Banning Face-Recognition Technology Does Not Protect Your Privacy, Says Dean Zlateva
Metropolitan College Dean Tanya Zlateva, cofounder of BU’s Center for Reliable Information Systems & Cyber Security (RISCS), was quoted in an article by WGBH News on February 25.
The article, “Is It Possible to Opt-Out? Facial Recognition Technology Raises Questions About Data and Consent,” notes that security and law enforcement agencies, healthcare organizations, and retail businesses are fueling growth in the facial recognition market that is expected to reach a value of 10.19 billion by 2025, according to Mordor Intelligence. Also growing fast are people’s concerns about privacy rights. Where, and how, is face mapping technology being used? Are we being tracked? And, how do you opt-out, as a private citizen?
Law makers and civil rights activists are demanding clear regulations and ethical guidelines, with House Democrats in Massachusetts going so far as to propose a moratorium on law enforcement’s ability to “acquire, possess, access, or use any biometric surveillance system.” But Dean Zlateva, whose research involves computational modeling of visual perception, parallel and distributed processing, and pattern recognition, says that regulations and bans on biometric technology are missing the point: the data is already widely available.
The tools that map your face, or recognize patterns in your gait or your iris, can only match their algorithms with information that already exists in a particular database, drawn from a multitude of sources—internet presence, social media, official records, to name a few. The real question, says Zlateva, is how do we better protect the individual’s digital information?
“When we talk about privacy and security, it’s not just for face recognition or iris recognition or for date of birth and social security,” said Zlateva. “It’s how we deal with protecting data that the person to whom it belongs has not explicitly given permission to use.”