The Cop iPhone App That Knows Your Face and Can Send You to Jail

Before we talk about the facial recognition technology thats being rolled out to police stations nationwide next month, here’s a question for you: Who would you rather have access to face recognition tech: cops or that weird heavy-breather on the subway? Do you want it? You know, to check out that weird heavy-breather on the subway: what’s his deal? Maybe you are the heavy-breather. In the beginning, that face recognition app might just send you to some photos on Picasa or Facebook—but that’s all it takes to get to the top of the hill in figuring out a whole lot of stuff about someone.

That app doesn’t exist yet for civilians. Bossman Eric Schmidt is already on record saying that Google’s got the tech nailed. “We built that technology and withheld it [because] people could use it in a very bad way,” he said earlier this summer at the D9 conference. That’s nice and not evil, I guess, but Slate tech thinker Farhad Manjoo writes that Google reps have told him “face to face” that customers want face recognition on Google’s Goggles visual search app.

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A thing about technology—and all things that make money really—is that if people want it or even just think they want it, technology will provide them with it (cf. the ability to buy guns with Bitcoins). It doesn’t matter if it’s for the greater good to keep it from society. So, if not Google, then someone else will deliver widely available, accurate facial recognition tech. That sort of tech is hardly a proprietary sort of thing anyway. And once someone else does it, Google will have no reason not to, as Manjoo notes.

A Carnegie Mellon study out earlier this month had some interesting results using a piece of software acquired by Google last month called PittPatt. With webcam snapshots, the not-publicly-available software, cloud computing, and Facebook, the Carnegie Mellon team came up with correct identities for 30-percent of the pictures (and of those 30-percent, they were able to deduce the first five digits of the photographed person’s social security number about a quarter of the time). The study’s author, Prof. Alessandro Acquisti, notes also that he’s designed an app that takes photos of a subject and creates an overlay of the image with the subject’s name and social. Like Google, he’s promised not to release it to the public.

What’s really put all of this in the news right now is the tech that cops are getting access to as we speak. Next month, an iPhone add-on developed by BI2 Technologies that uses facial recognition to identify people and check them out in law-enforcement databases is set for its first deployment, 1000 devices for 40 agencies.

MORIS currently only works from about five feet away and its creators argue that the close proximity implies consent. And that consent is vital. This is a technology that the law isn’t prepared for: is snapping a picture of a suspect (or “suspect”) the same as a search, or is it just snapping a picture. (If you break it down into its manual old-school constituent parts – taking a physical photo and checking it with tons and tons of other photos in a physical, paper-based database by hand, it seems like it might be found to be legal.) These are uncharted waters, which means that it’s all the more important to push the privacy issue right now, not only because uncharted waters are where it becomes rather easy for people to do bad shit.

Maybe it’s only a temporary issue, until civilian tech catches up and everybody has the same capabilities. It’s hard to imagine that a face-recognition search by a heavy-breather can’t well be used as the basis for arrest. MORIS can however. If it matches your face with someone on the FBI’s most wanted list by accident, well, that’s going to be problematic. Of course, you don’t need software to fuck-up for a bad arrest to happen. Maybe as this technology improves, we’ll see fewer wrongful arrests. Dunno yet.

In the end I’m less concerned with MORIS itself than what MORIS says about the inevitable destruction of anonymity in public spaces. You will enter a train station or airport and a camera will pick you up and ID you, just like that. This will be logged certainly because everything is logged in the future because keeping information in the future will eventually be cheaper than destroying it. Sure, the system will check you in, and a robot will hand you your plane tickets just before you enter the body scanners. But nothing in your life will ever be forgotten. You can’t go home again.

And we’re only talking about an iPhone app for local law enforcement. Just consider all of the surveillance technology out there that you don’t even know about. And remember: If You Have Something You Don’t Want Anyone To Know, Maybe You Shouldn’t Be Doing It.