By Maya Belle
Facial recognition is recently becoming a heavily used method of identification all over the world. Some more common uses are in device security and in some grocery stores and bars in the UK, purchasing alcohol, and some of its more obscure uses are in genetic disorder identification, shoplifting and even school security. While it certainly is a useful technology, how does it work, and what should you know about being safe with it?
Generally, facial recognition happens through four specific steps. Firstly, your face is captured from a piece of media, like a video or photo. It could be alone, or in a crowd of people, but a program will detect your face; some new versions of the software can even detect your face if it has slight variations.
The second step is for the software to categorize and read every part of your face. Generally, facial recognition uses 2D photos to distinguish nodal points on a face, which allow the software to convert it into a facial signature. Every human face has 80 nodal points, and specific nodal points are the shape of your cheekbones, the distance between your eyes, or the distance between your forehead and chin. As stated earlier, all of these nodal points come together and create your facial signature.
Your facial signature, or faceprint, is made of a mathematical formula consisting of your face’s nodal points and data collected from it. Similarly to a thumbprint, your face print has an individual structure and is completely unique. In fact, 117 million Americans have their face in one or more police databases, and the FBI has access to over 641 million photos for facial identification.
Subsequently, these databases are used to find your identity. The technology can match your face to these, or even match it to something like pictures from a facebook profile. This can also indicate name and address when found.
As amazing as this technology is, there are of course some concerns. For one, there can sometimes be errors in facial identification, which especially in criminal cases, can result in false convictions. Another issue is that databases may not be large enough or many not have the person the software is identifying. Privacy can also be a concern; with data breaches becoming more and more common, you may not know where your face is ending up. A recent breach states that 100,000 photos and license plates were compromised from the Border Agency database. With facial recognition software being able to connect a face to personal info, it can definitely be wise to not give your face to any databases. Your face can even be misused, through uses such as apartment monitoring and companies tracking employee attendance.
While facial recognition software certainly can be a useful tool in all parts of life, you should be cautious of who and what you are giving your face, and subsequently personal information, to.
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