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For a long time a fantasy of sci-fi writers, unlocking a device or paying for a purchase at a glance is now a reality, widely popularized by Apple's highly-publicized iPhoneX, released in late 2017.
But armed forces, immigration or police services around the world also use it to identify a suspect in a crowd or to match the face of a person in custody with an offender database
A reality henceforth
The facial recognition allowed at the end of June to identify more quickly the shooter of the newspaper Capital Gazette which made five deaths near Washington to the States -United. Without it, "we would have taken much longer to identify and advance the investigation," according to the local police, with whom he refused to cooperate.
In Maryland, where the shooting took place, the public body, which manages prisons in particular, has since 2011 a facial recognition database, according to a 2016 study from Georgetown University. It has about 7 million images from driving licenses, as well as 3 million shots of "known offenders."
Lack of reliability
But for many defenders of freedoms public, facial recognition is rather synonymous with Big Brother . Especially since several studies highlight its unreliability, especially for non-white people.
According to Georgetown University, about 117 million adults in the United States unknowingly appear in databases allowing facial recognition, used by law enforcement agencies, federal and local, even though this technology is only slightly regulated.
In the United Kingdom, the NGO Big Brother Watch has recently denounced the lack of reliability of automatic facial recognition, which consists of recording and digitizing faces in a public place to identify them in real time and compare them to databases.
According to Big Brother Watch, not only does this technique lead to to a biometric control of any citizen, but, moreover, it is unreliable since according to the figures of the London police itself, the system – currently in test – is tr ompe in the identification of people in almost all cases, mistakenly believing offenders.
"The real concern would be to see police officers identify at the request of innocent citizens with cameras on their uniforms" thinks Matthew Feeney of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in the US
Concern also for Brian Brackeen, yet head of Kairos, a company that designs a facial recognition software. "Government surveillance fueled by facial recognition is an incredible violation of the privacy of all citizens and a slippery slope to the complete loss of our identities," he says.
Clare Garvie, who led the Georgetown study, believes that for two years, "facial recognition has been expanded and more active" in the United States, including border control. This technology is no longer science fiction in China, in the forefront on the subject, where it is widely used to monitor citizens.
The collaboration of technological companies challenged
Several technology groups are present in facial recognition, like Microsoft, whose technology is used at the borders, while Maryland uses that of the German Cognitec and the Japanese NEC.
These companies are not spared by the controversy, like Amazon, who faces a sling of employees and activists blaming him for selling his technologies to the police. The internet giant defends itself by baduring that it does not carry out any surveillance activity or provide data to the police, adding that its technology can help find missing children or fight against human trafficking.
Against another recurring criticism, IBM recently launched a study "to improve the understanding of biases in face badysis," while Microsoft says it is making progress in the badysis of "all color shades of skin. "
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