Facial Recognition: Should We Fear It or Embrace It?

Facial-recognition technology is not new, but it has progressed immensely in the past few years, mainly because of advances in artificial intelligence. Naturally, this has drawn the interest of Silicon Valley, advertising agencies, hardware manufacturers, and the government. But not everyone is thrilled. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and 35 other advocacy groups, for example, sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding that his company stop providing advanced facial-recognition technology to law enforcement, warning that it could be misused against immigrants and protesters. Early iterations of the technology, which dates back to the 1960s, were clunky. Police had to create a facial-recognition database, which required a human user to specify key points on a photo of each subject's face, such as the center of pupils and corners of the eyes, mouth, and nose.