When Facebook knows everyone in the pic... (without you even tagging them). Facial recognition is a relatively hot field with potentially big profits to be made by the companies who develop, sell, and use it in their products. But one major player just ditched the tech on moral grounds:
- IBM is dropping its facial recognition business — it'll stop selling, developing, and researching the creepy/sophisticated tech, because it thinks it could be used as a weapon for mass surveillance and racial profiling.
- In a letter to Congress, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said we should reevaluate how facial recognition tech is used by law enforcement agencies (and if it should be used at all).
- Amazon is one major tech company that sells facial recognition software to law enforcement through its product, "Rekognition" (creative).
Troubling data... Research suggests that many commercial facial recognition systems (IBM's included) have demonstrated bias across lines of age, race, and ethnicity. Then there's also the issue of privacy violations — but many don't think of those issues when unlocking their phones with their faces or tagging friends on FB.
Weapons deals are controversial — so are big tech deals now... Just like the knife you slice your avocado with could cut your finger, facial recognition tech could be (and is) used for a lot more than just unlocking iPhones: On a large scale, China’s 170M+ surveillance cameras use facial recognition to ID citizens out of crowds. Tech companies are increasingly dealing with the moral implications of their creations.