Facial Recognition Can Expose Political Orientation

[Note: all footnotes refer to the original journal article in Nature.--Ed]

DannyB writes:

Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images:

Abstract
Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals' political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ. A facial recognition algorithm was applied to naturalistic images of 1,085,795 individuals to predict their political orientation by comparing their similarity to faces of liberal and conservative others. Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal-conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%). Accuracy was similar across countries.

[...] Introduction
There is a growing concern that the widespread use of facial recognition will lead to the dramatic decline of privacy and civil liberties^[1]

Pervasive surveillance is not the only risk brought about by facial recognition. Apart from identifying individuals, the algorithms can identify individuals' personal attributes, as some of them are linked with facial appearance. Like humans, facial recognition algorithms can accurately infer gender, age, ethnicity, or emotional state.^[2],^[3] Unfortunately, the list of personal attributes that can be inferred from the face extends well beyond those few obvious examples.

A growing number of studies claim to demonstrate that people can make face-based judgments of honesty^[4], personality^[5], intelligence^[6], sexual orientation^[7], political orientation^[8],^[9],^[10],^[11],^[12], and violent tendencies^[13].

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