Interpreting Facial Recognition

Developed in the 1960s, facial recognition technology has been used by the government and companies to identify people by matching them to photos. By 2001, the novelty of more powerful and rapid facial recognition technology grasped the public’s attention. During the January 2001 Super Bowl, surveillance cameras captured images of the crowd to find people with criminal records (FBI 2013). This potential invasion of privacy under the pretense of public safety sparked a public debate about the government taking private information from citizens. So what limitations should be put on the use of facial recognition software in America in order to keep the public feeling secure? In recent years, many companies who use this technology claim it is

The Patriot Act was hastily passed just a month later October and it severely limited the privacy of Americans and gave unprecedented power to the government and private agencies to track innocent Americans, turning regular citizens into suspects.5 In addition, the great technological evolution and emerged of social media that occurred round the same time, and shortly thereafter, created the perfect storm for the emergence of the largely unregulated surveillance society that we live in today.6 The result is digitization of people’s personal and professional lives so that every single digital trace that people leave can be identified, stored, and aggregated to constitute a composite sketch of ourselves and its only getting worse. In 2008, passed the FISA Amendments Act, which expands the government’s authority to monitor Americans’ international communications, in addition to domestic communications.7 In short, after 9/11 the U.S is left with a national surveillance state, in which “the proliferation of government technology and bureaucracies that are able to acquire vast and detailed amounts of digital information about individuals with minimal or no judicial supervision and often in complete secrecy,” giving the government and corporations with access to the data that the government compiles the ability to single

In my opinion, I believe such law should be diminished. If this continues, a criminal, a doctor, a pharmacist, an engineer or a politician can remove their earlier misdeeds from the search engines. People would not be able to access their background and might take some wrong decisions. Individuals can get away from their earlier malicious deeds just due to this law of ‘Right to be Forgotten’ that hides such individual’s information from the common people. This goes against the right to get access to information or freedom of information for common people. For example, if a doctor has some negative record about a surgery that went wrong leading to a patient’s death and he removes such information from the search engine, people cannot take the right decision whether to choose the doctor. Again, people might end up voting a politician who has corruption cases against him. If there is review about a restaurant serving unhealthy food,

Edward Snowden once said, “Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say” (Snowden). Even in America, “land of the free”, our ability to hide our identities is threatened daily. The people of the world must protect their right to be anonymous on the internet.

Developed in the 1960s, facial recognition technology has been used by the government and companies to identify people by matching them to photos. The data for this software was originally entered manually, limiting the scope of use. By 2001, the novelty of more powerful facial recognition technology grasped the public’s attention. During the January 2001 Super Bowl, surveillance cameras captured images to find people with a criminal record (FBI 2013). This potential invasion of privacy under the pretense of public safety sparked a public debate about what private information the government was allowed to take from us. So should we be putting limitations on the use of facial recognition software in America in order to keep

Privacy is what allows people to feel secure in their surroundings. With privacy, one is allowed to withhold or distribute the information they want by choice, but the ability to have that choice is being violated in today’s society. Benjamin Franklin once said, “He who sacrifices freedom or liberty will eventually have neither.” And that’s the unfortunate truth that is and has occurred in recent years. Privacy, especially in such a fast paced moving world, is extremely vital yet is extremely violated, as recently discovered the NSA has been spying on U.S. citizens for quite a while now; based on the Fourth Amendment, the risk of leaked and distorted individual information, as well as vulnerability to lack of anonymity.

How much are Americans hiding? With internet and social media, these days it is hard to hide any personal information.  It is as easy as searching a person’s name in Google to find out any information needed about a certain individual. This allows any records to be available to be seen online, and a person’s past to remain apart of their future, or their internet search. Europeans on the other hand, can hide whatever they want on the internet with the “right to be forgotten,” requesting Google to take off any unwanted information from their search engine at any time. As Europe pushes for this law in the United States more everyday, many citizens in the U.S. can think of things they would want erased about themselves from internet searches, but they also need to think of how much they would want hidden from their own eyes about others. Although Europe strongly supports the “right to be forgotten” and giving internet users more control over their online reputations, the United States should not acquire this law because it would go against the first amendment (the right of free speech), it would be “unfair and deceptive”(Peterson, 2015, par. 2) to U.S. citizens, and it would allow other countries to determine American’s laws or freedom.

