We Built a Legal Facial Recognition Machine for $60

To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked near Bryant Park (available on their employers’ websites, for the most part) and ran one day of footage through Amazon’s commercial facial recognition service. But our experiment shows that a person equipped with just a few cameras and facial recognition technology can learn people’s daily habits: when they arrive at the office each day, who they get coffee with, whether they left work early. The company recommends using a threshold of at least 99 percent for applications of its facial recognition service that involve identification or public safety, though critics of the technology say that the scoring is opaque and that the company has no way of enforcing that threshold.

Source: www.nytimes.com