In the News
In Amazon is selling police departments a real-time facial recognition system, Russell Brandom discusses Amazon’s Rekognition, a facial recognition tool, which can perform facial recognition analysis on real time video and images. Brandom explains that this tool is currently used by police, social media sites, and news outlets to identify specific individuals or objects. Such use has led the ACLU to file complaints that Rekognition could be a violation of civil liberty.
Our Take
Privacy in the age of social media and technology is difficult to accomplish. Many of us choose to publicly share details about our lives on social media sites or to give this information to companies in order to receive services–some optional, and some not–from them. The things that make us feel the most discomfort and that often make it into tech news tend to be the things that we have not explicitly opted into: companies sharing our information with third parties, or, in this case, technology that monitors the public spaces we happen to move through every day.
Most public areas and many private ones, especially in cities and around sensitive areas such as banks or cash registers, already have security cameras watching for potentially dangerous activity on camera. And much of the time, we are happy for this: these videos are frequently used to find the person who stole your phone or robbed your convenience store. However, as cameras shift to more general monitoring of the populace, the potential for misuse increases exponentially. Although facial recognition software may prove helpful to police and even provide services that we value online, it is important for us to consider how much importance we place in convenience vs. privacy or even security vs. privacy, and how comfortable we are with so much data about our daily lives being stored somewhere for use by the government…or the hackers who locate it.
Recommendations
So how can you protect your privacy?
- Be cautious about sharing both information and photos online, and check the privacy settings on your accounts
- Stay up-to-date on legislation, technology, and legal battles that may impact your privacy, so that you can make informed decisions both on- and offline