Face Recognition in the Era of the Cloud and Social Media: Is it Time to Hit the Panic Button?

Rarely is written such a thoughtful, thorough and insightful essay bridging the subjects of technology, society and the individual.

Joseph Atick on facial recognition: (findBIOMETRICS)

So what can we do?

♦ Condemning the technology serves no purpose.
♦ Attempting to interfere with its progress is futile.
♦ Banning it is a desperate act.

History is filled with accounts of failed attempts to put the lid on technologies that have a legitimate place in society. Protectionism will most certainly fail once more in our hyper-networked and global society. Face recognition is a tool that has a legitimate role in enhancing security and in combating crime and terrorism and it would be unfortunate to see its responsible use derailed by knee-jerk reactions and irrational fear.

We need to address the root cause of this threat to privacy by focusing on the ease with which identification databases can be built through automated harvesting of identity-tagged images over the web. Of course, we cannot prevent consumers from posting images of their lives or tagging them. So how do we prevent these publicly accessible image sources from being assembled into comprehensive identity databases? We believe there is a series of technical measures that collectively provides the necessary protection.

Dr. Joseph J. Atick, is the Vice Chairman and the co-founder of the International Biometrics & Identification Association (IBIA). He is a recognized early pioneer in the industry, having been one of the original inventors of face recognition technology and the co-founder and leader of several companies in the identity management industry, including Visionics, the first company to commercialize face recognition.

I say this a lot but this time it goes double: Read the whole thing.