Facial Recognition Software Raises Large Privacy Concerns

An article by James Temple called “Facial recognition software’s privacy concerns” raises some very interesting questions regarding privacy and facial recognition software.  This article focuses on several concerns regarding how facial recognition is used currently, and how it will be used in the future. According to Mr. Temple, although facial recognition makes it easier to tag your friends in photos on Facebook, it also allows for more disturbing applications. Among identifying students using the most basic Facebook profile information and this type of software, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University were able to, in some cases, use this information to accurately guess the first five numbers of students Social Security Numbers.  Many companies, as well as the government are investing in the technology to match faces to identities.  The more photos of an individual that are tagged, the more accurate the results of facial recognition. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo also use facial recognition in photo, video, and gaming products, so facial recognition software consistently gains additional data to be used for more accurate recognition. Privacy settings often allow for this feature to be turned off, but as many users do not change their settings, making information more readily accessible to companies and marketers.

While we cannot slow the growth or usage of this software, and we cannot assume this it is only going to be used for not malicious applications, we can control how it will apply to us. Many privacy settings allow us to control the information that we put out. The largest part of this is knowledge. If we are more aware of the settings used with our social media sites, we can be more vigilant in keeping our “Faceprint” safe. By controlling settings on Facebook we can keep people that are not a part of our social circle from having access to our pictures, we can also keep our friends from tagging us in photos.  Many of the platforms that we use have a feature that we can use to opt out of these services. However, it should be required that a company or a software have a disclaimer that they use this type or software, or that the information could be used by this software. There is no way to eradicate our footprint if we are involved on the internet, but we can maintain control over how many data points we allow to the public.

Along with actively educating the public that this is a threat, we also need to make solutions readily available to the public. Having easy to understand tutorials available for public usage on how to keep their images safer, as well as better “help” guides to deal with privacy settings on our favorite websites, would go far to lessen the potential threats to our privacy. One other option for consumers, to find their images online, in order to remove them or adjust the privacy settings, is to use facial recognition software to find their own image. This would give users an opportunity to adjust settings or delete images wherever they may be.

Link to original article :
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Facial-recognition-software-s-privacy-concerns-3645779.php#page-1