As facial-recognition technology grows, so does wariness about privacy. Use at a school in Seattle fuels debate.
As facial-recognition technology grows, so does wariness
about privacy. Use at a school in Seattle fuels debate.
Originally published September 28, 2018 at 6:00 am
Updated September 29, 2018 at 1:57 pm
RealNetworks is offering schools a new, free security
tool: facial-recognition software. But as the technology moves further into
public spaces, it's raising privacy concerns and calls for regulation — even
from the technology companies that are inventing the biometric software.
By Rachel Lerman September 28, 2018 6:00 AM
As Mike Vance approaches the glass door that leads to
RealNetworks’ engineering office, he smiles slightly at a small camera mounted
in front of him. Click. The door unlocks, responding to a command from software
powering the camera that recognized Vance’s face and confirmed his identity.
Vance, a senior director of product management at the
Seattle tech company, leads the team that created Secure, Accurate Facial
Recognition — or SAFR, pronounced “safer” — a technology that the company began
offering free to K-12 schools this summer.
It took three years, 8 million faces and more than 8
billion data points to develop the technology, which can identify a face with
near perfect accuracy. The short-term goal, RealNetworks executives say, is
increased school safety.
“There’s a lot of benefit for schools understanding who’s
coming and going,” Vance said.
The software is already in use at one Seattle school, and
RealNetworks is in talks to expand it to several others across the country.
Looking ahead, RealNetworks — known for video- and music-streaming software
introduced in the early 2000s — plans to sell SAFR to various industries,
though the company is staying completely mum on the details for now.
The introduction of the technology has thrust
RealNetworks into the center of a field that is growing quickly as software
gets better at identifying faces. But growing along with it are privacy
concerns and rising calls for regulation — even from the technology companies
that are inventing the biometric software.
Facial-recognition technology is already common, used in
everything from photo apps that sort pictures of people, to unlocking an
iPhone, to law-enforcement agencies searching databases of driver’s license
photos.
Facial recognition is used, broadly, in two ways, said
Oren Etzioni, CEO of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the
sister organization to Paul Allen’s brain science institute. One is consumer
convenience, such as grouping photos, and the other is for surveillance and
tracking.
The big tech players have been involved for years:
Microsoft markets Face API for companies to identify and group similar faces
for apps and other products, while Amazon has Rekognition, which came under
fire earlier this year when the ACLU asked the company to stop selling it to
law-enforcement agencies. Google, Apple and Facebook are also in the game, as
tagging and grouping photos on smartphones illustrate.
But now, as RealNetworks’ SAFR shows, the technology has
been moving further into public spaces. And with that, privacy advocates wonder
if people fully realize how often their faces are being scanned, and advocates
and the industry alike question where the line is between the benefits to the
public and the cost to privacy.
Learning a face
Facial-recognition technology functions much like
fingerprinting — each face has its own unique signature, and companies teach
machines to recognize and match people’s unique features.
RealNetworks’ technology maps 1,600 data points on each
face it sees. The team has been “training” its machine for about two years,
since the launch of RealTimes, its free app that lets people build photo
slideshows. Baked into the 3,300-word user agreement for that app is language
that allows RealNetworks to use customer photos to train its facial-recognition
system.
There’s no panacea here. But I do think that trading some
degree of privacy is a reasonable trade-off for saving children’s lives.” -
Oren Etzioni
SAFR doesn’t know the identity of people in the RealTimes
photos, Vance said — there are no names, addresses or other identifying
information in the massive database of 8 million faces. But what it can do is
tell if two faces are the same person. It’s gotten so accurate that it can tell
identical twins apart and match family photos of the same person even if they
were taken decades apart.
SAFR relies on being able to identify people “in the
wild,” or acting candidly, not posing.
“The great things about those kinds of faces is that
they’re people doing things that they naturally do in life,” Vance said.
“They’re not mug shots or canned shots. You can overtrain a system for people
looking squarely into the camera. But when you’re walking around here, when
you’re walking around a school, you’re not always looking squarely at the
camera.”
Many face-recognition technologies can also identify
basic demographics of a person. Microsoft’s Face API, for instance, can guess
your age with just one photo — a feature that has gotten more accurate since it
was first released in 2015 to middling user reviews.
That has led to concerns of bias, though, especially
since a study at MIT’s Media Lab found some big tech companies’
facial-recognition apps had error rates up to 35 percent higher when
identifying women with darker skin compared to men with lighter skin. Some
feared that could lead to misidentifying women and people of color, a troubling
issue especially if the systems are used by law enforcement.
Microsoft has acknowledged the bias issues and is taking
steps to better identify diverse faces, broadening the database it uses to
train its system by adding photos of more diverse people.
RealNetworks, however, hasn’t trained its software to
identify someone based on race. You couldn’t, for example, ask SAFR to alert
you when a white man walks in a door because it won’t know which faces are
white.
The company didn’t see any benefit in teaching the
machine to recognize race. “It’s loaded,” Vance said of racial identification.
