Open Access‘ETHICAL BIOMETRICS’ AND THE FACE OF THE CHILD: THE SURVEILLANCE OF CHILDREN WITHIN FACIAL RECOGNITION INDUSTRY DISCOURSE
Author(s) -
Christopher O’Neill,
Mark Andrejevic,
Neil Selwyn,
Xin Gu,
Gavin Smith
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
selected papers of internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2162-3317
DOI - 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12222
Subject(s) - biometrics , public relations , framing (construction) , context (archaeology) , facial recognition system , internet privacy , psychology , political science , computer science , computer security , engineering , cognitive psychology , structural engineering , pattern recognition (psychology) , paleontology , biology
In this paper we analyse data gathered through facial recognitiontradeshow ethnographies and interviews with members of the biometrics industry, as weconsider recent shifts in industry discourse towards promoting the ‘ethical’ use ofbiometric technology. As the biometrics industry increasingly moves towards a ‘VideoSurveillance as a Service’ (VSaaS) model, the study of facial recognition infrastructures isbecoming a crucial aspect of the interrogation of the Internet of Things. We demonstratethat the facial recognition industry is acutely aware of critiques of facial recognitioncameras and biometric technologies as enabling social harms related to intrusiveness andbias (see Stark, 2019), and that members of the industry are keen to promote a moreprosocial public image of the technology. Towards this end we find that biometric monitoringof children has gained a prominent place in the promotion of facial recognition technologiesas a mode of ‘careful’ surveillance. We identify three key ‘use cases’ in which the face ofthe child takes on a prominent role as justifying and legitimating the use of facialrecognition technologies – in the auditing of humanitarian food supply programs, in thedetection of so-called ‘staging’ of family units at the US border, and in the detection ofunderage gambling in Australia. We argue that the immanent ‘ethical’ framing of the child’sface in this context serves to obscure the political ramifications of the extension offacial recognition and of biometric surveillance tools more broadly.