KATE THOMPSON DAVY: Facial recognition and privacy: who’s watching the watchers?
Automated facial recognition is a useful tool, but there is mounting concern about ethical and privacy implications
Futurists have long predicted the rise of facial recognition. It’s a classic feature of science fiction, and today we are living that sci-fi life. We have self-driving cars, real-time translation apps, holograms of long-dead artists, and mind-controlled prosthetics. Facial recognition is just another of these mind-blowing tools that is coming of age.
Of course, it isn’t an entirely modern invention. As I understand it, the first systems that could be called computer-assisted facial recognition date back to the 1960s. In the ’90s software for automated facial recognition (AFR) became commercially available, and as digital imagery and artificial intelligence systems become cheaper, better and more easily accessible in the past decade or so facial recognition has boomed...
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