind that by downloading some applications on Facebook, you give the company access to all your pictures.
Legislators have dangled the threat of regulation. Facebook and Google have both stepped up lobbying in Washington. Facebook reported last week that it spent close to $1 million in the second quarter of 2012; Google spends considerably more.
Why does this matter? It matters because our faces can be more revealing today than at any time in the past. They can potentially connect our offline and online existences.
Facial recognition technology can be vital, for instance, in nabbing criminals. It can also be used to identify people at a Tea Party meeting or a protest in Tahrir Square or, with so many cameras in public places, compile a record of all those who pass in front of a certain mosque or synagogue.
Our faces are immutable, as Sarah Downey, a lawyer who works for Abine, a company that offers free and paid tools to guard online identity, points out. It is one thing, she said, to post photos online of your children for friends and family members to see. It is another when advancing technology allows that photo to be connected to all the other data that’s out there about your families, including potentially where you live. “Everything they are doing is inescapably documented,” Ms. Downey said.
Abine is not a disinterested party in this debate. Its tools include one known as “DeleteMe,” which promises to expunge your digital footprint from data broker Web sites.
Meanwhile, as we figure out what to do when others post pictures of us, one Oregon company this month figured out how to build a new imaging tool that can attach itself to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones. With new technology, it announced in a news release, “we are now recognizing faces and reading license plates from stand-off ranges beyond audible detectability.” Drones, in other words, can be fitted with cameras that are good enough to recognize faces from so far away that we wouldn’t ever hear them whirring overhead.
