As facial recognition technology improves and becomes more pervasive, it has raised a number of concerns about uses that will impinge on privacy and liberty. These concerns are certainly justified particularly in certain political contexts. For example, the Chinese government has announced that telecommunications carriers will be required to use facial recognition to verify the identity of anyone signing up for new mobile phones or network technologies. The facial recognition data will then be used with surveillance cameras to keep tabs on citizens.
Balanced against concerns about liberty are five positive use cases, including: school safety, health care efficiency, disaster recovery, assisting the blind, and finding missing persons. These use cases do suggest advantages of having facial recognition data.
The question of how to assess the overall impact of gathering facial data seems to hinge on how such data will be controlled and used. Collecting facial data in centralized government data bases seems to be asking for misuse. Allowing individuals, or in the case of children their parents, to control their own facial data and where and how it is shared might permit the positive uses without the dangers of uses which curtail citizen rights.
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