I’m sure many of you have heard about things like Google’s DeepMind or Snapchat’s facial recognition feature. Not to mention apple’s attempts at creating a way to unlock your phone using your face instead of a fingerprint or passcode. But what exactly are these technologies seeing?
Some people have been trying to determine things about people simply by using a program to determine something about a participant based on their face. For example a program you can try out right now is a online facial recognition software by Kairos which tries to determine someone’s emotional state by just a single picture, or more recently a study showed how a new program could be used to determine which participant was gay in a crowd with up to 91% accuracy. These technologies can be frightening. A homophobic government could use technologies like these in just a few years to track and target gay men and women as well as develop these technologies further to track any type of minority or person of interest. Another possibility is that this type of technology could be developed to find people who are about to or have recently committed crimes by looking at the emotional state of their face. I’m sure most of you have heard of lie detectors that use your blood pressure or nervousness to determine if you’re lying. We could one day be able to determine if someone’s lying by just a recording or picture of them. Though this technology could also be used to look for people in pain and look for things like early symptoms of a heart attack or stroke and notify EMS before the patient even knows they’re in trouble.
Torlo 