In October 2004, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) began testing portable face recognition technology?– handheld PCs with cameras that act as automatic mug books. Several suspects have been identified and arrested as a result. The American Civil Liberties Union has objected, though, characterizing the LAPD?s activities as "creeping Big Brotherism."
So what?
Privacy advocates are concerned that a national ID card with a built-in RFID tag would be subject to remote, covert scanning by law enforcement (as well as law-breaking) personnel, with disastrous results for privacy and identity protection. The advantage of faces, from an identity theft perspective, is that they encode no personal information: "Scanning" a face doesn’t tell you its social security number, while scanning an ID card would probably tell you that and much more besides. Further, it’s possible that RFID tags might eventually be hacked or forged–but you can’t easily "hack" your face (wearing a stocking mask, while probably effective, will make your life…complex; try applying in person for a bank loan, for example), which makes faces a potentially more reliable identification mechanism than RFID. The courts have ruled that you have no expectation of privacy in public, so perhaps we’d better get accustomed to the idea that our visages might be–without our knowledge–scanned whenever we?re outside the house. Keep a smile on your face, just in case.
