Is Facial Recognition technology a blessing or a curse?

Facebook recently announced that it would discontinue its use of its facial recognition system. The IRS also announced it will not require users to submit bio-metric data for authentication purposes, either.

Facial recognition technology has evolved rapidly over the past decade, and is continuing to improve every day.

Many people are concerned about their privacy, and feel that facial recognition technology is an invasion of it.

I support the use of facial recognition technology. I feel its benefits far outweigh its drawbacks.

Let me put this in some perspective:

In the past, we all recognized each other!

Let’s go back 75 years to when life was simpler. It was safe for our kids to play outside anywhere in our neighborhood. Many of us never even locked their doors. This was because we knew all our neighbors, and they knew us. This was before air conditioning moved us inside 24/7. This was the era of sitting on the front porch in the evenings.

We felt safe because we knew if our neighbors had our backs. If they saw something out of the ordinary, or saw a stranger, or saw one of our kids misbehaving, they let us know. When I was a kid, if I did something bad in my neighborhood, odds were that my parents knew about it before I even got home.

Our local police officers knew everybody as well, especially in small towns.

For many people, traveling more than 10 or 15 miles away from home was a special occasion. I remember when I was growing up in Boynton Beach, Florida, in the early 1970’s, a trip to the Mall in West Palm Beach was a big deal! Actually, any trip to West Palm was out of our routine. And West Palm was only about 20 miles from Boynton Beach.

We didn’t have Wal-Mart’s. We shopped at local Mom & Pop stores, where we knew the shopkeepers, and they knew us.

People worked for the same company for their entire careers. Moving was much less common, especially moving cross-country.

The common theme here is that people knew each other. If two people in the same town didn’t know each other, odds were they each knew somebody who did. Two degrees of separation!

Life was safer because people knew they couldn’t get away with much without being recognized. They had Facial Recognition back then: the human kind!

Facial Recognition Today

Today’s world is a very different place. Air conditioning keeps us inside. Many of us don’t even know our own next-door neighbors, much less all of the other people in our own neighborhood or town. We think nothing of traveling 25 miles just to get dinner. Today, the average person moves more than ten times in the lifetime.

Almost everybody agrees that we don’t feel nearly as safe as we did back then, simply because we don’t know everybody like we used to, and it’s natural to be more suspicious of strangers and the unknown. That’s just human nature.

75 years ago, the only time one was worried about being seen somewhere was when they were somewhere they really shouldn’t have been. Other times, they would gladly wave to their neighbors when they were recognized.

Today’s facial recognition technology has the ability to restore some of that safety net. While it won’t help us to actually know our neighbors, it could allow merchants to know their customers again. It can allow police officers to know the people on their beats. I would be thrilled to walk into Wal-Mart and have them welcome me by name, and let me know of any specials that I make actually be interested in. (I’ll bet that a lot of the shoplifting problem would go away as well.)

Facial Recognition technology can bring some of that closeness to the Internet. I hate remembering 157,383 different passwords. I hate having to wait for a text code for verification after I enter my password. If the computer can recognize me, it would make it a lot easier to work. And it could also stop random people from accessing my account even if they guessed my password if they did not look like me!

I love Facebook. If I was in a picture that was posted somewhere, I would be happy that Facebook would automatically tag me and let me know about it. Of course, just like 75 years ago, I might not like it if people knew when I was somewhere was I was not supposed to be, but that is exactly what keeps me out of those places a lot of times!

I like seeings ads of things that I am interested in. It’s much better than being barraged with ads that I have absolutely no intention of ever buying. (I just wish that when I click “Already Purchased” when hiding an ad, Facebook realize that they should stop showing me similar ads as well.)

The argument I hear most often is that people don’t want companies and the government to know about them and what they look like. Well, as far as governments are concerned, they already have that with your Driver’s license, State ID, School ID, Passports, and more. Middle and large companies keep your photo on file, and many require a company-id with a photo to even get into work.

In other words, as far as keeping your image private — that ship has sailed!