Earlier in the semester, my students worked on A3 Tailored Cover Letter and Resume where I shared a video: Artificial Intelligence: The Robots Are Now Hiring. A follow-up to that is this video Facial Recognition: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). The video may be from seven months ago and the topic is at least a few years old but the implications are just beginning to be vetted.
Note 1: View discretion is advised as the 21-min video contains strong languages and John Oliver's brand of humor. If you are under the age of 18 and cannot obtain your parent's permission, let me know and I will give you an alternate assignment in place of watching this video.
Note 2: When I tried to search for this video through Blogger's YouTube video search/insert function, Blogger (owned by Google) would not return it -- along with almost all of John Oliver's videos -- as a search result. Hence, I inserted a screen capture of his video and pointed you to the URL. If that doesn't work, visit https://youtube.com and search for the title his video.
The five statements that stood out for me are:
(1) Driver license photos from residents of these states (includes Nevada)
(2) 'Skynet but good'
(3) Only 8 out of 42 matches were verifiably correct
(4) "...argues that it has a First Amendment right to harvest data from social media."
(5) "...'unconventional databases' for 'extreme opposition research'..."
These funny lines stood out for me as well: 'loser fish', 'your brain autocompleted the rest', and 'accidentally made tennis interesting for a day'.
Students, please share your professional thoughts on what you learned from his video in your comment to this blog post.
The concept and continuous developments of facial recognition are intriguing. To think that one's identity is not always logged and tracked is mindless, given that John Oliver confirms in his video of facial recognition that, "The FBI... has logged more than 390,000 facial-recognition searches... since 2011..." Not to mention, many phones also now come equipped with finger-print identity access, how Siri or Alexa are able to recognize just the owner's voice when one states "Hey Siri" or "Hey Alexa," and how a credit or debit card can pretty much track your frequently visited spots and give a radius of your location.
ReplyDeleteWe actually had this talk as an operational environment briefing in the Military. China not only has the ability to track you by your face but also by your gait, since everyone's gait is unique. The rate of growth of technology makes it difficult for laws to keep pace on new emerging technologies. As a former police officer, I've seen the other side of the video and understand both sides of the argument. This is why my social media footprint is small and I'm a little paranoid about the growth of technology. With any great invention there comes the possibility that it will be misused and used for nefarious purposes.
ReplyDeleteFacial recognition, this video has brought this subject to my attention in a very concerning manner. I have overlooked the invasion of privacy element and to me the unlawful nature of acquiring a person's photos. After this video and having time to process the information, there is an urgency for federal regulations and regulations that benefits the people of our country and not bias to government agencies or wealthy corporations. A picture of man in a news paper at the age of 16, is not relevant at his current age. The unsuccessful identification percentage for minorities is most disturbing, racism is programed into technology and all I can think is, ! The blank is intentional, too many thoughts evaluate my previous sentence, but I hope for equality in our forward progress as a country. Fair regulations on this technology has my vote.
ReplyDeleteThis makes me want to live off grid in the middle of no where! Hollywood makes all of this technology seem so great, but I do feel it is an invasion of privacy. I know there are plenty of pictures that I have untagged myself from because I did not want them on my profile, and although I have always known they will always be on the internet, this kind of technology is nauseating. They are not even terrible pictures that could cost me a job or anything like that, just parts of my life I want to move on from. This video further reaffirms I should not post pictures of my children online. Although the language can be a little mature, there are parts of this video that I feel my sixteen year old needs to see - especially with how much younger generations expose themselves on the internet. When I send her the link, I am sure I will get the teenager death glare when she sees it is 21 minutes long. I do agree with Matt that the growth of technology is too fast for laws to keep up, but I feel something needs to be done before it gets out of hand.
ReplyDelete"Even if this technology becomes perfect we should really be asking ourselves how much were comfortable with it being used." I didn't know police were using facial recognition to target protestors. As the others mentioned, I also agree laws and regulations can't keep up with the growth of technology. I was especially surprised when the reporters picture was found from when he was 16.
ReplyDeleteI have heard of facial recognition before, I know that some companies in town already use it. After watching the video it is very scary even though we tried to eliminate our social networking, but the DMV already have our information and if they get hacked the hacker will get our information.
ReplyDeleteMy husband and I used to attend a lot of protests in Vegas and whenever we did we were always told to cover our faces because Police may try to use some form of facial recognition software to arrest and target certain protestors. I can't believe this technology is being used in such an evil way and its truly horrifying how our laws just cannot keep up with the growth of technology. I just wish they would use this technology for better things like maybe identifying missing children or victims of sex trafficking. I'm sure there are benefits to having this type of tech available to us but we need to think of better ways of using it.
ReplyDeleteThe app FindFace is really really creepy and dangerous. I mentioned in one of the comments that facial recognizion is racially biased and thats a very serious concern. Also I just don't know how I feel about the measures police go to "keep the peace". It feels very 1984-ish to me.
ReplyDelete