Artists use face paint to protest and fight facial recognition technology.

Recently in East London there was a protest against the use of facial recognition technology. This comes in the wake of London police beginning to use facial recognition in their operations, leading to the arrest of a women picked out off the streets. 

Artists painted geometric shapes on their faces to stop the technology from working on them. They tested their paint by seeing if their phone cameras recognized their faces. 

London has a very high concentration of security cameras, and this has long been accepted by the community. However, face-recognition technology is putting this acceptance to the test, not just in London but also across the world in Hong Kong, Russia, and more. 

A recent poll showed that most of the British public feels they don’t have the information to form an opinion of facial recognition, but opposition to the technology is growing. There was a mention of being able to ‘opt out’ of the technology, but I’m not sure how that would work. 

 

Chan, Kelvin. “With Painted Faces, Artists Fight Facial Recognition Tech.” Tech Xplore – Technology and Engineering News, Tech Xplore, 8 Mar. 2020, techxplore.com/news/2020-03-artists-facial-recognition-tech.html.

2 thoughts on “Artists use face paint to protest and fight facial recognition technology.

  1. I think that this is a great way to combat the introduction of facial recognition technology into the lives of people who are not interested in using the feature. While facial recognition is useful in some respects, it should not be used in public settings on unwilling participants. It is an invasion of our right to privacy, and this face paint idea is a creative way to protest this problem. I am not the only one who thinks this way. Just this month, college students across the country protested the use of this technology.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/02/facial-recognition-us-colleges-ucla-ban

  2. As we all enjoy many benefits from facial recognition technology, like the adaption of this technology on our smartphones which allows us to unlock our devices easily and with more security. However, it does have many debates going on around the ethic of using this technology. Despite the high concentration of security cameras makes people uncomfortable, due to the influence of programming, face recognition technology has certain racial prejudice against the colored people. Recent studies have shown that people of color are far more likely to be misjudged than whites. In other words, people of color are more likely to be wrongly identified as criminals, which no doubt could become weapons of racists and create a fake phenomenon that people of color are more likely to perform crimes. Consider this aspect, I still think facial recognition technology has a long way to truly solve these problems.

    Hao, Karen. “A US government study confirms most face recognition systems are racist.” MIT Technology Review, 8 Mar. 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/f/614986/ai-face-recognition-racist-us-government-nist-study/

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