Is it worth the convenience for a machine to recognize your face? Submit a selfie, and you don't need to carry a ticket into a concert, promises Moscow's NTechLab, which used face-scanning technology to let people into a electronic music festival this summer. Of course, the selfies, once submitted, stay with NTechLab, which is free to sell its face database and facial recognition tool to anyone, from concerts to police departments to authoritarian governments.
The 26-year-old Mr. Kukharenko and 29-year-old Mr. Kabakov [NTechLab cofounders] largely brushed off any fears that their technology could end up in the wrong hands. Mr. Kabakov said that simply owning a smartphone means you can't opt out of surveillance. “There is no private life,” he said. “Your government can control you now…. You take your iPhone or Android phone and it has information about your behavior, your movements, about what you buy, about who you are talking to.”
The program uses machine learning: training algorithms to recognize specific faces again and again by feeding images over and over until the algorithms get it right. (A set of 20 million labeled pictures of celebrities were used for training). NTechLabs paired with another group to make FindFace, a tool that took pictures of faces and then scanned VKontakte, Russia's Facebook, to see if there was a match. The founders view it as a new tool for meeting cute, with a picture surreptitiously taken of a stranger on a subway leading to a future deeper connection. There's another term for this, and that's stalking.
Again, from the Wall Street Journal:
the platform made headlines in Russia when a group on VKontakte used FindFace to identify and harass women who had allegedly acted in pornographic films online, going so far as sending messages and photographs to friends and relatives of the women. According to NTechLab, the group was shut down by VKontakte and the user group was banned from FindFace, which has nearly a million registered users. But ethical concerns have continued to plague facial recognition technology, which has become ensnared in lawsuits in the U.S.
Last summer, British police scanned the faces of people attending the Download music festival, to see if they could find known criminals in attendance. Faced with public outcry and without a clear procedure for what to do with the pictures of faces, the police deleted the whole lot of them.
As for the Russian concertgoers who submitted selfies to NTechLabs, their faces have likely already been fed into the algorithm, so that any cameras hooked up to the same software can identify them again, wherever they are. Convenient for police, at least.
