The debate over facial recognition has been extensive, with privacy advocates and law enforcement officials pitted against each other for the right, or lack thereof, to be faceless. From Facebook’s auto-tag features to Google’s reverse face search tech, the consumer-facing functionality of this controversial tech has foreshadowed the potentially problematic future of law enforcement and technology for a while now.
The tech, as you can see, aggregates an accuracy score that assess a wide range of features, from demographics and emotions to image quality and facial landmarks, to decipher exactly who a person is. Unfortunately, as the critics have pointed out, it’s far from perfect in some pretty meaningful ways.
Why Are Some Shareholders Against the Tech?
The few outside shareholders who asked for the vote have plenty of reasonable concerns about selling facial recognition software to government organizations. For one, the right to privacy is the go-to concern when it comes to facial recognition technology, if only because it does make it nearly impossible to “opt out” of the overly connected world that has been so readily established in 2019.
Can We Trust the Private Sector with Facial Recognition?
We’d love to think that the big tech companies we entrust with our personal data and facial structure are noble, good-hearted organizations exclusively using it for the betterment of society. Tragically that is simply not the case.
