Facial Recognition Technology Whether Embraced as Useful or Harmful in a Business Context

The color of your eyes, the slope of your nose, and the shape of your lips — are the primary elements that make you unique. These particular qualities of your face are also what facial recognition technology uses to pluck you out of a multitude. In simple terms, facial recognition is the process of recognizing or verifying a person's identity using a digital image or video of their face. A facial recognition system will take the help of biometrics to map the face and match it with a database to find a match. Presently, people can unlock a smartphone with a glance, tag their friends in Facebook posts, or even superimpose one face onto another in photos. This kind of biometric tech has revolutionized authentication, making it quick, simple, and, for the most part, accurate. In the past, facial recognition was something only seen in the domain of sci-fi (Science fiction) and James Bond movies. Now it finally entered the mainstream and is a giant part of our daily lives. And no matter whether we like or dislike it, it has made a strong foundation. Although Hollywood loves including facial recognition technology as a plot point in science fiction media, movies and television haven't come up with an impressive job describing how facial recognition software works.

Tools like Apple's FaceID and Microsoft's Windows Hello have put forward facial recognition to consumer devices and helped restore passwords for every single thing from unlocking our devices to paying for goods and services. It's quite uncomplicated to let people mind run wild with business use instance for facial recognition technology— ranging from operating employees' faces as an access token to the myriad possibilities in industries from marketing to travel. The probable applications span from the relatively mundane of replacing old-fashioned timecards with facial recognition to individually-tailored marketing that takes shape on interactive signage as someone walks by.

An unspoken assumption at the back of facial recognition is that the human face is unique. Perhaps this assumption is based on the very human understanding to pick out a friend or loved one in a horde with a glance and our routine use of our faces as an emotive tool. However, we all know about identical twins and perhaps have experienced the doppelganger phenomenon, where we're mistaken for someone we've certainly never met. Moreover, very small-scale academic research has been done into how unique our faces are, both from a biological outlook and the ability of common facial recognition algorithms to discern individuals accurately.

Below are presented some pros and cons of facial recognition algorithms for a better understanding of whether it adds better or bad to technology.

Pros of facial recognition

It helps find missing people and identify perpetrators. Facial recognition has also been used to find missing children using digital images. Police using facial recognition are privy to live alerts and can investigate potential matches in real-time. Facial recognition software has been used to protect businesses against theft. If something is stolen from the business, the software can also be used to catalog the thieves for future reference. It is also helpful in providing better security measures in banks and airports.

Cons of facial recognition

As with any technology, there is a disadvantage to using facial recognition, such as the violation of rights and individual freedoms that it presents, potential data theft, and the threat of overreliance on inaccurate systems.

The possibility of an increasingly greater threat to individual and societal privacy is a significant downside of facial recognition technology. Privacy is such a big affair that some cities like San Francisco, California, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have prohibited law enforcement's use of real-time facial recognition surveillance. In particular cases, police can use video recordings from oneself owned security video devices, but they can't use live facial recognition software.

Facial recognition software can infringe on personal freedoms. Being recorded and scanned by facial recognition technology can make people feel like they're always being watched and judged for their behavior.

Moreover, it also violates our rights. While used for identification purposes, facial recognition data is considered as part of the 'special category of personal data under the UK's implementation of the GDPR. This also extends to racial or ethnic origin, and some facial recognition CCTV companies have been accused of this. There are also concerns about the storage of facial recognition data, as these databases have the probability to be breached.

It also provides opportunities for fraud and other crimes. Lawbreakers can use facial recognition technology to perpetrate crimes against innocent victims too. They can gather individuals' personal information, including digital images and videos collected from facial scans and stored in databases, to commit identity fraud.

As every coin has two faces, facial recognition software also comes with some pros and cons. No doubt this technology has multiple benefits but also contains some disadvantages such as the violation of rights and individual freedoms which puts its use at high risk.