Last year, a Russian startup
announced that it could scan the faces of people passing by Moscow’s
thousands of CCTV cameras and pick out wanted criminals or missing
persons. Unlike much face recognition technology — which runs
stills from videos or photographs after the fact — NTechLab’s
FindFace algorithm has achieved a feat that once only seemed possible
in the science fictional universe of “Minority Report”: It can
determine not just who someone is, but where they’ve been, where
they’re going, and whether they have an outstanding warrant,
immigration detainer, or unpaid traffic ticket.
For years, the development of
real-time face recognition has been hampered by poor video
resolution, the angles of bodies in motion, and limited computing
power. But as systems begin to transcend these technical barriers,
they are also outpacing the development of policies to constrain
them. Civil liberties advocates fear that the rise of real-time face
recognition alongside the growing number of police body cameras
creates the conditions for a perfect storm of mass surveillance.
“The main concern is that
we’re already pretty far along in terms of having this real-time
technology, and we already have the cameras,” said Jake
Laperruque, a fellow at the Constitution Project. “These cameras
are small, hard to notice, and all over the place. That’s a pretty
lethal combination for privacy unless we have reasonable rules on how
they can be used together.”
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