Some of the more dramatic recent reports of facial recognition would lead us to believe that this technology is an “epidemic of our time” as campaigners such as Big Brother Watch have warned against facial recognition use in shopping centres, museums, conference centres and other private spaces around the UK. Yet, despite the fact that I am the co-founder of a startup whose mission is to empower people to take ownership over their data privacy, I actually don’t think it is a bad thing – if the correct boundaries are in place.
Tech turns ideas into everyday reality in a heartbeat, and today, facial recognition innovations are all around us. The facial recognition in airports helps us get through security faster than ever before (if it works!) and Facebook’s DeepFace enables better image-based mechanisms, like tagging, and can identify people with a near-human accuracy level, based on no less than 120 million parameters.