Facial Recognition: Big Trouble With Big Data Biometrics

What if every time you walked down any street in any city, automated cameras - attached to street lights, business facades, mailboxes or homes, or in the form of "body cams" worn by police officers and parking attendants - automatically scanned your face and uploaded a biometric fingerprint to a central server? Or if every time you took a photograph, your smartphone sent a copy to a server for biometric analysis? And what if these servers were monitored by a third-party provider that shared the fingerprints with marketing firms and law enforcement agencies, including border control agencies? The biometric facial recognition technology required to underpin such an undertaking continues to be refined and made available by the likes of Affectiva, Amazon, Google, IBM, Kairos, Microsoft, NEC and OpenCV, among others. Amazon Web Services, for example, in 2016 began to offer biometric capabilities via Amazon Rekognition, and it's ready to highlight positive use cases.