I’ve been waiting to see this story and this company show up. It has felt inevitable and it’s sad that it’s being allowed to happen. How long will it be before the Ring cameras on every block feed into a real-time database where anyone can figure out where anyone else is, track their movements, and monitor their every moment?
Facial recognition is a bigger threat to our current way of life than just about anything else I can fathom other than climate change or nuclear war. The scariest part is that few people seem to recognize or care about the risk.
People freak out when it's based on cameras and faces because it triggers some ancient "being watched" reactions in us.
But when it's based on phone GPS, wifi networks etc., then people are fine with it. And that type of tracking is very possible for many years now through smartphones. But it feels less viscerally spooky.
I can go somewhere without my phone. My face essentially has to be visible. I'll agree that people should be more spooked out by phone tracking, but facial scanning is spookier.
if I leave my apartment in NY without any devices and transport myself exclusively with a metrocard paid for with cash, I can move myself across the entire city without being surveilled
I will however probably walk into at least one photo that gets posted publicly in the course of a day.
Surveillance by the police and government agencies is different and in some ways more restricted than surveillance by private companies, using social media inputs. It seems reasonable to assume that NYPD won't sell their surveillance camera data to third parties, but the legal restrictions on private companies seem much weaker -- if they exist at all.
People who pay attention are not ok with it being their phones either. Most people don't entirely get that they're under, or will soon be under constant surveillance.
In addition to the fact that your phone is separable in ways your face, Nick Cage and John Travolta excepted, is not, there's the notion of manifest versus latent (or tangible vs. intangible) perceptions.
Humans are visual creatures. To "see" is synymous with "to understand". Vision is a high-fidelity sense, in ways that even other senses (hearing, smell, taste, touch) are not. And all our senses are more immediate than perceptions mediated by devices (as with radiation or magnetism) or delivered via symbols, data, or maths.
This is a tremendously significant factor in individual and group psychology. It's also one that's poorly explored and expressed -- Robert K. Merton's work on latent vs. manifest functions, described as the consequences or implications of systems, tools, ideas, or institutions, is about the closest I've been able to find, and whilst this captures much of the sense I'm trying to convey, it doesn't quite catch all of it.
But his work does provide one extraordinarily useful notion, that of the significance of latent functions (or perceptions):
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The discovery of latent functions represents significant increments in sociological knowledge. There is another respect in which inquiry into latent functions represents a distinctive contribution of the social scientist. It is precisely the latent functions of a practice or belief which are not common knowlege, for these are unintended and generally unrecognized social and psychological consequences. As a result, findings concerning latent functions represent a greater increment in knowledge than findings concerning manifest functions. They represent, also, greater departures from "common-sense" knowledge about social life. Inasmuch as the latent functions depart, more or less, from the avowed manifestations, the research which uncovers latent functions very often produces "paradoxical" results. The seeming paradox arises from the sharp modification of a familiar popular perception which regards a standardized practice or believe only in terms of its manifest functions by indicating some of its subsidiary or collateral latent functions. The introduction of the concept of latent function in social research leads to conclusions which show that "social life is not as simple as it first seems." For as long as people confine themselves to certain consequences (e.g., manifest consequences), it is comparatively simple for them to pass moral judgements upon the practice or belief in question.
Facial recognition is a bigger threat to our current way of life than just about anything else I can fathom other than climate change or nuclear war. The scariest part is that few people seem to recognize or care about the risk.