FaceApp is the internet's new obsession, everybody wants a preview of their future. So, for those who don't know about this app, it is an application developed by Russian developers which shows how people will look when they'll get old. This is not a new thing, apps like this already existed in the past but this takes it to a whole new level. App requires only one photo of yours to predict your future face using artificial intelligence. Results of this app are far better than any other app present in the market. Even the CIA is worried about this app because they think that Russians are trying to get biometric data of Americans. Russians are not alone in the face recognition technology, a few years back NYPD used facial recognition to catch a shoplifter. They didn't even have a clear picture of his but still, they were able to catch him. A clerk who reported about this said that guy looked like the actor Woody Harrelson. you may think what's wrong in this it is helping the police to catch thieves. The entire picture is not that simple, face recognition was never developed to work like this. In a study by Georgetown University, they find that police is using this technology in radical ways like if in a photo an eye is missing put a new eye and bang you have a convicts photo. These are delicate algorithms but in most cases, there are no strict rules for how police should use them. The picture produced via this technology can be used to make an arrest or a stop.
Before discussing this further we should know how face recognition works, it's all about tracking key facial landmarks in a photo like the distance between your pupils, angle of your nose, the shape of your cheekbones basically all the physical details of your face which makes it distinctive. Initial face recognition works only when a person was directly staring into the cameras but with more sophisticated algorithms system is able to recognize faces even when a portion of that is available.
Vendors like NEC, Morpho, and Cognitech are pioneers in this type of systems and they have been selling their products to law enforcement agencies. But in the past few years, Amazon and Google have been developing this technology. Now with a couple of hundred bucks and some coding skills, anyone can make this type of systems. There is no problem with the system being used in mundane tasks but when the prosecution starts happening solely on this, it becomes dangerous. These programs work off accuracy thresholds, tighter the match, the higher the number. But there's no firm rule about how high the number needs to be. Which means that the same time police are playing with the photos they upload to the system, they're also playing with the standard for what counts as a match. So if you look like Woody Harrelson even a little bit, an officer could adjust the accuracy threshold until it registers as a hit. And then if you ask why you're being stopped, they can just say, the machine said it was you. when asked about this NYPD said that no one has been arrested on the basis of facial recognition alone, but the facial recognition has been involved somehow in more than 2800 arrests in the five and a half years the program has been running. Even when there are no arrests at all, a false match can still lead to a police stop which has dangers of its own. There's supposed to be a clear legal bar for making those stops, but facial recognition is short-circuiting that. Now, defenders of facial recognition will say that despite the problems, it's still an effective tool for police to protect their communities. Detroit's Project Greenlight is a network of connected surveillance cameras recently upgraded with facial recognition, and it's credited with a 23% drop in crime in the city. China is planning to apply even a more rigorous version of this in Shenzhen city, where the system will identify your activities along with your faces. It has some serious repercussions there are plenty of studies which shows that you'll behave differently when watched, this government scheme tends to control masses, it completely changes human behavior, people are forced to live in aspecific, it is fundamentally wrong to manipulate people's behavior like this. This could lead to arrest even before a crime has taken place because eventually, the government will take it where everything will be monitored. This is the plain breach of a person's privacy. That's why San Francisco, home to some of the largest tech firms in the world, banned it last year. San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin was particularly critical, calling it Big Brother technology. But, this isn't just a tech problem, fundamentally, San Francisco's saying the government just can't be trusted with this technology. Not because it's so bad but because we don't have enough oversight over how police departments will actually use it. That's a problem that goes much deeper than just recognizing faces. And as we find more powerful ways to peer into the average person's life, it's a problem that's not going away. So, please comment below what you think of this technology, should we trust our government or not?
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