The Tech That’s Radically Reimagining the Public Sphere

Facial recognition was a late-blooming technology: It went through 40 years of floundering before it finally matured. At the 1970 Japan World Exposition, a primitive computer tried—mostly in vain—to match visitors with their celebrity look-alikes. In 2001, the first-ever “smart” facial-recognition surveillance system was deployed by the police department in Tampa, Florida, where it failed to make any identifications that led to arrests. At a meeting in Washington, D.C., in 2011, an Intel employee tried to demonstrate a camera system that could distinguish male faces from female ones. A woman with shoulder-length red hair came up from the audience. The computer rendered its verdict: male.

Facial recognition was hard, for two reasons. Teaching a computer to perceive a human face was trouble enough. But matching that face to the person’s identity in a database was plainly fanciful—it required significant computing power, and quantities of photographs tied to accurate data. This prevented widespread adoption, because matching was always going to be where the money was. In place of facial-recognition technology (FRT), other biometrics, such as fingerprinting and retinal scanning, came to market. The face-matching problem hadn’t been cracked.

Or so everybody thought, until a pair of researchers from the , Kashmir Hill, .