The Face recognition, ¡The new fingerprint!
We walk the world leaving traces! a hair, a drop of sweat, or simply a fingerprint on the glass are testimony of our passage.
Nothing escapes your brand, if you make a phone call, log in to check your email, or simply search the internet for the price of an item you want to buy, all traces remain there.
You may think that discretion is the perfect strategy to go unnoticed, but Machine Learning and Facial Recognition have advanced in such a way that perhaps in the not too distant future the main ID will be our face.
At present, facial recognition technology is being rapidly incorporated as a mechanism to strengthen security and surveillance, supposedly, however greater monitoring in a city does not guarantee a low crime rate until now.
Let's see, there are 770 million public CCTV cameras in the world and 54% (415 million) are located in China. Another way of looking at it is that we know that of the top 20 of the most monitored cities in the world at least 18 are Chinese cities.
However, at present in these cities with robust public monitoring systems, the crime and security correlation is low, that is to say, that the more cameras they monitor does not mean that there is less crime.
The emblematic case of Taiyuan with 465,255 cameras and London with 627,727, these cities are in the first and third place of the cities most monitored with public camera systems, and both present high crime rates compared to other cities with fewer CCTV cameras.
Even in the Nubeo Database (www.numbeo.com) we see that in the first 20 cities with the lowest crime rate in the world, none of them tops the other list that shows the Top 20 most monitored cities in the world.
There will probably be justifications such as that the mere presence of public CCTV cameras are a deterrent for those who intend to commit a crime, there are also technical justifications that say that the quality of the image until recently prevented a good job of facial recognition software.
But now everything is changing and we see important advances such as the Mantis Monitoring Camera, which with 19 lenses can see you sneeze at 4,000 feet (1,155.6 meters), even captures cities and people in the big picture and then delves into extraordinary detail...
Advances of this type represent a revival in the business of monitoring and facial recognition, in fact, the Wall Street Journal foresees it in its 2019 article entitled: “A World With a Billion Cameras Watching You Is Just Around the Corner”, in where they project a growth close to 30% of the global figures of public monitoring Chambers.
As if that were not enough, the advance of facial recognition software follows the same behavior, even Netflix shows it in its documentary series "Connect" where the scientific journalist Latif Nasser immerses us in how this technology is applied today even in pigs of farm to identify the animal's mood by facial recognition.
Now as a no less important detail, it is how this facial recognition software learns day by day and it turns out that one of the ways is through all our images shared freely by us on social networks and apps, which allows the program to improve its identification result.
Reality surpasses fiction and a long time has passed since we saw Nineteen Eighty-Four written by George Orwell and starring Orson Welles wherein a utopian country all the inhabitants are watched by cameras.
This technology is not bad in essence, in fact at present in some US states like Texas, Florida, and Illinois, the FBI can use facial recognition technology to scan DMV databases of driver's license photos.
At many airports around the world, Customs and Border Protection now use facial recognition to screen passengers on international flights. And in some cities, the police have used facial recognition software to identify and arrest people in protests.
Definitely the key is in how this technology is used, how it was legally limited in its application in society, and how to demystify its uses of so many conspiracy theories in addition to restricting its access to bad political systems.
In the end, the one who does not owe it does not fear it! And part of feeling free goes through going down the street showing your face without concern to repercussions regardless of the fact that there are cameras that record you everywhere, also the very idea that it is enough showing your face to identify yourself is priceless!.
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