Wow, I'm glad that the rest of the country isn't following the Illinois example. I remember when the Google art institute released the "what classic painting do you look like", it was banned from use in Illinois, I guess this law is why.
I get that people don't think twice about giving it away. But it's another thing for that to be the moral justification for defending the merits of facial recognition.
Pardon my take, but:
A large uprising is starting to swell in the name of privacy, but the swing voter is concerned about what is essentially the visual equivalent of the "Which Disney Princess are you?" quiz.
The moral framework that concludes that people need to be coddled against making the wrong decision about sharing their face data for stuff like this is a bit condescending. Why do we assume people haven't considered the risks and decided they think either the odds of worst case scenarios are low or they aren't bothered by them?
It feels a little bit like the gun control debate. Taking away people's freedoms because of the possible worst case outcome can result in a worse overall situation.
If people aren't bothered by how facial recognition is used, stepping in and asserting we know better and they need a legal protection seems premature and overreaching.
No, because I don't see my face as a private thing. Nor is the exact distance between my pupils, or the profile of my nose, or any other information that can be cleaned from a photograph of my face.
It's not that it's a private thing, it's that it's yours to control.
There aren't technical limitations to the use (just as there aren't technical limitations to copying and freely distributing all digital media), so we either institute legal limitations or accept that it's allowed. There are many negative aspects of allowing it, so we should probably make sure we take the time to look at the repercussions of both stances carefully (that is, more carefully than "I don't have a problem therefore allow it").
Of course my face is mine to control. I can wear makeup, grow out or shave my hair, tattoo the whole thing if I care to.
Images of my face created by other people may be a different story entirely. Does Donald Trump or Boris Johnson own every photo of them on the AP newswire?
These arguments are way more nuanced with new tech. What about your fingerprint? your signature? Cadence of every syllable you say when you call the tech support or takeout? Any one can do any of these things over a single weekend. Tomorrow, Google could enable some feature on Android to recognize your face or voice on any phone in the world.
We'll need a better answer to deepfakes than "You cannot do anything with an image of another person's face."
Unless we want to be governed by faceless legislators or entertained by faceless celebrities. There should be some way to divide responsibility for person's images that isn't totalitarian in either direction (either "You cannot use a person's face without their consent," which kills visual news as a practice, or "every face is fair game for anyone to use at any time," which feels invasive to the individual).
I agree; in retrospect my comment was a bit facile. In the long run I don't think anyone will have any rights with respect to images of her or his own (clothed or naked) body. We're not in the long run yet. It will take some time for most of us to be comfortable with that.
In my view, it's more important to create a sort of symmetry with respect to images and other data than it is to preserve particular customs that are problematic in light of modern technology. That is, it's probably OK that every e.g. FBI agent has access to thousands of images of me, or even my complete genome, as long as I have access to thousands of images and the complete genome of every FBI agent. We learned in kindergarten that "knowledge is power". Like power, knowledge is not symmetrical. A federal prosecutor having power over me doesn't necessarily mean I have power over that federal prosecutor.
If we've learned anything in the decade just past (to be clear, that's an open question), it is that authoritarian structures are easily hacked by the authoritarians who run them. It may be that e.g. the Department of Justice wasn't always constructed to capriciously surveil and/or construct false cases against innocents (although, was that before or after they harassed MLK and other civil rights leaders?), but ISTM at least the cases of Aaron Swartz and Carter Page, to cover both ends of the political spectrum, show that to be the case now. If the tools of knowledge/power are increasing in power, we all need to have access to those tools.
