From airline lounges to cricket matches, our faces are already being read everywhere. But what’s protecting us from misuse of that data?
If you feel like facial recognition technology is suddenly everywhere you look — or rather, facial recognition is everywhere looking at you — you’re not alone. Not only do many of us carry the technology with us everywhere on our smartphones, it’s also increasingly present in the spaces we move through and the interactions we have in our daily lives, whether we know it or not.
(Crickey is a subscription web site, but there is a free trial you can use to access this item.) The reported circumstances raise significant consent and privacy questions, with the glum certainty the trials are unlikely to have gone anywhere near a research ethics committee.
Most people walking into the public library in Toowoomba last year, for example, were probably not aware that they were taking part in a controversial trial of facial recognition technology by the local council. Likewise the 45,000 visitors to the SCG for the final Ashes test this year were probably mostly unaware that their faces were being run through newly installed facial recognition cameras.
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Certain people walking around the streets of the Northern Territory in 2015, on the other hand, suddenly found themselves very aware of facial recognition when police used the technology to identify 300 wanted individuals via CCTV footage.
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