Boundaries of security
SAFR has been watching over the main entrance gate of
Seattle’s private elementary University Child Development School (UCDS) since
this spring, buzzing in parents who come to pick up or drop off their kids. The
school, where RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser’s kids were enrolled last year,
wanted to try out the system to add to overall security at its University
District campus.
It acts as an automatic doorman for parents and staff
members — if a parent’s face is recognized by the camera mounted above the
front gate, the door opens, reducing the need for someone inside the school to
diligently answer a buzzer.
“It’s very convenient,” said Ana Hedrick, whose daughter
is in second grade at the school. “It feels safe.”
The school sent out information about the system to
parents and gave them the option of adding their face to the machine’s database
— something that Hedrick and about 300 parents and caregivers have done. The
SAFR system at the school will identify only adults and rejects the addition of
children to the group of identifiable faces (which a few kids have tried to do,
unsuccessfully, using the system’s self-add feature).
The school offered to answer questions about privacy
concerns, and explained they use the adults’ photos only for their own security
system, said another mother, whose kids are in first and third grade at UCDS.
“I trust that the school knows what it’s doing,” she said. “Feeling like my
kids are safe here is huge.”
RealNetworks plans to keep giving SAFR to schools for
free, even as the company expands it to new industries where it will charge for
the system, Vance said.
The rash of school shootings across the country has thrust
school security into the spotlight. RealNetworks executives said they know SAFR
isn’t a fail-safe system, but they figure each little security component helps,
especially one that can recognize if a known, unwanted person has attempted to
enter school grounds.
“There’s no panacea here,” said the Allen Institute’s
Etzioni, who is not involved in RealNetworks’ project. “But I do think that
trading some degree of privacy is a reasonable trade-off for saving children’s
lives.”
Some critics, however, aren’t so sure such systems in
schools will be effective enough to outweigh the privacy costs.
“There’s a general habituation of people to be tolerant
of this kind of tracking of their face,” said Adam Schwartz, a lawyer with
digital privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “This is especially
troubling when it comes to schoolchildren. It’s getting them used to it.”
School security is a serious issue, he agreed, but he
said the benefits of facial recognition in this case are largely unknown, and
the damage to privacy could be “exceedingly high.”
Call for regulation
Privacy issues have become an increasingly common topic
as facial recognition gets more accurate. Big tech companies, including Amazon
and Google, faced opposition for selling their systems to law-enforcement
agencies, which some fear could lead to a police state and unfair profiling.
But law-enforcement agencies have also used such systems
to find missing people and arrest criminals, something that helps public
safety.
Some critics believe tech companies should restrict the
use of the technology. But its development and its use by law enforcement
agencies has reached the point where the federal government should step in and
regulate it, Microsoft President Brad Smith argued in a blog post this summer.
“The only effective way to manage the use of technology
by a government is for the government proactively to manage this use itself,”
he wrote. “And if there are concerns about how a technology will be deployed
more broadly across society, the only way to regulate this broad use is for the
government to do so.”
RealNetworks is supporting its Redmond neighbor’s call
for regulation, Vance said.
Regulations are already in place in Europe, where a
recent sweeping privacy law calls for organizations to inform people before
collecting their biometric data and tell them what it will be used for, even in
stores and businesses.
A few U.S. states also have consent laws regarding the
technology. A Washington law passed last year requires companies, before collecting
biometric data, to inform people and tell them what their information will be
used for. But most states have no mandates and the federal government has yet
to address the topic.
Between here and sci-fi
In China, the technology is so common that it can
identify people who are jaywalking and display their photos on public digital
billboards.
The U.S. isn’t near that level yet of routinely
identifying people in public streets or parks, said Clare Garvie, an associate
at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law Center, but she finds
the lack of transparency into how the technology is being used and the lack of
federal laws troubling.
Garvie was on a team that conducted a widespread study
that found 54 percent of U.S. residents are in a facial-recognition database
accessible by law enforcement — usually in the form of a driver’s license
photo. “It is unprecedented to have a biometric database that is composed
primarily of law-abiding citizens,” Garvie said.
“The current trajectory might fundamentally change the
relationship between police and the public,” she said. “It could change the
degree to which we feel comfortable going about our daily lives in public
spaces.”
But proper regulation could prevent that, and there’s
reason to be optimistic, Garvie said, pointing to Microsoft’s call for such
laws.
Use of the technology has been slowed to some extent
because it’s still limited in some ways: It isn’t as accurate identifying faces
in different lights or in motion, and it takes a tremendous amount of computing
power to quickly match faces among billions of photos. But these hurdles are
surmountable, said Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology
and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
He pointed out that facial recognition can be used for
good — to combat child trafficking — and for bad — to track law-abiding
citizens anywhere they go.
That doesn’t mean it’s neutral, he said. Anonymity is
becoming more scare with the proliferation of photos on social media and the
technology that can recognize faces.
“Those with unfettered access to your data, and
especially those whose usage of your own data you cannot inquire about or
limit, have power over you,” he said.
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