Facial recognition is everywhere here's why that's concerning

How comfortable are you with facial recognition?

Apple garnered lots of buzz over the launch of Face ID to unlock its iPhone X, and facial recognition software has since become the security standard for smartphones.

Nowthe technology is being pitched as the future of everything from advertising to law enforcement.

And, sure, it's convenient.But should the normalization of facial recognition be concerning? You may be comfortable using it to unlock your phonebut would you be comfortable if it were used to track your attendance at school?Or by governments to deemyour trustworthiness?

Experts cautionthat the concern isnot all facial recognition is created equal; there are different ways that these smart systems work, depending on their purpose.Broadly speaking, it often comes down to whether they're being used for convenience or for surveillance.

Authentication vs. identification

Consider whetherfacial recognition is being used for authentication, by comparing your image against another image of yourself, as isoften the casewhen unlocking your phone.Orconsider if it is being used for the purposes of identification, comparing yourimage to a databaseto search for a match and associate a name to a face in a crowd.

The appeal of facial recognitionis that "you cannot forget it, like a password, and cannot lose it, like a physical token," saidJulie Thorpe, an expert in information technology security and anassociateprofessor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

Considering how often we unlock our phones throughout the day this isn't like unlocking the front door of your home, which you may do just afew times a day it has become desirable to have protection without having to fumble around with a complex alphanumeric passcode.

"Biometric systems, such as face recognition, reduce the number of times you need to enter a password or PIN, whichin usual situationsreduces the time and effort required to login," saidThorpe.

But the ubiquity that comes from having this technology built in as a default security system on smartphones has made us increasingly comfortable with the tooland that makes some experts wary.

"They're convenient," saidPablos Holman, an inventor at the U.S.-based Intellectual Ventures Laboratory."But certainly it's giving people the sense that it is OKfor computers to identify them with facial recognition."

Apple exemplifies the right way to use biometrics, according to Holman, explaining that with the iPhone, "you're only using a biometric to authenticate yourself to your own device, but there's no central database of fingerprints or faces."

Buthe cautionsthat "unfortunately, there are very few other examples where biometrics are used in this way."

Instead of a signature

While reports suggest that consumers are increasingly concerned about their privacy and the misuse of their personal data, historically, when we get comfortable with a technology, we stop being as alert or as aware of it around us, said Ann Cavoukian, the distinguished expert-in-residence at Ryerson University's Privacy by Design Centre of Excellence.

In addition to using facial recognitionto unlock your phone, authorize downloadsand pay for purchases, there are credit cards that are using it as a security measure instead of a signature.

Beyond the ways consumers can benefit from the convenience of this new tech, corporations are also using it on us: social media platforms can automatically identify users in photos, andshopping malls can use it to track consumers.Those things combined are inevitably creeping into advertising,targeting us in real time the way online ads already do.

And what happens when this technology,which once caused such a stir,becomes normalized?

After all, there are cameras everywhere we go, and as the technology gets more robust, we'll reach a level of trackingor identificationthat is unprecedented, saidCavoukian.

More troubling yetis the fact that this technology is still far from perfect. For some facial recognition systems, if the lighting conditions are unusual, they may reject a legitimate user, Thorpe said.Then there's the issue of false positives, wheretwo individuals can have sufficiently similar faces that a recognition system may identify them as the same.

While it may not seem like anything more than an inconvenience when Face ID doesn't recognize your face in low light, the consequences can be dire, as facial recognition technology is being utilizedby an ever-growing list of industries.

Prone to misidentifying

In the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union has found that the technologyis prone to misidentifying faces, which can have terrible repercussions in fields likelaw enforcement, for example.

Facial recognition is also being used in airportsto confirm the identities of passengers. And while critics worry about what a system like this means for privacy and the freedom of travellers, that's not slowing its spread. According to NPR, U.S. Customs and Border Protectionhopes to have face scanners installed at all the nation's airports within four years.

Meanwhile, in the U.K., some schools are now using facial recognition technology to take attendance, triggering additional concerns over privacy and the consent to be tracked.

And in China, facial recognition is being used by the government to employ a new kind of "digital authoritarianism," with the intent ofassigning citizens a social credit score based on how trustworthy they are deemed to be. While the government refers to this networked tracking system as "Internet plus," critics call it a 21st-century police state. As Holman puts it, the technology is "being deployed to watch people very deliberately, to see if you step out of bounds."

From airports to banks, and hotels to sidewalks, seemingly everything that people say and do is being monitoredin detail, used to do everything frompredicting crime toco-ordinatingemergency servicesand ultimatelycontrolling the lives of those being tracked.

So as Apple unveils its latest and greatest shiny gadgets with impressive new features, Cavoukian warns, it is to our benefit to think of not only how we use these toolsbut how corporations, organizationsand government might use themas well.

While we may like using them, we don't necessarily like it when they're used on us.