Facial recognition is big tech’s latest toxic ‘gateway’ app | John Naughton

We test and control drugs, so why do we freely allow the spread of potentially harmful products by unregulated entrepreneurs?

The headline above an essay in a magazine published by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) caught my eye. "Facial recognition is the plutonium of AI", it said. Since plutonium - a by-product of uranium-based nuclear power generation - is one of the most toxic materials known to humankind, this seemed like an alarmist metaphor, so I settled down to read.

The article, by a Microsoft researcher, Luke Stark, argues that facial-recognition technology - one of the current obsessions of the tech industry - is potentially so toxic for the health of human society that it should be treated like plutonium and restricted accordingly. You could spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley before you heard sentiments like these about a technology that enables computers to recognise faces in a photograph or from a camera. There, it's regarded as universally beneficial. If you've ever come across a suggestion on Facebook to tag a face with a suggested individual's name, for example, then you've encountered the technology. And it's come on in leaps and bounds as cameras, sensors and machine-learning software have improved and as the supply of training data (images from social media) has multiplied. We've now reached the point where it's possible to capture images of people's faces and identify them in real time. Which is the thing that really worries Stark.