Facial recognition technology is opening up a whole can of worms when it comes to ethics and optical technology.
One country that is turning the nascent field into an art is China which just unveiled a super camera capable of recognizing individual faces within a crowd of thousands at China’s International Industry Fair.
A team of scientists at China’s Fudan University and Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics developed the camera which uses cloud technology to operate. Working together, these computers and the camera have the equivalent of 500MP according to Xiaoyeng Zeng, one of the scientists that helped develop the technology. The camera uses a powerful AI to make all of this happen, of course, and the China News Service did not hesitate in boasting that it is capable of capturing extreme detail of individual faces in a crowd with the particular ability to hone in on one in particular “in an instant” PetaPixel reports.
Along these lines, the usage scenarios outlined involve military and commercial uses as well as “public security” purposes. It is the latter that has many privacy advocates concerned but the former cannot be discounted either.
From bespoke advertising to customized media experiences, facial recognition technology when tied with a commercial or business application almost has too many benefits for companies to ignore. Whether or not we will all be living in a cyberpunk dystopia soon is a matter for debate, but there’s no doubt that advanced optical technologies will play a huge part in daily life in the future.
What do you think? Is facial recognition technology going to be a major privacy issue in the future? Do you see it being permitted – or do you think people will try to limit its usage? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
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1 Comment
I think it already is a privacy issue.