60 Minutes: A Face in the Crowd: Say Goodbye to
Anonymity
One of the greatest
issues with the rise of Big Data is that much of the information collected about
individuals is done so against the individual’s will and without his or her
knowledge. The predictability that arises from such data collection is,
however, often valuable enough to large businesses that it can outweigh any
moral obligations of or to privacy. Knowledge is power, and the ability to
definitively know a woman is pregnant before she tells even her father, for
example, is a not just a great boon for profits, it is a razor-edge in a
cutthroat business world.
Last
year, “60 Minutes” featured a section delving into the world of facial
recognition and its role as a rising prospect of Big Data turned Big Business.
In it we see the possibilities of everyday facial recognition being explored. For
example, Facedeals is a new opt-in app developed by marketing firm Redpepper
that uses shop-installed Facedeals cameras and facial recognition to recognize
customers, probe their online identities for information (i.e. through Facebook
likes), and offer a personally-tailored deal that is more likely to be utilized.
Furthermore,
other companies are striving to create more effective displays through
recognizing the shopper at a given moment in time. The “60 Minutes”
presentation features an promotional video from Intel that offers scenarios in
which a display may change from shoe sales when being viewed by a young woman
to golf club deals when a older man walks by, granting merit to the comparison
made in the “60 Minutes” video between today’s facial recognition and the
highly-aggressive, personalized marketing in the fictional film Minority
Report.
Proponents of
widespread facial recognition, such as David McMullen, CEO of Redpepper, argue
that we have all already given up our privacy through the widespread use of surveillance
cameras, GPS devices, and our credit cards. Therefore the gain of savings is a
better deal than receiving nothing and still having our personal information
out in the world’s vast sea of data. However, this viewpoint presupposes that
the status quo of the loss of privacy is and will always be. The very first
question, then, that we must ask ourselves is if privacy is something we want
to defend, and if so, what is the best path is to regaining it?
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