A cute little story appeared on the BBC website today about the Teatreneu club, a comedy venue in Barcelona using facial recognition technology to charge for laughs.
In a related story, the Wall Street Journal reports on how marketers are scanning online pictures to identify the people engaging with their brands and the context they’re being used.
With the advances in recognition technology and deeper, faster analytics it’s now becoming feasible that anything you do that’s posted online or being monitored by things like CCTV is now quite possibly recognise you, the products your using and the place you’re using them in.
Throw all of the data gathered by these technologies into the stew of information that marketers, companies and governments are already collecting and there a myriad of good and bad applications which could be used.
What both stories show is that technology is moving fast, certainly faster than regulatory agencies and the bulk of the public realise. This is going to present challenges in the near future, not least with privacy issues.
For the Teatreneu club, the experiment should be interesting given rich people tend to laugh less; they may find the folk who laugh the most are the people least able to pay 3o Euro cents a giggle.
Paul,
Your wrote “technology is moving fast, certainly faster than regulatory agencies and the bulk of the public realise”. You might be right about what the public realises but I want to clarify that it is not the case, as others often think, that technology has outpaced regulations.
Much of the world has technology neutral data protection laws that limit the collection of Personal Information. If a business doesn’t have a reasonable need, or consent, then it is not permitted to collect Personal Information. What technologists are often unaware of is that the creation of Personal Information (by facial recognition for instance) is a form of collection and as such is covered by privacy laws.
For reference, with the former Deputy Privacy Commissioner of NSW, Anna Johnston, I wrote about this in the new Encyclopedia of Social Network Analysis and Mining:
“The proactive creation of biometric matches constitutes a new type of PI Collection, for Facebook must be attaching names – even tentatively, as metadata – to photos. This is a covert and indirect process. Photos of anonymous strangers are not Personal Information, but metadata that identifies people in those photos most certainly is. Thus facial recognition is converting hitherto anonymous data — uploaded in the past for personal reasons unrelated to photo tagging let alone covert identification — into Personal Information.” See https://www.constellationr.com/content/facebooks-challenge-collection-limitation-principle
Yes technology is moving fast, but when it creates novel ways of creating and collecting Personal Information, then that technology is accountable under existing laws.
Imagine I invented a new fuel additive that magically gave my old car a top speed of 500 km/hr. I am still not allowed to speed. Technology that creates new ways to break the law has not outpaced the law. Quite the opposite.