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"Under the oxymoronic rubric of "self-regulation", Facebook, Twitter and Google are already considering ways to appear responsible and protective of the integrity of those two elections. Twitter has pledged to stop running political ads, and both Google and Facebook are considering suspending precise targeting of political ads."

"Fighting the creep of government use of face surveillance and the related risks can seem overwhelming. Police agencies, and the spy tech vendors that profit from the growth of a surveillance state, have much to gain by deploying this invasive spying technology. "

"Activists from Fight for the Future prowled the halls of Congress in "jumpsuits with phone strapped to their heads conducting live facial recognition surveillance" to "show why this tech should be banned.""

"But it is not just governments who will be interested in the results. The software is freely available and cheap. It is being distributed all over the internet of things, from intercoms to "home assistants". Once our faces are attached to the detailed digital identities that are already compiled by the advertising industry, any sufficiently sophisticated shopping mall will have a map of the preferences of everyone who enters its maw."

"In just the past few months, three cities - San Francisco, Oakland, and Somerville, Massachusetts - have passed laws to ban government use of the controversial technology, which analyzes pictures or live video of human faces in order to identify them. Cambridge, Massachusetts, is also moving toward a government ban. Congress recently held two oversight hearings on the topic and there are at least four pieces of current federal legislation to limit the technology in some way. "

"Squires said that Bridges had a reasonable expectation that his face would not be scanned in a public space and processed without his consent while he was not suspected of wrongdoing. The court heard that thousands of people have had their biometric data taken in the past two years by AFR technology used by South Wales police."

"Apple and Google's tougher enforcement could preclude such apps from becoming realistic alternatives to the mainstream social networks. They now face the choice of either stepping up their policing of posts - undercutting their main feature in the process - or losing their ability to reach a wide audience."

"Having mastered facial recognition for humans to an alarmingly precise degree, even picking out wanted criminals from huge crowds, Chinese tech whizzes are turning their attention to furrier faces. "We've been using it for sheep, pigs and cows," said Zhao Jinshi, who studied at Cornell University and founded Beijing Unitrace Tech, a company developing software for the agriculture industry."

"But now Silicon Valley seems to be under a little-noticed threat. Amid Covid-19, the deep recession, and renewed antitrust pressure from Congress and regulators, the Valley faces a very different challenge - the disruption of its very essence, the serendipitous encounter. The culprit is a rush by many of the Valley's leading companies to permanently lock in the coronavirus-led shift to remote work."

"Before we go deeper, it's important to note that there are two approaches to facial - or any biometric - authentication: "match on server" and "match on device." The former approach shares some of the risky aspects of facial recognition technology because it stores the details of one's most personal features-your face or your fingerprint-on a server, which is inherently insecure. There are some well-publicized examples of biometric databases being hacked, which is why so many companies are committing to only do on-device biometrics."

"The submission outlines Big Blue's belief that facial recognition is fine in a "1 to 1" context such as unlocking a phone. But IBM is opposed to "1 to many" facial recognition that refers to a database to identify a face in a crowd and could therefore be used for "mass surveillance systems, racial profiling or other human rights violations.""

"But users began to spot flaws in the feature over the weekend. The first to highlight the issue was PhD student Colin Madland, who discovered the issue while highlighting a different racial bias in the video-conference software Zoom. When Madland, who is white, posted an image of himself and a black colleague who had been erased from a Zoom call after its algorithm failed to recognise his face, Twitter automatically cropped the image to only show Madland."

"The software, 4 Little Trees, was created by Hong Kong-based startup Find Solution AI. While the use of emotion recognition AI in schools and other settings has caused concern, founder Viola Lam says it can make the virtual classroom as good as - or better than - the real thing. Students work on tests and homework on the platform as part of the school curriculum. While they study, the AI measures muscle points on their faces via the camera on their computer or tablet, and identifies emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, surprise and fear. "

"Inoculating people from misinformation and tackling the "infodemic" are key to fighting the coronavirus. Tang, Taiwan's first transgender government minister and a self-described "civic hacker", has done this by fostering digital democracy: using technology to encourage civic participation and build consensus. Tang has also quashed faked news by implementing a 2-2-2 "humour over rumour" strategy. A response to misinformation is provided within 20 minutes, in 200 words or fewer, alongside two fun images. Early in the pandemic, for example, people were panic-buying toilet paper because of a rumour that it was being used to manufacture face masks; supplies were running out. So, the Taiwanese premier, Su Tseng-chang, released a cartoon of him wiggling his bum, with a caption saying: "We only have one pair of buttocks." It sounds silly, but it went viral. Humour can be far more effective than serious fact-checking."

"However, the recent study's seemingly high-tech attempt to pick out facial features associated with criminality borrows directly from the 'photographic composite method' developed by the Victorian jack-of-all-trades Francis Galton - which involved overlaying the faces of multiple people in a certain category to find the features indicative of qualities like health, disease, beauty and criminality."

"KUALA LUMPUR: Facial recognition technology today is increasingly being used by law enforcement agencies, banks, hotels, airport and now convenience stores to detect and arrest criminals quickly. Kuala Lumpur Police chief Datuk Seri Mazlan Lazim said by the installation of facial recognition closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in convenience stores the faces of criminals can be clearly recorded to trace their identities."

"Zvikorn, whose bio on the site describes an Israeli teen into sports history, has made more than 2,300 edits to Wikipedia articles over the past few years. "The main reason I edit Wikipedia is a strong belief that every person on the planet has the right to access the accumulated knowledge of humanity," he wrote. "Today it is only getting more important for mankind to find out the truth and not be exposed to believe fake news." But after his breaking-news edit, Kamala Harris's page on "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" quickly became a battleground-first over a sexist slur and then over racial identity-offering a grim preview of the attacks Harris is already facing as the presumptive Democratic nominee for vice president."

"But the technology raises important issues of governance, justice and fairness. In recent months, the Black Lives Matter movement has taken action to address what it sees as an abuse of police power and surveillance technology. Facing reputational and financial costs, several major tech companies stopped developing facial recognition or selling it to the police. Microsoft went as far as petitioning the US Congress to legislate against it."

"This can make the technology easier to use for seniors who aren't comfortable with other forms of electronic payment, since they wouldn't have to lift a finger. As for the rest of us, this also means an end to standing in line to get off the bus while someone - often me - fumbles around for exact change."