https://medium.com/@jjw_27023/the-contours-of-facial-recognition-2e963c8dd878

James J. WardBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingMay 23When you think about it, facial recognition is a deeply “human” action. It’s the most common way for people to recognize one another, it’s one of the earliest stages of our developmental attachment to our parents, and it is, by far, the easiest way to evaluate someone’s credibility, intentions, and personality. It explains why we want face to face meetings for our big decisions (has anyone ever proposed via text?), and why the Constitution requires that we see one another in court sometimes. We even show our faces to one another when there’s no need: your social media profile almost certainly has a picture of your face somewhere, largely because it’s a way for people to know your account is really “you,” and not an evil impostor.

It’s that very closeness to human nature that makes automated facial recognition both readily understood and deeply alienating. The fact is that, unlike many other complicated data processing or machine learning actions, recognizing a human face is something that we all basically understand and that resonates with us in a way that other forms of recognition do not. Think of it this way: fingerprints are more reliable than facial recognition ( just ask Chinese authorities), but people are more comfortable with fingerprint ID over facial ID, and by a wide margin. Why? Plenty of reasons, but one is certainly the feeling that our faces are somehow more intrinsically “us,” and so deserving of more protection (regardless of whether that makes sense from a privacy perspective). Facial recognition technology (FRT) implicates our very notion of ourselves, and when/how it is acceptable to be seen.