Facial recognition tech? More like farcical data-collecting tech. We had a guest speaker in our computing ethics class this week talk about facial recognition and the inherent bias in the technologies being propagated by biased datasets, and also about the whole concept of facial recognition tech, or making any analysis at all on external features, being inherently an extension of phrenology. And thus, rubbish, racist and leading nowhere.
I don’t know, sometimes you hear about things in the world and think, “am I going mad? This sounds like an all-round bad thing. Is there something I’m missing here? Am I losing my mind? Is there some undeniable benefit to that makes all this disturbing loss of privacy worth it, because everyone seems to be using and employing it nonetheless?” So it’s sometimes really reassuring to hear that people who are experts in these fields and have closely studied these technologies and computer science, sociology or surveillance for years, also firmly think that this is a bad, bad terrible idea that has no positive outcomes.
Says a lot that someone who has studied facial recognition technology and systems for years has to say that the best thing that can be said about FRT is that it absolutely should not exist. I’m not losing my mind after all.