I have read in the privacy community that facial recognition done in public places is considered problematic. Not knowing what is considered the crux of the matter, I have to ask about some facial and behavioral recognition use cases here, and whether they are a problem or not
- Digital signage on roads, cameras in stores, etc. read pedestrians’ faces, movements, etc. and infer attributes for marketing purposes (sometimes the inferred attributes are stored as is, sometimes they are stored as statistics and the attributes themselves are removed)
- Public transit agencies can share police databases to identify and track individuals with arrest records
- Public agencies use facial and behavioral recognition to determine and track suspicious persons. The information read is stored.
Along with what’s already been said: it’s not only what the entity collecting it is using it for, I also have issue with it being abused by others, such as hackers who obtain and sell this data, or even a lone malicious employee (‘insider threat’). Data collection is a professional industry (even the criminal side) and I have no doubt that companies or systems collecting this data are targeted for it.
Someone may want to collect it for a benevolent purpose, with consent, and do what they think is right with the information, but that information with likely get hacked and sold away for whatever someone wants it for. Like said below, then what? Get a new face?