Face It: We Know Where You Are

July 17, 2001

Over the past several years, facial recognition technology has advanced to the point where a computer can quickly scan a TV picture and recognize faces. This technology might someday be used in place of other forms of identification as it gets better and cheaper. What we're teaching the computers to do, in effect, is reduce faces to a couple of numbers that are easy to store and retrieve.

The potential of this technology to capture criminals has not been lost on law enforcement organizations in the United States: At Superbowl XXXV in Miami last January, the police set up facial recognition systems at the entrances to the stadium to see whether they could identify known criminals and suspects. And they did.

Alright so far. You and I can get money from the ATM just by flashing our pearly whites, and the cops get the bad guys. What's so bad about that?

Despite its good points, privacy advocates recognize a real danger lurking in the background: that the government will be able to build a dossier of everybody's whereabouts. Before you think this is a long leap, consider the following:

In order to identify and capture criminals, the cameras need to be everywhere.
The facial recognition software scans every face, even those of innocent people, and converts each to a couple of numbers.
To find a match, the computer looks in a database.

Here's the leap, and now it's not really that far:

Disk space is cheap, making it feasible to create large databases.
Storing a face's couple of numbers in a database is as easy as looking in a database for a known face's set of numbers.
Each face that gets scanned can be added to the database with a notation of date, time, and place, even if there is no name to go with the face.

Okay, you say, that's still slightly palatable because the government doesn't know the name belonging to the face. But here's the kicker:

If the government wants to find out where you've been, all it needs to do is scan a photo of you, perhaps from your driver's license, convert it to a couple of numbers, and ask all the databases whether you appeared anywhere. Instant Dossier.

The path from here to far-fetched isn't as long or as arduous as it might appear at first. Given the propensity for law enforcement to expand its surveillance capabilities and investigative techniques, it's suddenly not unreasonable to believe that widespread deployment of facial recognition surveillance is a serious threat to everybody's privacy.

October 5, 2001

This topic was touched on in today's NPR Talk of the Nation, found at NPR's online archives.