Facial recognition technology poses privacy concerns

By Michael O’Connell, FederalNewsRadio.com

Facial recognition is becoming a bigger part of law enforcement and homeland security. It’s also growing in the commercial sector, which has all kinds of privacy and ID misuse implications. That’s why the Federal Trade Commission recently held a workshop to explore the issues.

Amanda Koulousias, a staff attorney in the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection at the FTC, spoke to The Federal Drive with Tom Temin Tuesday morning about the who, what and why of this gathering.

“One of the things that we learned at the workshop … is what are the privacy concerns here and are the technologies currently being implemented in a way that raises additional privacy concerns or are they being implemented in a privacy-sensitive way,” said Koulousias. “And since we don’t fully know the answers to that, it’s very hard to predict where we’ll go.”

Workshop participants included technologists, privacy and consumer advocates, academics and representatives of companies implementing facial recognition in their products. They discussed the privacy concerns relating to two separate technologies — facial detection and facial recognition.

One way that companies are now using facial detection is in commercial signs. “It’s detecting the age range and the gender of the person who is looking at the sign,” Koulousias said. “It can then target an ad to that person based on the demographic characteristics.”

Facial recognition, on the other hand, is being used in various photo-tagging applications. Representatives from both Google and Facebook were among those at the workshop discussing how their social networks were using the technology.

To read more, visit:  http://www.federalnewsradio.com/439/2691162/Facial-recognition-technology-poses-privacy-concerns

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