Face up to Reality
Calls to stop the use of face recognition technology are growing louder, but it is already too late. Given its widespread use by tech companies and the police, a permanent roll back is impossible.
The European Commission is considering temporarily banning the use of the technology in public spaces, giving politicians in Europe time to develop measures to reduce the potential risks of face recognition systems. Some US cities, such as San Francisco, have already implemented bans.
Public areas make up a small proportion of the physical spaces we inhabit. What about the many that are privately owned, such as shops, schools and museums, in which face recognition is steadily being rolled out, sometimes without our knowledge?
Most of us now associate face recognition with CCTV cameras（闭路电视摄像机）. Facebook, for example, runs face recognition on users' photos to automatically identify them in other images on the site, which has been functioning for years. Russian search engine Yandex has a smart search function that, given one image of a face, can find pictures online of the same person even in different poses and lighting conditions.
Other concerns relate to the fact that the technology is imperfect. An independent analysis of a face recognition trial by London's Metropolitan Police found that 81 per cent of matches the system flagged to a watch list of suspects were incorrect.
So what is the possible solution? When we consider both the rate at which the technology is developing and its widespread use nowadays, it is crystal-clear that a ban on its use in public spaces would be too little, too late.
A set of effective rules on when and how it can be used needs to be decided quickly. Face recognition technology is here to stay; implementing a temporary ban would be the regulatory equivalent of burying our faces in the sand.
A. This applies to face recognition, as is often the case.
B. As a matter of fact, it is advancing in the online field, too.
C. What face recognition needs is strict and urgent regulation.
D. But the prohibitions are so limited that they are hardly bans at all.
E. And it's even less accurate for some minorities, which risks worsening racial issues.
F. Companies cannot let market make a final decision on the future of new technology.
