Facial recognition technology (FRT) is a fascinating development. A facial recognition system is one that can match a human face from a digital image or a video frame – such as that captured by a camera – against a database of faces, and ascertain the identity of the person in the image. Such systems work by using algorithms to measure facial features from the digitally captured image. While some applications of FRT may appear to be innocuous – such as using one’s image to unlock a phone – many questions arise when one thinks of how some governments may use this rapidly advancing technology.
It may be relatively easy for a person to recognise and identify a human face, however, for computers, face recognition is quite a difficult task owing to the way that machines process information.
Nevertheless, FRT has come a long way since the 1960s when research of the subject started. The most advanced systems can now accurately identify the image of a face captured by a pole mounted surveillance camera, regardless of angle and lightning conditions. Incidentally, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed engineers to develop systems capable of seeing through surgical masks.
FRT is now being used by private entities as well as policing and government agencies worldwide. Such applications have raised concerns among civil rights organisations and privacy campaigners. Those concerns relate to the fact that a government can now track the movement of a person in real time, almost 24/7, without the knowledge or consent of the person. How might an authoritarian regime use such a capability?
The answer to that question may be found in China.
Journalist Alfred Ng wrote the following:
“China’s facial recognition system logs nearly every single citizen in the country, with a vast network of cameras across the country. A database leak in 2019 gave a glimpse of how pervasive China’s surveillance tools are — with more than 6.8 million records from a single day, taken from cameras positioned around hotels, parks, tourism spots and mosques, logging details on people as young as 9 days old.”
A bipartisan group of 17 senators wrote a letter to former United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during the Trump presidency. The letter stated that, “China uses facial recognition to profile Uyghur individuals, classify them on the basis of their ethnicity, and single them out for tracking, mistreatment, and detention, and [facial recognition] technologies are deployed in service of a dystopian vision for technology governance, that harnesses the economic benefits of the internet in the absence of political freedom and sees technology companies as instruments of state power.”
Perhaps, the situation in China illustrates what any government can do with such technologies.
China has made no secret of its capabilities; one official boasted that the surveillance system integrates information from phones, cameras, payment machines and other sources to pinpoint the location, and intentions of citizens all the time. In fact, there are documented instances of people being arrested before arriving at an anti-government protest, but after revealing their intentions to friends via their phones.
It is interesting that China is not keeping this technology for itself, it is willingly exporting it to other regimes.
Journalist Will Knight writes, “According to a study by academics at Harvard and MIT published by the Brookings Institution, a prominent think tank, China is the world’s biggest face recognition dealer. Experts fear sales of the technology also export authoritarian ideas about biometric surveillance. Chinese companies lead the world in exporting face recognition, accounting for 201 export deals involving the technology. China also has a lead in artificial intelligence (AI) generally, with 250 out of a total of 1,636 export deals involving some form of AI to 136 importing countries.”
Even as concerns about the implications of such technology for individual privacy and other human rights are being expressed, Guyanese may wish to consider the situation at home.
The current PPP regime, apparently, has a very comfortable relationship with China. Against that backdrop, one notes that more surveillance cameras are being installed all the time. Simultaneously, Guyanese would be aware of alleged acts of intimidation against journalists, political opponents, and activists. Would the ruling PPP regime not love the idea of being able to track people that it may consider to be its enemies all the time?
