📑 Is our privacy out the window?

Bookmarked Is our privacy out the window? (Lens: Pioneering research stories, commentary and opinion told by leading academics – Monash University)

New facial recognition technology and its potential uses are justifiably raising fears.

Mark Andrejevic and Neil Selwyn talk about the various ways that surveillance technology has crept into our society through:

The use of facial recognition to deter marathon runners from cheating, relieving teachers of the burden of taking the class roll, and saving home-owners the worry of losing their door keys.

They also discuss some of the function creep, such as the whereabouts of Workforce and the tracking of customers in stores. The authors close with a call that we must all pay more attention, especially as governments begin the debates about regulation.

Amid growing calls in the US and elsewhere for outright bans on all forms of facial recognition, it’s time for Australia to begin to pay closer attention. At present, most uses of the technology remain speculative or in the early stages of development. There’s a brief window for us all to have an influence on what happens next. It will be important to regulate not just the use of public databases, but also the creation of large-scale private databases, and the uses to which these can be put.