December 30, 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 tests commercially available products every other year, and you can find their latest report online at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Should you look it up, you'll find a whole lot of people who also find these technologies interesting: the report's sponsors and supporters are listed there for anyone to see. There's the FBI, the Secret Service, US Customs, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. There's the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Department of Energy and the Transportation Security Administration. Keep reading, and you'll find Australian Customs, the Canadian Passport Office and the United Kingdom Biometric Working Group. And there are plenty more.
"Golly!" I thought when reading it, "So many people want to know exactly who I am, and they don't want to bother me by asking. How gracious of them!"
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As with any robust technology evaluation, the effort tried to examine "large-scale real world applications." They're trying to read my face both indoors and out, the consistency of identifying me on the same day versus over many, changes in my facial expression, the distance I am from their cameras and the various angles of my face.
Their three basic questions were: "Who am I?" "Am I who I say I am?" and "Are they looking for me?"
The report establishes that the ability to recognize faces digitally has improved significantly in recent years, but since no product is perfect, there's some very straightforward discussion about making the trade-off between correct facial verification and false accept rates.
It turns out I present a challenge in one sense, in that men are more easily recognized than women, yet on the other hand, older people are more readily identified than young. And since the best recognition occurs when comparison pictures are recent, they will definitely want to be taking my picture on a frequent basis.
So, there's my New Year's resolution in a nutshell! I'm going to redouble my efforts to always look my best.
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We all try to take a good picture when we step up to the line for a driver's license, not to mention our passports, gym IDs and security passes. But do we expect these organizations to share them with any number of other databases? Reading the report, you soon realize that cross-referencing databases is a major part of this effort.
And that brings me to the future. If I walk through the door of a store, can I expect to be sized up? If I go to make a presentation or apply for a job, will my dossier be emailed around, before any face-to-face encounter even begins? Will a false photo evaluation follow me around like a bad credit report?
Most troubling to me is the idea that we can expect numerous unsuspecting pictures of ourselves to be circulating throughout the world of computers, databases and networks. And I don't believe we have many rights at all in this arena.
While I continue to puzzle it all out, I'm reminded that many indigenous peoples have been known to decline having their pictures taken. They say that a photo steals a part of your soul. It makes you wonder - maybe, they're on to something.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
