Estate Living Magazine Design for living - Issue 42 June 2019 | Page 61

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Your face has become a key. Right now, your face can be used to unlock your phone and
approve mobile purchases but, in China, it links a person to their social credit score, which
permits them to travel on public transport, or can ban the individual from travelling on
trains and planes. Standing at the tip of Africa and looking up into the world, we can see the
reactions to facial recognition and listen carefully to the debates. To our left there is a US city,
San Francisco, that has banned facial recognition, and to the right, China, which embraces
facial recognition without barriers.
But it’s not just commerce and security – there are also fun and sinister applications like
using facial recognition data to create characters and avatars, or to create fake videos called
deepfake, like the ones below.
What is facial recognition and how does it work?
Facial recognition is a method of identifying or verifying the identity of an individual using
their face. Facial recognition is a category of biometric software that maps an individual’s
facial features mathematically, and stores the data as a faceprint. The software uses deep
learning algorithms to compare a live capture or digital image to the stored faceprint in
order to verify an individual’s identity.
Safety vs privacy
The challenges of facial recognition 
Failure rates are very high – recent tests by the UK police at the Notting Hill Carnival showed
a 91% failure rate in identifying people (theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/15/uk-
police-use-of-facial-recognition-technology-failure). Add to this a database filled with grainy
E
One of the greatest arguments for facial recognition is its potential use for finding missing
people and combating human trafficking. Combining the ability to age missing people
and continue to hunt for them globally using facial recognition has a lot of public support.
Missing Children South Africa (missingchildren.org.za) reports that only 77% of missing
children are found, and the use of global facial recognition could assist with lowering these
statistics and with reuniting families.
The biggest debate is related to safety versus the ability to live anonymously. Safety is often
raised as a reason to allow facial recognition to be used without regulation. Examples of
this are many. Taylor Swift secretly used facial recognition to find stalkers in her concerts.
But how accurate is facial recognition? The UK police have done several tests of facial
recognition outside high-traffic areas such as high streets or football stadiums. These have
led to some arrests, but only between one and three on each occasion, which – it is argued
– an active police force could have achieved.