It's that easy to build a surveillance machine (Swiss Press Online 2021, by Timo Grossenbacher – Felix Michel) - Swiss Press Award
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Timo Grossenbacher – Felix Michel
Facial recognition programs on the internet can potentially use an image of any person to find their identity. A group of data journalists devised an experiment to demonstrate that
it works. They downloaded 230,000 public instagram images and used the software to compare them against the database of portraits of candidates from the 2019 federal elections. The result: the face recognition software, which is available for free online, found and identified hundreds of politicians in the Instagram photos. This news provoked mixed reactions including surprise and fascination, but also concern. The issue is not only the violation of privacy, but also the risk of misidentification: artificial intelligence only recognises similarities; to be on the safe side, the “matches” must be verified manually. But the problems didn’t start there: the mass download of facial data in itself constitutes a violation of privacy, as the Swiss Federal Data Protection officer makes clear. SRF Data completely and irrevocably deleted the entire data haul after the experiment.
Interview with Timo Grossenbacher – Felix Michel
