Facial recognition is an emerging technology that will revolutionize many different aspects of business, government, and citizenry. Like all disruptive tech, facial recognition is sure to bring its fair share of both controversy and improvements to everyday life.

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The yet-to-be-released iPhone 8 is rumoured to primarily feature a more advanced facial recognition unlocker, entirely replacing fingerprint sensors and pin codes. In China, facial recognition is trusted by several companies, such as AliBaba,  to take care of payment authorizations. These examples validate that not only do the technologies show promise for the future, but they also offer a tangible benefit, even in it’s current state of development.

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Besides making our lives easier, facial recognition poses some seriously powerful uses for both governments and companies. A paper soon to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology describes an experiments in which an artificial neural network was fed 130,000 images of men’s dating profiles where sexual orientation was provided. The program was then able to guess with 81% accuracy the sexual preference of the individual based solely on the single profile image. Human subjects were only able to achieve 61% accuracy.

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Another example of this technology in action includes whether or not a given person has a criminal record. An algorithm developed from China’s Shanghai Jiao Tong University was able to correctly guess the presence of criminal history 89% of the time. There are quite obvious use cases for a future version of this technology, whether that includes tracking down suspicious characters using street cameras or acting as a predictive tool for law enforcement suspect records. Alternative software could be created to guess at IQ scores, political leanings, reading emotions, and generally retrieving a ton of information about someone without their knowledge.

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There are some Orwellian implications in these uses for facial recognition. Not only are there millions of cameras on smartphones, street corners, in stores and in many public spaces, but with the proper infrastructure faces can be automatically identified and recorded, enabling mass surveillance without having to pay police staff. Social media activity, purchase history, personal medical information, web searches, and physical location, together with (potentially) any emotions or intentions perceived by the camera could all be conglomerated, fed through an algorithm, and used to predict any kind of activity.

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These tools could be incredibly effective at stopping crime, to an extend that has never been achievable before. Street cameras and body cams would provide plenty of evidence against criminals, as well as forcing police to follow their own rules. Any guilty faces caught on camera will be unable to reenter the civilized world without being “recognized” by computer software at a street corner or inside a store.

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Without proper legislation, facial recognition will inevitably become a huge political issue. Like most emerging technologies, however, it will also make our lives easier, safer, and just that much more complicated.