Google has announced a ban on face recognition apps for it’s Glass product. This is a dramatic step because many people have been expecting face recognition to be one of the most important features of Glass.
What good is face recognition?
- Face recognition along with other biometric information can be used for authentication. Passwords suck. They are a bad user experience for many reasons: they choke fluidity, they are by definition hard to remember and are thus written down, they are ugly, they are alienating. Face recognition is a pathway around passwords.
- Face recognition allows for customization. If a machine recognizes you and knows who you are, they can balance resources in ways that are more useful and pleasing to you. This can ease your cognitive load (gibberish repetitive tasks stumbling around a one size fits all pre-rendered world) and it can increase your productivity.
- Face recognition allows for pervasive abilities. Do you want to have to go through a multiple-stage, deliberate look-up for people you meet, or can you get a more relaxed flow if some important information is cued up? Social information is extremely important for humans.
- Face recognition can function as medical augmentation for people who have alzheimer’s disease, face blindness, or are just bad with names.
- Face recognition is enterprise software for sales people. Sure, it’s creepy if Wal Mart greeters start talking to you by name, but if they offer you personalized discounts or can cue up half your shopping basket based on your buying patterns, they can save you time and money. High end sales people at trade shows selling multi million dollar products may have a strong need for identifying buyers they have not met yet.
- Face recognition is a social rocket booster. It opens up the usefulness of on-line social graphs like Facebook, Linkedin, Ancestry, Classmates, and dating websites. If you meet a stranger at a party you would know what interests you have in common, what people you know in common, and what fun or value you can offer each other. The easy flow of this information makes in person social collision more fun and rewarding.
Face recognition does have some grey area uses. As a security device it could warn you of people on sex offender registries, or people who own guns, or have criminal records. People can use face recognition to avoid each other based on arbitrary categories or even target people for bullying. Misguided advertisers can use face recognition to target and (if the targeting algorithm or data tech is wrong) harass and annoy customers. I would also expect 1001 new misuses to be discovered once face recognition is ubiquitous. However, these problems will need to be addresses as needed in the same way any new tech has potential pitfalls. Traffic lights didn’t invent themselves.
Why do I expect this tech to be common, regardless of Google’s immediate decision? Google and all major software companies are already using this tech. Google announced a major machine learning algorithm to recognize cat faces. It’s easy to imagine how this work can be applied to less fuzzy faces. It seems that Google is merely preventing immediate face recognition. Perhaps they are trying to sabotage competing social media companies. Perhaps they are defending against an aggressive smear campaign against them. Regardless, face recognition is a major tech and can and will be applied to every smart phone and webcam.
