Facial recognition has become very common in everyday life, from logging us in to our phones in a few seconds, to speeding up customs processing, to catching criminals. While its convenience is often praised, its expansion in public surveillance raises serious concerns.
Facial recognition is a type of AI that maps the geometry of facial features–the distance between eyes and nose, the distance of the mouth, and the shape of the jawline. The camera separates the face from the background, analyzes facial features, converts them into a mathematical formula or code, and stores the data. When, for example, someone tries to unlock their phone using facial recognition, the phone compares the face’s template to the known faces in its database, and you get it.
This AI offers significant benefits, such as opening your phone more quickly and analyzing faces to help catch criminals and improve public safety, but it also introduces significant privacy concerns. Facial recognition can track people without their knowledge, raising concerns about consent. Surveillance cameras in public places increase monitoring in everyday life, raising concerns about the persistent observation of public spaces. Many people feel uneasy when they believe they are being watched, often because there is no clear explanation or transparency from companies or the government.
Facial recognition has not always been accurate, as studies show that this AI has had higher error rates with darker-skinned faces and female faces. These biases create unfair outcomes, which are often linked to the data. The data used to train the system to recognize people does not fully represent diverse populations, resulting in lower accuracy for certain groups. These errors have denied many people access to places like airports and workplaces, and have led to wrongful arrests and detentions.
Furthermore, facial data can be stolen or hacked through database breaches and interceptions during transmission. Database breaches most often occur on centralized servers where companies or governments store millions of facial images. In 2024, reports emerged of a breach involving an Australian facial recognition system used at venues, resulting in the theft of drivers’ licenses, signatures, date-of-birth details, and facial templates. This poses a dangerous risk to facial ID data, because unlike passwords, once you set a facial recognition system somewhere, the face can not be reset–in other words, you cannot delete it.
In many regions, laws still regulate how and what facial recognition can be used for. There are ongoing debates about facial recognition: whether it should be allowed because of its potential risks in schools, public places, and law enforcement, or kept for its potential to improve security and efficiency.
As facial recognition continues to spread worldwide and spark debate, more people are questioning how far its use should go. While this technology becomes more efficient and quicker to use, it also poses many risks that are hard to ignore. The main challenge will be finding a harmony between using technology and protecting others’ privacy and individuality.
