March 18, 2003
What a Difference a Face Makes?... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes".
One imperfect but rapidly emerging technology goes by the name of "face recognition." The US government has just performed its biennial test of all the products available commercially, and you can find it online at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Its sponsors and supporters include such expected organizations as the FBI, the Secret Service and US Customs, but the list doesn't stop there. There's the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of Energy and the Transportation Security Administration.
And in case you think this is a strictly American proposition, also included are Australian Customs, the Canadian Passport Office and the United Kingdom Biometric Working Group.
Golly, I thought when I read it. Do all these people want to know my face? I had no idea.
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As with any robust technology evaluation, the effort looked at "large-scale real world applications." That means testing indoors vs. outdoors, same day vs. different days, changes of expression, distance from the camera and various angles of the face.
The three primary challenges were: "Am I who I say I am?" "Who am I?" and "Are you looking for me?" - three questions which in and of themselves can be pretty scary.
There's no doubt that the ability to recognize faces digitally has improved significantly in the last two years, but since no product is perfect, there's some very straightforward discussion about how to make the trade-off between correct facial verification and false accept rates. It depends entirely on who, what, where and why you are trying to recognize a face.
I don't really care that men are more easily recognized than women or that older people more readily than the young. The best recognition occurs when the source pictures being used for comparison are recent. This tells me that folks using this technology will want to take my picture frequently and keep updating it again and again.
Now, I start to get worried.
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I know when I deliberately have my picture taken. I step up to the line for my driver's license, and there's my passport, my gym ID and the security pass for this very station. I know that each of these organizations have my photo digitized on their systems, but I presumed that was pretty much the end of it. It never occurred to me that they might use it for other purposes, or that they might pass it on to another database. I must say this shines new light on that offer to put my photo on my credit card. The credit card company already knows what I buy; now, they'd also know what I look like?
And that brings us to the future. If I walk through the door of a store, will I be sized up? If I go to make a presentation or apply for a job, will my dossier be made available before the meeting even begins? Will a false evaluation follow me around like a bad credit report?
Most troubling to me is the idea that numerous unsuspecting photos of myself would be circulating throughout the world of computers, databases and networks.
I am curiously reminded that indigenous peoples are known to decline when asked to have their photos taken. They say that a photo steals a part of your soul. You know, I think they may be on to something.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
