<i>The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers... Basically, his design consisted of a multifaceted quartz lens hooked up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.<p>As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure - the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, then switched to the next...<p>In any case, the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him - or her - was meaningless.</i><p>From A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick.<p>Published by Not Known in 1977
Obligatory link to CV Dazzle (a site exploring the use of avant-garde hairstyles and makeup to foil facial recognition): <a href="http://cvdazzle.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cvdazzle.com/</a>
I've spent the last three years either working for a company actively implementing facial recognition (and other biometrics) into both security/identity products and consumer retail products or just researching biometric technology in general.<p>I've come to the conclusion that there won't be a great shift forward in these technologies until someone comes along and completely reinvents the concept of privacy itself. I've seen retailer after retailer try to implement improvements to consumer experience (either through beacons and directed coupons or through some sort of identity recognition) only to be met with ENORMOUS backlash [1] from consumers freaking out because the store can tell where they are in the store at any given time. In security, iris recognition, voice recognition, and facial recognition are all methods of identification that cannot be stolen and yet all are methods of identification that freak people out to no end. <i>They'd rather carry around an ID that can be stolen, copied, and sold on the black market thus ruining their financial livelihood for the rest of their lives than switch over to a more reliable biometric based method of identification</i><p>Privacy as we knew it is dead. It died a long time ago; hell you could probably argue that it started to die the first time anyone published a phone book because if I knew your name then I could figure out where you lived. Biometrics, to me, is a recapturing of privacy and personal identification because you no longer have to worry about relying on third parties to protect your identity (which is obviously not working [2]), YOU ARE YOUR IDENTITY. Your face, your voice, your fingerprint, your iris, all of these things cannot be spoofed and are uniquely yours <i>and cannot be taken away from you</i>.<p>As for the article, this is a perfect example of the kinds of things that require a reinvention of the notion of privacy. Used to be if you were captured on camera in public no one knew who you were unless someone you knew saw that picture and could identify you. Now with facial recognition, that's not possible anymore. But Pandora's box has been opened and it cannot be shut again so articles like this just seem totally pointless in light of that- they're missing the fundamental issue that facial recognition is a thing that exists and it's not going to stop existing just because we're all unsure how we feel about it. Yes I <i>absolutely</i> agree that facial recognition needs to be an opt-in where it can be, like on Facebook or Twitter or whatever. However we're living in a time when absolute right to privacy and anonymity in public no longer exists, and we need to figure out how to navigate that fast or else all of this biometric technology that can and should be used to make life easier is going to be regulated all to hell and we'll be stuck in paranoia-ville and afraid to leave our homes.<p>[1]<a href="http://consumerist.com/2013/05/10/nordstrom-decides-to-stop-tracking-customers-smartphones/" rel="nofollow">http://consumerist.com/2013/05/10/nordstrom-decides-to-stop-...</a>
[2]<a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/102752205" rel="nofollow">http://www.cnbc.com/id/102752205</a>