After San Francisco City Hall banned the use of facial recognition technologies, across the other side of the country, Somerville, Massachusetts has passed similar measures.
The two cities’ response is surprising in that it anticipates Europe’s more aware and respectful approach to privacy: Brussels is still very much in the preliminary stage of preparing legislation after the conclusions of an advisory panel, although everything indicates that a ban on the use of facial recognition algorithms to carry out mass surveillance activities will be the final outcome. In London, however, tests are going ahead, with police arresting people who cover their faces.
As facial recognition technology becomes simpler, more scalable, more precise and its adoption more ubiquitous, it presents us with a moral dilemma: one thing is using it for applications that make our lives easier and that we decide, such as unlocking our smartphone or our computer, boarding planes faster or passing through passport control, while it is quite another having to accept that the authorities are monitoring our every move. The tactics used by protesters in Hong Kong, such as wearing masks or putting stickers on different parts of their faces to confuse facial recognition systems, as well as using single-use metro tickets instead of their transport cards, or buying new SIM cards should alert us to the dystopia that awaits us if we allow the authorities to decide on how best to use surveillance technologies.
Companies like Amazon have made it clear that despite the opposition of employees, they will continue to sell their facial recognition technology to governments around the world. At the same time, there is also a techno-fatalist belief that facial recognition technology is here to stay and that we will have to accept it as part of everyday life from now on. But this resignation clashes with reality: we know from history that mass surveillance has never worked and ends up generating systems that monitor everyone except those with something to hide, while encroaching on hard-won freedoms. History should have taught us that simply saying: “I have nothing to hide, so therefore I have nothing to fear” is, to say the least, naïve.
How can we best regulate the use of facial recognition technologies? Should we restrict its use to exceptional situations and that must require a court order? Should we simply ban it? Or perhaps we should regulate its use only in certain, restricted situations? How are are we going to get a grip on a problem that is evolving in real time?
