美味英文怎么说Facial recognition

2021年1月19日发(作者：firmness)
Facial recognition
Nowhere to hide
Facial recognition is not just another technology. It will change society

THE human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of
facial features helps people recognise each other and is crucial to the
formation of complex societies. So is the face’s ability to send emotional
signals, whether through an involuntary blush or the artifice of a false smile.
People spend much of their waking lives, in the office and the courtroom as
well as the bar and the bedroom, reading faces, for signs of attraction,
hostility, trust and deceit. They also spend plenty of time trying to
dissimulate.
Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In
America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers’
attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. This year Welsh
police used it to arrest a suspect outside a football game. In China it verifies
the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and
lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple’s new iPhone is expected to
use it to unlock the homescreen.
Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental. Some
breakthroughs, such as flight or the internet, obviously transform human
abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode them. Although faces
are peculiar to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at
first sight, intrude on something that is private. And yet the ability to record,
store and analyse images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale
promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to notions of privacy,
fairness and trust.
The final frontier
Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric
data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a
phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. FindFace,
an app in Russia, compares snaps of strangers with pictures on VKontakte, a
social network, and can identify people with a 70% accuracy rate.
Facebook’s bank of facial images cannot be scraped by others, but the
Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say,
and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Even if private
firms are unable to join the dots between images and identity, the state often
can. China’s government keeps a record of its citizens’ faces; photographs
of half of America’s adult population are
stored in databases that can be
used by the FBI. Law- enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in
their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens’
privacy.
The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information
—
and
machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are
analysing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions,
such as Hajdu-Cheney syndrome, far earlier than would otherwise be