Google has agreed not to sell facial recognition technology amid mounting pressure from privacy advocates and citing potential for abuse.
The issue came to a head earlier this year when it was learned pop star Taylor Swift used facial recognition at one of her concerts to identify known stalkers. However, Peter Shankman, tech guru, author and host, says that expectation of privacy left the station a long time ago.
“If I'm at an airport, if I'm at a Patriots game, whatever, I have no expectation of privacy, my photo can be used,” says Shankman. “For people to start complaining 'oh my God they're using facial recognition,' I say good, as they should.”
Shankman sees facial recognition as the next step in gathering data to tailor advertisements to your devices.
“Every single advertisement you see gets tailored to other advertisements,”he says. “You can opt out of advertising, but the problem is if you opt out of advertising the Internet is not being as beneficial as it could be. I challenge you to tell me why that's bad?”
But tech companies sell that data to the government, which the ACLU and others argue is a violation of our civil liberties.