Facing the Privacy Costs of Biometric Identification

Thanks to massive gains in accuracy and lower costs, facial recognition is better than ever and its applications for governments are growing. But with the technology’s adoption come increased threats to personal data. U.S. Customs and Border Protection plans to use facial recognition for more than 97 percent of commercial air travelers by 2022. Flickr/US Customs/Donna Burton In 2017, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Hillsboro, Ore., became one of the first law enforcement agencies in the country to use Amazon’s facial recognition software program, known as Rekognition. Powered by the latest in artificial intelligence, the tool allows Washington County officers to look for matches of a suspect’s face by quickly sorting through more than 300,000 mug shots in a county database that goes back to 2001, according to a report in The Washington Post . Sheriffs have used facial recognition more than a thousand times since the program was installed more than 18 months ago, and the software has led to dozens of arrests for theft, violence and other crimes, according to the Post, but its use has also raised some red flags among privacy advocates who question its accuracy, especially for individuals with dark-skinned faces, and how the police decide to use the technology. The facial recognition market is growing rapidly ($7.76 billion value globally by 2022, according to the research firm MarketsandMarkets) as demand for surveillance, monitoring and identity grows. But as the technology becomes increasingly accurate, it could further diminish what privacy we have left, say critics. That has set off alarm bells, demands for stricter regulations and laws on how and when it should be used, and, in some cases, outright bans. Algorithms Grow Up Biometric identification technology has been around for decades. Fingerprinting became a high-tech, automated process with the development of automated […]

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