Facial Recognition – We trust the government with it more than anyone else
Bottom Line: Government and trust are two words that don’t go together like they used to. But then again, the same could be said of a myriad of industries as well, right? New polling just demonstrated that 95% of us are “troubled” by the state of media news media – along with trust at record lows. What about tech companies? A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg was having movies made about him and was a geek sheek superstar. These days... Not so much. And btw, I get it and I’m generally with you.
There is one place within government where trust is generally still strong. Our military and with law enforcement. That’s encouraging to see, and it’s needed as much as ever for law enforcement these days. It’s also evidenced in the latest research by the Pew Research Center.
According to Pew, 59% support law enforcement’s use of facial recognition software, this despite the actions of cities like San Francisco, to ban it. But when it comes to the use of facial recognition software our trust stops with law enforcement. Only 36% of us are comfortable with technology companies using facial recognition software and only 18% of us approve of advertisers being able to use that type of technology for their purposes.
In Florida, forms of facial recognition technology have been used for over two decades, pretty much since the onset of online databases, and without specific regulation regarding its use by law enforcement in our state is being used in various forms and fashions by law enforcement agencies from the FDLE to municipal police departments – including in South Florida. I’m of the opinion that if we can’t trust law enforcement generally in our society, we have much bigger problems than facial recognition software, thus I’m a huge supporter of the use of this rapidly improving technology. But on another note, while I’m not keen on its use by technology companies either – I do love the technology with mobile devices. Maybe that’s hypocritical? Either way I think it’s a superior experience to passwords or fingerprints.