Facial Recognition’s Trust Problem

Facial recognition is used for public surveillance and business access control. The two are very different; but both functions suffer from a major drawback. People do not trust facial recognition.

Surveillance is the primary problem – it is intrusive and insufficiently secure. It is non-consensual and used in public spaces by unknown people for unknown purposes. Access authentication is more constrained. It is used in discrete buildings by individual known operators for a known purpose, and is consensual.

Facial recognition and surveillance

The primary concerns over surveillance-focused facial recognition are the still lingering memories of Edward Snowden’s revelations of widespread and hidden NSA and GCHQ surveillance. This is combined today with the lack of user consent for the collection and use of personal images, their storage in unknown databases, and their use by unknown entities for unknown purposes. 

Clearview and GDPR is an example of the latter concern. Clearview web-scraped ...