Position Paper: Analyzing the Impacts of Facial Recognition

• Published in: Privacy Technologies and Policy Vol. 12121; pp. 43 - 57
• Main Authors: Castelluccia, Claude, Le Métayer, Daniel
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2020; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Authentication; Ethics; Facial recognition; Identification; Impact analysis; Surveillance
• ISBN: 9783030551957; 3030551954
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-55196-4_3

Considering the lack of consensus on the deployment of facial recognition technologies, many organizations, including public bodies, NGOs and private companies have alerted public opinion and called for a broad debate on facial recognition. We believe that such a debate is indeed necessary. However, in order to be really productive, it is essential to ensure that arguments can be expressed and confronted in a rigorous way. The main objective of this position paper is to help set the terms of this debate on a solid basis. To this aim, we present an incremental and comparative risk-analysis methodology for facial recognition systems. The methodology introduces, for a better separation of concerns, four levels of analysis: the purpose, the means, the use of facial recognition and its implementation. We discuss each of these levels and illustrate them with examples based on recent developments. Interested readers can find more details, in particular about the use of ethical matrices to facilitate the analysis, in an extended version of this position paper published as an Inria report [7].