From the New York Times article by Sahil Chinoy on April 16th 2019

What we found shows the technology’s promise — and perils.

Source: Opinion | We Built a (Legal) Facial Recognition Machine for $60

Facial recognition technology – a threat to privacy?

The NY Times article details how easy it is to use existing public web cameras that live stream and services like Amazon’s or Microsoft’s facial recognition services to identify and track people.   It’s a bit chilling actually what can be done now – in this NY Times test they recognized about 2500 people using just a few days data from three live web cameras fed to Amazon’s service.   This article makes several really salient points: Law enforcement and government agencies are just starting to take advantage of this for example by identifying people in public demonstrations or people in the area of crime scenes, and secondly that it may soon be ” … impossible to speak and participate in society anonymously”. Currently, there are no laws regulating the use of this technology.

This use of cameras and imaging technology fascinates me but scares me at the same time.  How about you?  Maybe I’m old school but I do guard my privacy more than others seem to.

The article is a must read if you are interested in imaging technology and privacy.   btw – The New York Times has a whole series of articles on privacy called the Privacy Project.

I have read that similar and perhaps more advanced and systematically deployed facial recognition technology is widely used by the Chinese government.  Maybe this is the direction the US will go?  Or perhaps big companies will harness this for use with more targeted marketing?