November 9th, Class Essay

11/9 Essay: Read this November 2nd article on a change in use of facial recognition technology by Meta (formerly Facebook) (hat tip to Arthur). What are your general thoughts on government and private company utilization of technologies that are able to recognize a face and/or match a human face from a digital image or a video frame against a database of faces? What advantages or benefits could/do such technologies provide? What role (if any) should a government play in regulating their use by individuals or companies? You have until 10:05.

I think that facial recognition technology should be able to be used by the government, but not by private companies. Facial recognition technology can be extremely helpful if a police department is attempting to track a suspect or known criminal. Cameras in public spaces can help to identify the suspect and track them down. Without the benefit that facial recognition technology provides to police departments and detectives, it is likely that it would be much harder to track down criminals. However, a major concern with the use of facial recognition systems, in particular, to identify and track down suspects, is that it can lead to false identification of suspects and doesn’t work equally well on all races and genders. Thus, in order to use the facial recognition systems to their most effective capacity, the algorithm must be further developed to accurately identify people. Until that can be done, the question of whether we should use facial recognition technology this way comes down to the moral question of what is more harmful: wrongly convicting individuals, or having possible suspects on the loose?

I do not think that it is necessary for private companies to use facial recognition technology. For example, Facebook uses facial recognition technology to identify friends in a photo, and Apple does a similar thing by creating folders of your pictures with different people, using facial recognition. These are non-essential services, and without them, people would not be significantly worse off. Not being able to automatically tag your friend in a post is not a life-ending scenario. Because these companies aren’t providing essential services and having people’s faces in a database can cause ethical concerns as well as possibly open people up to risks, private companies should not be able to use facial recognition technology.

Lastly, I believe that a government should lookout for the best interests of its citizens and regulate facial recognition software use by preventing it from being used in non-essential ways, such as on social media. American citizens have the right to privacy, and thus the government should be aware of the threats of facial recognition technology to citizens’ privacy and take the steps necessary to prevent facial recognition software from being used incorrectly, non-essentially, or even maliciously.

Overall, I believe that there are some positives of facial recognition technology, and it can be used effectively in police departments in the future once the algorithm has been fixed in order to work accurately on identifying people. However, I believe that facial recognition technology does not belong in the hands of private companies, especially those using facial recognition for non-essential purposes. Based upon this, the government should take steps to regulate the use of facial recognition technology to protect the privacy of its citizens.