We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point. | The New York Times | Opinion

Source: We’re Banning Facial Recognition. We’re Missing the Point. | The New York Times | Opinion, by Bruce Schneier

The whole point of modern surveillance is to treat people differently, and facial recognition technologies are only a small part of that.

In all cases, modern mass surveillance has three broad components: identification, correlation and discrimination.

Facial recognition is a technology that can be used to identify people without their knowledge or consent. … But that’s just one identification technology among many. People can be identified at a distance by their heart beat or by their gait, using a laser-based system. Cameras are so good that they can read fingerprints and iris patterns from meters away. And even without any of these technologies, we can always be identified because our smartphones broadcast unique numbers called MAC addresses. Other things identify us as well: our phone numbers, our credit card numbers, the license plates on our cars.

Once we are identified, the data about who we are and what we are doing can be correlated with other data collected at other times. … It can be purchasing data, internet browsing data, or data about who we talk to via email or text. It might be data about our income, ethnicity, lifestyle, profession and interests. There is an entire industry of data brokers
who make a living analyzing and augmenting data about who we are — using surveillance data collected by all sorts of companies and then sold without our knowledge or consent.

The whole purpose of this process is for companies — and governments — to treat individuals differently.

Regulating this system means addressing all three steps of the process… The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible. Similarly, we need rules about how our data can be combined with other data, and then bought and sold without our knowledge or consent. … Finally, we need better rules about when and how it is permissible for companies to discriminate.

Today, facial recognition technologies are receiving the brunt of the tech backlash, but focusing on them misses the point. We need to have a serious conversation about all the technologies of identification, correlation and discrimination, and decide how much we as a society want to be spied on by governments and corporations — and what sorts of influence we want them to have over our lives.