Privacy or convenience? Today’s technology frequently asks users to pick. Security for your home is smart, and it brings this uneasy choice home. After all, devices that are smart gather and transmit information to provide value. However, the processes and features that make smart home security frictionless (like automatically synchronizing devices), also make them problematic.
The facial recognition feature takes privacy and security concerns that smart homes have to a new level. Smart security cameras, with and without facial recognition could be hacked into, causing functionality and footage maliciously redeployed by hackers. But what happens when cameras have a database built that matches faces with names? Biometric data can make the threat of hacking much more serious and creates a new, globalized concern — discrimination based on race.
Recognition of faces: what is it and how it’s used
Technology that is new is often costly, imperfect, and controversial. A facial recognition camera addresses all three. But the technology has big potential in a wide range of fields -from airports, crowd management at grocery stores, where camera-mounted shelves detect shopper mood. The technology of facial recognition can be used almost everywhere, including homes security.
Face analysis algorithms permit security cameras to recognize the faces of your family members. This helps to provide greater control of the system (the camera will “recognize” you when you walk through the door and deactivate an alarm) and also increases the accuracy of alerts.
But the current technology isn’t the best. It is necessary to present the camera to the faces that you would like it to keep, either by adding photos or letting the camera take their photo. Cameras that recognize faces create a database of familiar faces (most can remember 16-32). Because faces are 3D and constantly in motion and not static like a fingerprint, cameras need to be able to recognize faces by viewing them from different angles over time — for a few days or longer. You might have experienced this process if you created the Face ID on your new iPhone.
Analytics take place within the camera and are a blessing for privacy. Faces and names aren’t transferred to a corporate server, meaning they aren’t vulnerable to large-scale data breaches or exploitable for commercial purposes. It also means that receiving an alert for a repeat offense criminal is still quite a ways off.
Facial recognition can make the home smarter
Security systems that can remember faces improves both accessibility and prevention. The first users can go beyond the “Hey, Alexa” style of system control. A simple gesture to the camera will allow you to adjust the room’s temperature to your preferred 71 degrees and then turn on Spotify.
Facial recognition also adds more relevant information to system alerts. Rather than reporting an anonymous person who walked through your door at 2:33pm the camera that recognizes faces can inform you that it was your grandma. False alarms begin with false alerts. A camera able to parse the loved ones from an intruder cuts the number of false alarms and helps you decide when it’s worth calling the police.
Only a handful of smart cameras allow facial recognition
Facial recognition remains a rare feature in home security cameras. There are a few cameras boasting this feature actually have it. There are a few smart cameras on the market that have facial recognition software — coming from Honeywell, Nest, Netatmo, Tend Secure, Wisenet and more — but there are many more in the works. Abode, ADT, and LG all showed facial recognition devices during CES 2020.
Notably, Ring Alarm, the security company acquired from Amazon in the year 2016 and associated with a frenzied innovation process is yet to include facial recognition in its smart cameras.
If it’s not too bad, Amazon sees just such a future: An Amazon patent outlines the pairing of Ring doorbells with Rekognition technology. This would link cameras for citizens with police databases.
Facial recognition is not without its drawbacks.
Ring cameras do not yet have facial recognitiontechnology, but the negative press that the company has endured over the last year highlights the technology’s theoretical downsides: Big Brother surveillance as well as privacy issues, hacking, and profiling based on race. Cameras may have difficulty recognizing people with dark skin tones. This weakness can have a significant effect if the footage of cameras are employed to catch criminals.
The privacy of technology and the bias — those are two reasons not to use facial recognition. The relative degree of green in facial recognition an additional reason. Face recognition software requires time to build its database and can be deceived. As less advanced the software is, the more likely shadows or sunglasses can be used to confuse it.
What should you look for when looking for security cameras that recognize faces
Facial recognition, though still in the early stages and troubled as it may be, represents a fresh technology in artificial intelligence. The ability to recognize someone’s face is a unique human capability.
If you’re interested in adding facial recognition to your home security system, shop and install with security and privacy in your mind. Make sure you purchase devices for your home that have strong protection protocols that are in place. It is a minimum requirement that you have two-factor authentication as well as regular security updates. User-friendly controls to turn off video, audio or other specific capabilities (including face recognition) are essential as well. Try to position your facial recognition device in a way that it only records people who are in your home — not just any stranger who walks by. You could also consider putting up a sign close to the entrance to let anyone onto your property that they’re being watched.
