With the recent protests and riots and the usage of facial recognition in identifying criminal behaviour by the police, the question has dawned in some people’s minds, have we become a big brother society?
However, I would also suggest that the question is really, how much of our privacy have we given away and how much more will we give?
This is because facial recognition is a small link in the chain that leads to a big brother world where the state is not only watching you, deciding whether you are doing right or wrong but also learning everything about you.
Look at your phone, did it open? How many of us easily accepted the move from entering the passcode to accepting the oh-so-easy facial recognition function that not only opens our phone but enables us to easily access various apps and social media accounts, make payments and even allows us into our bank accounts, all without having to remember those pesky passwords and PIN codes.
Yes, use my face, please! It’s simple and easy, and obviously it is totally secure. So what is the downside? Well, our face is being logged each time we use it.
A digital file of information about each one of us is building up in huge data warehouses and in what the industry calls data lakes.
An ocean of information that even bigger and more powerful computers are capable of ‘mining’ which then enables them to draw conclusions about what we might like to watch, read, eat, buy and so on, and that is just for starters.
For it is this combination of vast amounts of personal data, aided and abetted by the latest super computing power that is at the heart of what is becoming the AI generation.
Artificial intelligence is the name for the technology that can make decisions for us, based on knowing what we like, what we do, where we go and what services we access – especially when we use, or allow facial recognition to identify us.
So the real question becomes, who knows what we are doing when facial recognition is used? Who captures and records that data? What do they do with it?
Private sector businesses as yet aren’t at a scale where they can link all the information about us together. Maybe big firms like Apple, Google and Amazon if they continue to embed their services deep into our daily lives may get there but these businesses require us to make a conscious decision to use them. What about the state?
When every inch of the public realm is smothered by CCTV. When police officers and now even staff in some stores are wearing body cameras to ‘ensure and improve safety and security’. Is it no wonder that we are not walking into a surveillance state, we have already embraced it.
Today no one thinks twice about posting footage of a fellow citizen driving badly, shoplifting, gesticulating at a protest march or undertaking any other type of what is currently considered ‘unacceptable’ behaviour.
And you all know what’s coming next. Some of you already have them on your doorbells, some on your cars and many on your cycling helmets. It is your personal security cam! Fixed to your jacket or on your handbag. Switch it on or off when you want it to, to ensure you are always safe as sound, or at least someone else will be watching and recording.
LATEST OPINION:
So my friends, it is not big brother that we should be concerned about. We have already willingly given authority to others to watch us. Big brother has been with us for some time.
Equally, we have been very happy to use ‘our face as our passport’. The question we must ask now is how happy will we be to allow others to access our data, connect these data sets and make decisions about each one of us without us knowing, both now and in the future?
This is the issue of our personal data being collected and analysed leading to the very real challenge for each one of us of personal profile privacy.
When a very, very detailed picture of our lives can be built and used by others without us knowing, judging what type of citizen we are – and that is the worry we all now face.