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Facial Scans at US Airports Violate Americans' Privacy, Report Says (nytimes.com)
Ron Nixon, writing for The New York Times: A new report concludes that a Department of Homeland Security pilot program improperly gathers data on Americans when it requires passengers embarking on foreign flights to undergo facial recognition scans to ensure they haven't overstayed visas. The report, released on Thursday by researchers at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown University's law school, called the system an invasive surveillance tool that the department has installed at nearly a dozen airports without going through a required federal rule-making process. The report's authors examined dozens of Department of Homeland Security documents and raised questions about the accuracy of facial recognition scans. They said the technology had high error rates and are subject to bias, because the scans often fail to properly identify women and African-Americans. "It's telling that D.H.S. cannot identify a single benefit actually resulting from airport face scans at the departure gate," said Harrison Rudolph, an associate at the center and one of the report's co-authors. "D.H.S. doesn't need a face-scanning system to catch travelers without a photo on file. It's alarming that D.H.S. still hasn't supplied evidence for the necessity of this $1 billion program," he added.
Easy - they put you on the "You can't come back" list.
No tinfoil needed.
Well, first off, there's the fact that research done by visual researchers reveals that that human forgets faces not of his/her ethnicity significantly faster their own ethnicity. Your memory of a face in a crowd declines in under 10 seconds, and happens even faster than that when you're glancing at someone who doesn't look like you. Crowds are also very confusing because of other visual factors that are similar in what you're looking at and distract ... movement, colours, clothing, shapes, etc.
Second, people have an utterly terrible memory for faces, and one's cognitive ability runs across a wide spectrum. Unless there is a mark or deformity that is significant, people are generally poor with faces, especially ones in a crowd. And while it's unlikely that someone with a condition like prosopagnosia is going into law enforcement, it still means that about 2% of the population is hopelessly "blind" when it comes to recognizing people's faces. Additional research shows, in experiments we can replicate, that even close family members, if their appearance is slightly altered, are missed in a crowd to a significant degree when scanning faces in a crowd.
Third, it takes on average 2.5 seconds for the average human to look at and recognize a face. Sometimes as long as 5 seconds. How do you imagine that you could have enough security personal around to scan the thousands of people who move through crowded public spaces like airports, train stations etc every minute or two?
I've been in the same room as two police detectives trying to get accurate descriptions of criminals one time, and the variations of what the guys supposedly looked like from one interviewee to the next was amazing to hear. There is no way a human scanning a crowd is going to do anywhere near as good a job at facial recognition than decent software that stores potentially millions of faces (note that accuracy is debatable, and is still pretty hard to get right with most of these systems). I think the problem here are the questions around who has this data, how is it being used that you're not being told about, how long is it kept, who is it being shared with, and what is the measurement of it's success (besides a few companies making 100s of millions of dollars). A better system takes into account different physiological aspects of you ... height, weight, appendage movements, stride type and length, etc. But I have no clue whether or not it's legal, though.
DaveyJJ