Hey, big spenders. Facial recognition technology, already employed by some retail stores to spot and thwart shoplifters, may soon be used to identify and track the freest spenders in the aisles.
The NEC Corporation, for instance, is working on "V.I.P. identification software, based on face recognition, for hotels and other businesses “where there is a need to identify the presence of important visitors.”
And companies like FaceFirst, in Camarillo, Calif., hope to soon complement their shoplifter-identification services with parallel programs to help retailers recognize customers eligible for special treatment. “Just load existing photos of your known shoplifters, members of organized retail crime syndicates, persons of interest and your best customers into FaceFirst,” a marketing pitch on the company's site explains. “Instantly, when a person in your FaceFirst database steps into one of your stores, you are sent an email, text or SMS alert that includes their picture and all biographical information of the known individual so you can take immediate and appropriate action.”
“Commercial facial recognition technology has the potential to provide important benefits and to support a new wave of technological innovation,” says John Verdi, the agency’s director of privacy initiatives, “but it also poses consumer privacy challenges.”
But facial recognition seems more fraught because, like DNA sequencing, it measures and records biological patterns unique to individuals. Like concerns over the proliferation of genetic data, the debate over facial recognition ultimately revolves around whether a person has a right to control who has access to his or her biometric data and how it can be used.
Because facial recognition can be used covertly to identify and track people by name at a distance, some civil liberties experts call it unequivocally intrusive. In view of intelligence documents made public by Edward J. Snowden, they also warn that once companies get access to such data, the government could, too. “This is you as an individual being monitored over time and your movements and habits being recorded,” says Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for privacy issues at the American Civil Liberties Union. “That is a very scary technological reality.”
For the technology to work, a company or government agency must create a database containing photos or video stills of individuals. Next, a typical system extracts complex measurements — often topological — of each face. Then it converts each person’s facial data into a mathematical code, or “faceprint.” If security cameras record someone at, say, a store or a casino, the system can compare the faceprint of that live image to those in the database, taking only a few seconds to run through millions of faceprints and find a match.
