Facial Recognition in Everyday Life

Facial recognition technology is one of the defining surveillance technologies of our time, and as the technology continues to develop it is urgently important to consider the ways in which it amplifies and reconfigures power relations. While much of the critical work on facial recognition technology has focused on bias and accuracy, this book considers the social, cultural, and political implications of a surveillance technology poised to dramatically transform our experience of anonymity in shared and public space. Drawing on a series of case studies to explore how existing logics of digital surveillance are transformed when physical space is equipped with automated recognition, the book develops several defining concepts for understanding what this level of surveillance means for strategies of governance and control. Long the object of physiognomic calculations, the face, as subjected to automated forms of data collection, is now already being used to predict everything from people's future career success to their potential for criminality. Further, as the authors show, as "smart" cameras proliferate, society moves into a post-panoptic realm in which people are actually being watched all the time. This shift from surveillance scarcity to glut allows "pattern-of-life" analysis on a mass scale, aiding in the customization of both physical and informational environments at the level of the individual and enabling the ongoing replacement of human-to-human interactions with automated human-to-machine ones – a process the authors describe as a "social recession."