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July 13 2011 5:36 PM

Smile, You're On Everyone's Camera

Ubiquitious facial-recognition software is coming.

Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer. Click image to expand.

According to the Wall Street Journal, police departments across the nation will soon adopt handheld facial-recognition systems that will let them identify people with a snapshot. These new capabilities are made possible by BI2 Technologies, a Massachusetts company that has developed a small device that attaches to officers' iPhones. The police departments who spoke to the Journal said they plan to use the device only when officers suspect criminal activity and have no other way to identify a person—for instance, when they stop a driver who isn't carrying her license. Law enforcement officials also seemed wary about civil liberties concerns. Is snapping someone's photo from five feet away considered a search? Courts haven't decided the issue, but sheriffs who spoke to the paper say they plan to exercise caution.



Sure, this isn't a new worry. Early in 2001, police scanned the faces of people going to the Super Bowl, and officials rolled out the technology at Logan Airport in Boston after 9/11. Those efforts raised a stink, and the authorities decided to pull back. But society has changed profoundly in the last decade, and face recognition is now set to go mainstream. What's more, the police may be the least of your worries. In the coming years—if not months—we'll see a slew of apps that allow your friends and neighbors to snap your face and get your name and other information you've put online. This isn't a theoretical worry; the technology exists, now, to do this sort of thing crudely, and the only thing stopping companies from deploying it widely is a fear of public outcry. That fear won't last long. Face recognition for everyone is coming. Get used to it.

What's changed in the last decade? Three things. First, computers have gotten better at recognizing faces. The technology works by analyzing dozens of different features—the distance between your eyes, the width of your nose—that remain the same across photographs. As computers have gotten faster and digital photography has gotten better, face recognition has filtered down to consumer photo software. (I find Picasa's to be uncannily good). By this point, every tech giant has snapped up face-identifying expertise. Apple purchased the face-recognition firm Polar Rose last year. In 2006, Google acquired the biometric recognition company Neven Vision, and Hartmut Neven, one of the world's experts in computer vision, is a respected engineer at the company. A Microsoft research team in Israel has built a fantastic app that uses face-recognition systems to search the Web for pictures of people who are in your photo album. And last year Facebook rolled out a tool that automatically suggests names of people to tag in your pictures.

Another major factor that augurs the face-recognition era is that we've become accustomed to ubiquitous photography. Now that we all carry cameras everywhere, it no longer seems odd when someone points a lens in your direction—you probably don't even notice it. Indeed, we all have a general expectation that if we go outside, someone is going to capture our image. We might not like it, but we live with it.

Finally, there's Facebook. Ten years ago we were worried about authorities building a worldwide database of our faces. In 2004, a Harvard student built a site that let people post their own names and faces, and hundreds of millions of people around the world have taken him up on it. We're all posting pictures, and tagging names to pictures, at a furious rate—according to Facebook, people add 100 million names to faces on Facebook every day. The face-recognition tools available to law enforcement agencies will match you against government databases—the DMV or passport database, or the FBI's most-wanted list—but the technology available to consumers will be able to do just as well by matching your face to online snapshots. The government couldn't have built a better facial database if it tried. (See the Onion's video, "CIA's 'Facebook' Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs.")