[refurb]

I find this stance funny because at least in my experience facial recognition adoption is lagging in the US and privacy implications are discussed.

The other countries I’ve traveled to just adopted with broadly without any discussion of privacy, just a “look how convenient this is!!”

[YeGoblynQueenne]

As I was told by no lesser expert than Yan LeCun [1], there's a difference between facial recognition and facial verification. The latter is when you stand in front of the automated gates at the airport and your fact is scanned and compared to the photo on your just-scanned passport to, well, verify, that you are the passport holder. Many countries have adopted this technology and after my exchange with LeCun I must say even I, terminally paranoid about being filed away in databases etc, am a little more comfortable with that. At the very least, in an EU country (and also the UK) you can ask for the operators of such services for all the data they have on you and instruct them to destroy it, so even if they keep your picture, you can often do something about it.

Facial recognition is the use of the same technology to match a picture of your face to pictures in some face picture database in order to identify you, without the need of a passport or other photographic id. As the Wired article points out, this use case has a very high rate of failure "in the wild", i.e. with natural lighting conditions, varied body postures and facial accessories etc. There are a few police forces in certain countries that have adopted this tech, but it's not as widely deployed as facial verification.

The article above is complaining about the use of facial recognition. It's a bit confusing because the article keeps using the term "verification" as does the Wired article, but there's a clear description of matching a picture taken on the street to faces in a "database", and there's no mention of using the tech to match a person to the photo on their id, so that's facial recognition, not verification.

There's a serious issue of invasion of privacy from unchecked use of facial recognition. Unfortunately most people are not going to care much, like they didn't care much when e.g. the UK installed surveilance cameras [2] all over the place, and like they don't care much when Meta, Google, Amazon, and everyone else vacuums up their online behavioural patterns for targeted advertisement etc.

___________

[1] Twitter thread, can't find it now.

[2] Or so-called CCTV. Please excuse a long-ago Metal Gear Solid player a small terminological transgression.

[refurb]

I don't really see the distinction?

There are many countries now that don't require a passport to enter - you can simply get a facial scan.

And even beyond that, the countries that do take a photo and compare with your passport and absolutely storing that photo and using it for whatever purpose they might have laid out.

So if the issue is that your privacy is being threatened due to a stored photo of you - that happens whether it's facial recognition or facial verification.

[BugsJustFindMe]

This article isn't about facial recognition. It's about the US executive branch repeatedly running roughshod over the law and lying. In that context, your comment is a non sequitur.

[expedition32]

Exactly. It is not about the technology it is about the implementation.

My country isn't perfect but at least we keep the racists, fascists and religious nut cases in line.

[refurb]

My comment was in reference to the comment I replied to. I thought that was obvious?