Do not smile, they try to recognize you

The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia (Ministry of Internal Affairs) is testing camera-register cameras with person recognition technology. The authorities are ready to follow the order literally - through cameras, portable video recorders and smart glasses that are already used in developed countries. The Student of the Higher School of Enterprises and a social technology researcher Dmitry Muravyov examined the problem of total surveillance from the perspective of ethics and technology.

According to official figures, only in Moscow there are more than 167 thousand cameras with the function of recognizing persons, St. Petersburg- 153 thousand . The global market for facial recognition systems is growing: according to Marketsandmarkets, it will reach $ 6.84 billion by 2021. Today we are balancing on the verge of privacy and safety.

Is it worth being afraid of surveillance, or is it a reasonable price for calmness in the world of growing crime? Are we ready for the fact that person recognition technologies may be wrong? In mid-August 2018, the 21-year-old “other Russia” activist Mikhail Axel was detained in the subway according to the signal from the video camera that recognized him on the orientation of the E-E Center (the Main Directorate for Combating Extremism). According to the police, the FaceControl technology recognized his face is used in the Safe City hardware and software complex.

Axel was taken to the police room, where he was checked by
Databases of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation. It turned out that it is not listed on the wanted list. The activist was released, however, it remained unknown how FaceControl works: “Employees of the Internal Affairs Directorate on the subway did not enter the Axel data into the system,” and the management does not have information about those who did it.

Two glances at person recognition technology

As well as any significant social problem, there are several points of view on person recognition systems, the nuances of which are focused on the issue of state intervention in personal life. Supporters of surveillance are sure: you need to use all the tools for combating crime.

The statistics of the Moscow government supports this argument: in 2017, thanks to video surveillance systems, 14% more criminals were caught than in 2016. The Moscow authorities intend to support this trend: the Smart City Until 2030 program is aimed at “Development of the City CCTV platform and other means of monitoring the life of the city”.

The developers of video surveillance systems also positively evaluate the results of their work. The Russian company NTECHLAB has become one of the world leaders in the field of biometric technologies. Its founder Artem Kukharenko noted : “If a person has something wrong with his head, then it doesn’t matter what technologies to give him in his hands, he will do evil. But I cannot come up with a supervisor that can be done by recognizing faces. But positive things are a bunch. ”

Opponents of “smart” cameras are sure that this is a direct threat to the right to privacy. If user data find themselves in the database, the state and commercial companies receive more and more power over citizens. How to make sure that data is preserved and privacy: who will “defend the watchmen themselves”?

New forms of commercial use of person recognition technology can cause no less controversy than Facebook wiretapping . World giants, such as Amazon, are opposed to tracking systems, which requires stopping the Software for recognition of Rekognition authorities. And in May 2019, San Francisco became the first city in the United States, in which they introduced a ban on the use of facial recognition technologies.

Legal calls for person recognition systems

Like many new technologies, person recognition is in the "gray" legal field. The biometric data obtained using persons recognition systems fall under Art. 11 Federal Law "On Personal Data" (No. 152-ФЗ dated 07/27/2006). In accordance with this article, personal information can be used only to counteract terrorism, in order to defend and other law enforcement.

Also on the topic: why the user anonymity is under threat and how to maintain digital rights

The use of person recognition systems for commercial purposes without the written consent of the subject of personal data is not provided for by applicable law. However, the state program “Digital Economy” can make significant adjustments: one of its points is the development of a law regulating big data, their status and turnover.

Private and public field of new technologies

Do we need a rethinking of the very concept of privacy in the conditions of digital technology? Ivan Ninenko , a member of the Future Foundation Expert Council, noted: “To some extent, you need to come to terms with the fact that large cities will be a place for the lack of Privacy.

“Getting into the metropolis, leaving the forest, relatively speaking, a person is in the observation system. And every year it will be smarter and it is better to lead it from a point to a point, and this, unfortunately, is an inevitable level of digital security, given the population density. ” Ivan Ninenko.

Among other advantages, the expert noted the weakening of the access control - and so it will be clear who is included. The minus is obvious: it will be time to say goodbye to the feeling that someone does not know where you are. This is another world, a new degree of transparency, a new degree of accessibility.

It is really difficult for us to understand whether every “click” in the social network is or just a walk around the city exclusively with our personal experience, or at some point it is transformed into public information.

In his book “It's Complicated the Social Lives of Networked Teens”, sociologist Dana Boyd, who explores the digital life of teenagers in the United States, writes about social networks as a environment in which we are dealing not with privacy or publicity, as we knew them before, but with a new situation in which the technology brought in the disorder in both of these Categories.

From her point of view, we are used to looking at privacy and publicity as an opposition, but in reality this border is eroded due to technology. We need to think about this problem, paying attention to specific contexts in which technologies develop.

Perhaps, instead of a forced choice between privacy and publicity, it is worth developing new concepts that help to describe contextual-dependent relationships between technologies and the social and ethical consequences that they give rise to.