Consider this scenario:
A social media site creates "faceprints" based on photos you and your friends post.
Upon demand, due to "special circumstances" (e.g., massive public demonstrations) they hand over all the data to the federal government, which uses it in conjunction with photos of demonstrations, to arrest or intimidate people involved.
Science fiction? Paranoid fantasy? Fact?
A bit of each. The faceprints exist and not everybody is happy about it. Here's an item from the Daily Online Examiner:
Facebook has been hit with a lawsuit alleging that its collection and use of “faceprints” to identify users violates an Illinois law regarding biometric data.
“Not only do Facebook's actions controvert industry best practices, they also violate the privacy rights of Illinois residents,” Carlo Licata alleges in a potential class-action complaint filed in state court in Cook County.
Licata's lawsuit stems from Facebook's automatic photo-tagging feature, rolled out in 2010. That feature recognizes users' faces and suggests their names when they appear in photos uploaded by their friends. To accomplish this, Facebook draws on its vast store of users' photos.
Licata alleges that Facebook's compilation of that database runs afoul of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which requires companies to obtain written releases from people before collecting “face geometry” and other biometric data. The Illinois law, passed in 2008, also requires companies that gather biometric data to notify people about the practice, and to publish a schedule for destroying the information.
The part about this information being used the government is fiction (I think), but in light of revelations that ten years BEFORE 9/11 the US government started collecting all phone calls made to 116 countries, maybe it's not too far a leap.
I'm sure some people might consider it far-fetched. My readiness to believe is based to some degree on experience--during the Vietnam War protests, the government would have loved to have these kinds of tools. Richard Nixon would have been able to pull more dirty tricks. Potential whistle-blowers and others would have been much easier to intimidate. Mass arrests would have been easier. Being identified could have led to getting fired or admission to colleges being denied.
So...is this faceprint scenario just a good basis for dystopian fiction...or is it our future?
PS: You can opt out of being automatically tagged, but how many people do? (I didn't know you could, nor did I even think of how it could be mis-used until I saw the news story above.)
