You can change your name or use a pseudonym. You can also edit or delete your social media accounts. But you cannot change your face so easily. Facial recognition helps us solve a lot of problems — and it simultaneously creates plenty of new ones. In this post, we discuss the threats that come with the global spread of such systems.
1. Losing the right to privacy — on a global scale
The FBI officially maintains the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS) — a database containing photos of people accused or convicted of civil and criminal proceedings. That’s OK, isn’t it?
Not at all! In May, the American Government Accountability Office audited the Bureau and found out that in fact the FBI’s database of 412 million photos includes pictures of people who were never the target of any investigation. The Bureau even has a separate unit that is in charge of facial recognition: Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation ( FACE) Services.
As it turned out, FBI representatives made arrangements with several states and obtained photos from driver’s licenses and passport and visa applications, as well as images of criminal suspects and convicts. The database also includes photos of foreign nationals — potentially about 100 million of them.
The FBI actively uses facial recognition during investigations. We’ve already written about how this approach pays off. But the situation is more complicated than that. Facial recognition technology is young and imperfect, and the FBI’s system is no exception: It has racial biases and at best achieves 80%-85% accuracy. At the same time, the FBI deliberately covered up the scale of its facial recognition usage, contrary to the requirements of the Privacy Impact Assessment.
— Kaspersky Lab (@kaspersky) August 19, 2016
Also noteworthy: The city council of Moscow and Russian law enforcement try to keep abreast of relevant technology and are getting ready to implement FaceN technology (developers of this system also provided the code for FindFace — a service that lets people search for other people using their photos). These new systems will be connected to hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras in Moscow.
As Russian media Meduza reports, there are no analogues to this system in any city in the world. The algorithm can compare people on the streets with criminals database, but it’s not all. It can also detect individuals in any part of the city and match their images with social network accounts, which usually contain a lot of personal information”.
We should also point out that in the beginning of this year Russian Senate compelled Russian courts to consider photos and videos as legal evidence. Prior to that, the decision was at the court’s discretion.
2. Abuse by law enforcement
Facial recognition makes mistakes. People in charge of these systems misuse them — it’s a known fact. For example, in August, the New York Times reported that San Diego police gathered images of guilty and innocent people without their permission.
Aaron Harvey, a 27-year-old African-American living in San Diego claimed that police treated him with prejudice. Harvey lives in one of the most violent areas of the city. That is probably why the police stopped him more than 50 times and said he was a suspected gang member. When he refused to allow the officer to take his photo, the officer boasted that he could do so anyway.
— Kaspersky Lab (@kaspersky) July 1, 2016
“He said: ‘We’re going to do this either legally or illegally,’ and pulled me out of the car” — Harvey, describing the incident to the New York Times.
Earlier, in 2013, authorities in Boston also tested a facial recognition system. It was linked to surveillance cameras that covertly scanned people’s faces during concerts and other outdoor events. At the end of the testing period, the project was scrapped for ethical reasons. But Boston is one deal, and global implementation is quite another: Facial recognition systems are now being widely used by government agencies.
3. Corporations spying on everybody
Organizations own face databases t