Week Four

Facial recognition is something that I think about as almost a fantasy. I only see it in cop shows on TV and in movies. At the same time, every time I pick up my phone, I unlock it with my face. When Apple announced FaceID on their new phones last year, I didn’t think much about it. It was basically just like when they started fingerprint unlocking with TouchID; it was just a cool new thing. It wasn’t until this class that I realized the ways Apple could be storing my information and maybe even using it without me knowing. I don’t really care all that much if they store my data, but I would care a little more if I found out that they were using my face or my fingerprint for identification purposes with law enforcement or other agencies.

Being a white woman, pretty much all technologies work for me. I know, however, that for people of color, especially black people, facial recognition can be imprecise and cause a lot of problems. The article talking about facial recognition software in Detroit brings up how much of a problem misidentifying black people is with these new softwares. There was also mention of how there haven’t been enough studies to find out if using this facial recognition software is even helping make communities safer. It’s really interesting how all these law enforcement agencies kind of just jumped into using facial recognition without any studies or prompting from the people. I think that there can be positives to facial recognition, like quickly finding people that need to be found, but only if the facial recognition is proven accurate. If there are any misidentifications it can lead to trauma from the person who was misidentified and distract agencies from actually solving the problem at hand. If we’re going to use facial recognition, it needs to be studied, tested, and improved, like any other technology out there today.