The Democratization of Surveillance

As artificial intelligence brings nations high speed facial recognition capabilities, surveillance societies are rising across nations: blurring the lines between privacy and security. This is due to the enormous scale of changes that are enabled by significant advancements in technology: digital imaging, high speed processing, skin texture analysis, thermal cameras, machine learning, 3D sensors, speech recognition, mood recognition and more. These advancements break technical barriers allowing the extensive collection, recording, storage, analysis and application of digital data and information. Moreover, the explosion in processing power allows powerful computers utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to execute facial recognition capabilities with almost perfect accuracy. Today, facial recognition technology can be used to not only identify individuals but also uncover additional personally identifiable information (PII), such as photos, blog posts, social networking profiles and internet behavior all through facial features alone. This is just the tip of the iceberg.