reason: Facial recognition technology's troubled past - and troubling future
Reason Online takes a look at face recognition technology in its September 11
anniversary roundup. The failed trials at Palm Beach airport and in Tampa are mentioned, along with the
British experience and some new results. The conclusions are familiar: error
rates are far too high for the technology to be of use; but even if it did
work, it's being used in situations where it cannot provide security.
But FRT, currently used in at least two U.S. cities and widespread throughout Great Britain, is notoriously unreliable and ineffective. At its best, it brings to our streets the high-tech equivalent of the Department of Transportation's airport security policy: humiliate and search everyone ineffectively. [...] Smith found that changes in lighting, eyeglasses, background objects, camera position, and facial position and expression all seriously affected image quality and system efficacy. He concluded that airport use of FRT would require "special walkways where lighting is tightly controlled and passengers pass single file." Passengers would have to be "instructed to remove hats and glasses and look straight ahead at a head-height camera." None of this fits with the exaggerated claims in favor of FRT made by those selling it and repeated as fact by gullible media outlets. According to the Denver Post, "It doesn't matter if you gain 200 pounds or go bald between photographs. Short of plastic surgery the camera will recognize you." Unless, of course, you put on sunglasses, or cock your head, or make a funny face. [...] Yet "even if the technology worked perfectly," Smith observes, it would still allow 99 percent of the terrorists through....The biggest problem with face recognition systems is the simple fact that we don't know who the terrorists are and law enforcement doesn't have their pictures. Spotting terrorists at airports is simply the wrong use of this technology. (see www.reason.com)