To what extent should governments and companies be using biometric information obtained from facial recognition technology for surveillance and convenience in identifying individuals in society? This article discusses the legislature that must be implemented to protect our right to privacy. We will reach a conclusion by further analyzing the benefits and the risks of the new technology, evaluating the privacy issues that accompany, and discussing faults in the

Ever since 9-11, we as a country have been divided on many issues. One of the most discussed considers the question of whether retaining our privacy is more important than ensuring our safety. The two texts I will be using to explore this question are: Mobile Phone Tracking Scrutinized by Nikki Swartz Published in the Information Journal, which bills it’s self as “the leading source of information on topics central to the management of records and information worldwide”(347), in March/April 2006 and Reach Out and Track Someone by the author Terry Allen which appeared in the May 2006 edition of In These Times, a publication “dedicated to informing and analyzing popular movements for social environmental and economic justice”(347). In

Identification and recognition are often referred to one another as having the same meaning. For this research study, recognition is memory recall, whereas identification is matching features. This separation is to establish a clear way to separate eyewitness recognition from passport identification matching. Eyewitness recognition relies on memory to recognize an individual. This is different from identifying a child from a picture taken weeks or years prior to passport identification. The angle of view or viewpoint is used to explain the visual angle represented in images. Safety for children is a concern when examining the limitations with photos used in passport identification or in missing children posters.

The idea of privacy protection for private citizens is rooted in history back to the Magna Carta. With the passage of time and the evolution of communication the laws of the United States have attempted to ensure a balance between security of the nation and protecting privacy. The current state of privacy and the law is now in a state of flux as citizens have begun to rely more and more on technological means of communication and have integrated privacy invading technology into their daily lives. It is not uncommon today for the average citizen to have all their conversations and movements tracked and stored into massive electronic databases simply because they carry a cell phone. The use of the internet as a means of communication and

Facial recognition isn’t simply just recognizing a face and knowing who that person is. We perceive faces as whole not as a collection of different features. It can be done in three steps; 1. presence of the face is noticed, 2. The face is then measured to find

Abstract—The recent advent of right to be forgotten legislation in the European Union has triggered a debate over the ever-oscillating line of demarcation between privacy rights and personal freedoms. The right to be forgotten is essentially the theory that one should reserve the ability to choose what information about one’s past may be publicly accessible. The intent of these policies is to limit the ramifications of one’s forgiven and/or forgivable sins. By empowering the individual with the right to have unfavorable data deleted, it is hoped that onerous social stigmas can be mitigated. However, the impact of that kind of censorship on industry and individual liberties is cause for concern for those outside of the European Union. The task of adhering to right to be forgotten laws poses a headache for technology providers from a feasibility and financial standpoint. Additionally, many countries have laws (and populations) that run in opposition to the philosophical basis upon which right to be forgotten laws are based. This paper will examine the views of three stakeholders on right to be forgotten policies: The United States Government, the European Union, and myself.

Personal data is an integral part of any decision making process such as a loan application, driving license or a job application. Most of our personal data is readily available from various social networking sites or linked with our email accounts. Some of these data are readily available while others can be hacked into. Even the government institutions follow the same approach while investigating the individuals, be it at the airports or for any other investigation. All this is done without asserting the correctness of the data which makes us handicapped. Following the same reason, Facebook acquired Face.com – a website which does facial recognitions of the photos on the public platform. Face.com, in February 2011, had discovered a database of 18 billion faces across its API and other social networking sites. Existence of such everlasting digital data denies us the freedom in having autonomy over our lives. By agreeing to the terms and

The new GDPR updates and adds to the existing legislation, including in relation to the right to be forgotten. To begin, where Google was limited to the narrow circumstances concerning search engine results, the right under the new legislation ‘will be of significantly wider application, and will apply to all data controllers’ (Jay & Henderson 2016: 7). Moreover, the right has been strengthened in other areas, such as being exercisable on the basis of the withdrawal of consent, unlawfulness of the data processing, or where data is not necessary for the purpose for which it is held; ‘in these circumstances, the [right to be forgotten] is far stronger under the new regime as there is no balancing minimum and the [right] is absolute’ (2016: