The facial examination technologies have grown extraordinarly in the last decade and nowdays they are easy obtainable and easy to use. As other technologies- watch the troublematic of the Artificial Intelligence- its use has advantages and also disadvantages when they end with the fundamental rights like the privacy or when they are used to gather data combined with IA to raise the lethality of the militar use weaponry.
The facial examination technologies are every time more present in the technological market. From the ID Face of the Iphone x and similar systems in other smartphones, to the Windows Hello using IR cameras in the equipments with Windows 10 compatibility, going through the automatic labelled from Facebook.
The consumption uses are only the tip of the iceberg. Some months ago, we knew about the “rebellion” of 4000 employees of google signing an inner request where they demanded the company the exit of Project Maven, a military program of artificial intelligence and automatic learning drivem by the Defense Department of The United States with objectives like classify automatically pictures of objects and people for military use.
Amazon has also faced hard reviews due supplying facial examination technologies to the law enforcements of Oregon and Orlando, in the documents obtained by the American Union of Civil Rights by a request for the Freedom Information Law, used for the massive surveillance that could affect all groups and communities that are more vulnerable, people that are not white and immigrants.
And is not only Google or Amazon. Microsoft has similar contracts and technologies. A group of employees of Microsoft published an open letter where they shared their opposition to a contract of their company toc reate services in the cloud in Ia military programs for the Defense Department of the EE.UU.
A group of academics (300 experts in robothics, artificial intelligence, international relations, security, ethics and rights) set their sights in every technology: “The contracts of the Defense Department under consideration of Google and similar contracts already in use with Microsoft and Amazon, show a dangerous alliance between the private technologic industry, at the moment in possesion of big amounts of personal confidential data gathered from people from around the world, and the army of a country”.
Although the technologic companies have a important role to perform like corporate responsability, it is clear that not all of them want to establish their own ethic rules, particularly in a so competitive technologic enviroinment.
For that, the facial examination technologies are going to need a powerful public regulation to protect the fundamental rights of the citizens. Of course, asking the government of the EE.UU. (and all of them in general) the regulation of these technologies when their intelligence agencies use them for massive espionage aroudn the world is like “letting the fox take care of the chicken”.