Why Should You Care About Facial Privacy?
In multiple research domains, a human face is a well-studied object from visual content since it is a source of rich information, most notably the identity of an individual. Identity revelation from visual data can make one vulnerable to leakage of personal and sensitive information (e.g., sexual orientation [1], health condition [2], religious beliefs [3]), mental and social harassment [4], and much more.
Even police enforcements use technologies like Facial Recognition for their purposes — however they want, whenever they want, and we do not even know what dataset it is trained on or what accuracy their system has. The alarming ProPublica article [5] talks about software that purports to predict someone’s chances of committing a crime again. The software predicted black people with higher risk. According to the article, even though a black lady didn’t commit a crime again, her risk factor was high.
Then there are reverse search engines like ClearViewAI [6]. What’s ClearViewAI? ClearView AI is an application where one can upload an image of a person, and the application can fetch all the publicly available images of that person. It can even return the links to those public images.
