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Hundreds of years ago, before the United States was even a nation, Benjamin Franklin uttered these famous words: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." At the time, Franklin was addressing a tax and defense conflict in Pennsylvania. With the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition, and surveillance technology, however, Franklin’s quote has taken on a whole new meaning, fueling an interesting debate about the balance between liberty and safety.
Thanks in large part to the rapid development of AI, surveillance technology has become so advanced that cameras can do far more than just record video. Cameras equipped with AI can scan a person’s face, compare it with images stored in a database, and help identify who that person might be. Other AI-powered tools can track movement, recognize objects, and analyze enormous amounts of information in seconds.
Supporters of this technology argue it makes America safer by helping find missing children and solve crimes – but critics warn it could be used to invade Americans’ privacy and violate their Fourth Amendment rights.
Surveillance: Who Owns Your Face?
The Fourth Amendment protects Americans against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” There are also a variety of laws and regulations in the United States that protect Americans’ privacy, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which guards individuals’ protected health information, and the Privacy Act, which established how the government collects, stores, uses, and shares private information about people.
However, when it comes to physical appearance, no federal laws currently regulate facial recognition technology. Some states have laws to address privacy concerns over the advanced tech, like Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Passed in 2008, the first-of-its-kind law “ensures that individuals are in control of their own biometric data." It also prohibits private companies from collecting that data unless they meet certain standards, like notifying a “person in writing of what data is being collected or stored,” according to the ACLU’s state affiliate. The organization explained that biometric information includes fingerprints, hand scans, facial geometry, iris scans, and “other unique biological information.”
Still, the unfortunate reality is that almost “all the faces digitally collected are being bought, sold, and added to databases without the explicit consent of the individuals who wear those faces. Organizations typically have free rein with the images because few, if any, restrictions or regulations exist,” explained Communications of the ACM, a top publication on computing and information technology.
Social media platforms like Facebook have used facial recognition to identify people in photos. Amazon, Google, and IBM have used the technology to help train their algorithms. Police departments and other government agencies also have extensive facial recognition records. And the data collection from this technology is only intensifying as AI improves.
Public Privacy
The US Supreme Court has already established that the Fourth Amendment protects people when they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. When it comes to AI, facial recognition, and surveillance tech, is it reasonable to expect some level of privacy in public? Would you be willing to give up that privacy for a safer America?
