You Can Encrypt Your Face [electronic resource].

The New Inquiry 2017

Open access content

Facial recognition technology turns your face into code that can be archived and traded among strange and suspect parties. Its growing sophistication in the hands of law enforcement poses a particular threat to anonymous dissent. Civil rights groups are already forecasting a near future where police use of facial recognition to track protesters will discourage people from hitting the streets. The face is only one of several methods that companies specializing in biometric identification technology are developing at a rapid pace. Because they’re harder to forge than passwords, companies are scooping up our faces, gaits, irises and fingerprints in the name of identity verification and national security. With the global industry expected to balloon by several billions of dollars over the next five years, legislative attempts to hinder its growth are just barely catching up. But our right to anonymity cannot wait. Our visages have become sites of inert code, passively captured from our bodies by Facebook photographs and CCTV videos. Facial recognition companies often use encryption as a way of securing these raw goods—our faces—and winning favor with potential contractors. The Kansas-based company StoneLock, for example, boasts that it uses infrared imagery to reduce your facial measurements into a unique and encrypted biometric signature data file. Nobody could reconstruct your unique facial measurements, except the corporation that keeps your face in its lockbox. It’s time we conspire to shield our meatsacks from such intrusions and reclaim what encryption means in the context of biometric technology. You can, in fact, encrypt your face, and your bodies. The more people who do it, the better it works. Although putting a mask on in public on a regular basis is impractical, physically anonymizing yourself in public spaces should become commonsense for navigating contentious political events. The New Inquiry has come up with a novel approach to do this. We’ve devised an
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Algorithms
Artificial intelligence
Biometric identification
Electronic surveillance

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The New Inquiry