About Face
Is facial recognition ready for its post-phone future?
It didn’t take long for iPhone X’s Face ID to become one of the most coveted features on the phone—the thing that separated old from new back a year ago. People raced to test its limits and see if they could break it. Could you unlock your phone in the dark? Could you spoof the iPhone’s camera with silicon masks or a twin’s face? The hype dwindled as people with the new iPhones simply got used to unlocking their phone with a glance. It proved that facial recognition has finally become sophisticated enough to be useful. It isn’t just cool; it is convenient.
Now, dozens of phones come with face unlock features, and it’s also growing in other contexts like catching identity thieves, finding missing children, helping the blind, identifying underage drinkers, greeting hotel guests, and even finding lost pets (albeit identifying the face of an animal).
Still, the line between “convenient” and “worrisome” is not always clear. How might we be sure that facial recognition tech is used by you, not on you? How might we differentiate using facial recognition to catalog photos and identifying underage video game players from tracking school attendance or identifying and arresting protesters? The answer comes down to regulation. As the technology becomes more widespread and more powerful, legislators need to keep up with defining the acceptable uses and unacceptable ones.
Sources: Wired (September 10, 2018) | FaceFirst (May 2, 2018) Image: Randy Brooke/Getty