How To Fail At Getting Away With Crime

This is my first terrible blog post of many more to come. I am choosing to write about facial recognition. Yay. As you might have guessed by my title, facial recognition is a great way to fail at getting away with a crime. You know why, your face is being watched and recorded every day when you go out in public. Now, for me that isn’t a huge problem because I never go out in public unless I have to, so my face isn’t being watched quite as much as normal, social people’s faces are. That doesn’t mean that I can get away with a crime, though. My face has been watched and stored away with my information, ready to be whipped out the moment I try something illegal. Same for everybody else. There are cameras everywhere. School, restaurants, stores, libraries, movie theatres, pretty much in every place except your house, hopefully. Some people might look at this and think of it as a good thing. After all, it’s helping police find criminals, which is a good thing, right? It is, but maybe not using that method. Facial Recognition. Facial Recognition violates our right to privacy and the Fourth Amendment. In case you don’t have the amendments all memorized, here’s the Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. In simpler terms, it means it protects people from unlawful searches and seizures. This means that the police can't search you or your house without a warrant or probable cause. Looking up your face to find your private information without a formal warrant or something like that isn’t allowed, I think. Also, facial recognition has high rates of false positives, for example, a study was released that the technology managed to confuse 28 members of Congress with publicly available mugshots. Almost 40% of the false matches were of people of color. People of color are already disproportionately harmed by police practices, and it’s fairly easy to see how recognition could exuberate it. It was also found out that facial recognition technology from other companies have a much harder time identifying gender in people of color than white people. It managed to get Oprah wrong. There are so many flaws with facial recognition that San Francisco and Sommerville have already banned it. As of this moment I am between both sides, as I can see both point of views. Now, I have made my decision to agree with banning facial recognition. The ups can’t outweigh the downs of it. There are too many things wrong with the technology, as well as a violation of privacy, that I feel it should no longer be used. Maybe years in the future, if major changes are made to it, and the police or whoever would use it have to file for a warrant before using it, then maybe I would consider giving them the okay. But until then, since I am unsatisfied with it, I declare that it shall not be used. For now, until all the states ban it, next time you commit a crime, you better be good at disguises.