For the fast few days, FOX 9 News has been explaining how facial recognition technology uncovered thousands of incidences of drivers license fraud -- but Sen. Al Franken is worried about the ethics of such a system and how it could be misused.
Franken held a hearing in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to discuss how facial recognition tools work and whether the extra security comes at the expense of privacy.
"We just want to make sure this technology isn't violating the privacy of Minnesotans," he said.
Dr. Brian Martin runs MorphoTrust, a Bloomington, Minn., company that developed the software that was used to help find nearly 24,000 fraudulent Minnesota drivers licenses. He was among those questioned at the hearing, and he said the technology is advancing quickly.
Meanwhile, privacy expert Rich Neumeister said that while finding fraud is good, there's a slippery slope and possibly no obstacles to stop police from using facial recognition to identify political demonstrators.
"When I get my drivers license, they're not telling me it could be used for this and this and this -- and it could be sold to a private company," he explained.
Facebook already uses facial recognition on some 40 billion face prints, and can identify your face using a computer algorithm that will suggest friends tag you to in photos -- and the social media site doesn't make it easy to opt out.
- Open your Facebook privacy settings.
- Next to Timeline and Tagging, select Edit Settings.
- Next to "Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are uploaded?" select No One
- Click OK.
For now, Facebook is only sharing those photos with friends, but they do need to make money -- and that means users' faces could someday become Facebook's ultimate product.
