Digital Ethics Book Project Reflection Format
 

Facial recognition at the U.S. border: convenient or scary?

Holly Richmond

Friday, January 29th, 2016

http://digitalethics.org/essays/facial-recognition-at-the-border/

Facial Recognition

First Impression:

I think it has something to do with identity theft.

Quote:

"Facial and iris scanning isn’t as quick as spy thrillers would have you believe, but it’s convenient nonetheless."

Reflection Proper:

Before reading the article, I think the write was skeptical of the new technology of facial recognition. According to the writer, United States of America has been capturing iris scans which has 5,000 reference points of citizen more so the migrants. This is done so that the country has a list of people as well as they know if someone is really someone. I read before that way way back then, people just used their names as reference until when people were to many and they had the same names and birthdays, thus the fingerprint was used. Using fingerprint on the other hand can be difficult because if one is a construction worker or a an artist, their fingerprint could change, and just by wearing a glove, the fingerprints will not be show.

The ethical problem with this iris scannings or fingerprint scannings has to be privacy. By giving the government your identity and linking everything to these fingerprints or iris prints, we are giving the government authority over us. That would be no problem if the government was secure and not bad that they will use our identity, but many government offices are not secure thus identity is prevalent. I believe that the government has to have stronger security that can prevent hacks. Here in the Philippines, we are far away from this, because most of our government are manual and not digital, so identity is actually easier to hack, only a photo picture, name, and birthday will allow identity theft.

5 Things That I've learned:

Facial recognition exists.

Government in the United States are already using facial recognition.

Identity theft exists.

Iris scans are being used in the Unite.d States

Racism exist in checking identity

5 Integrative Questions:

What is facial recognition?

What has US border have to do with this?

How can recognition be used in US border?

How can recognition be scary?

How can recognition be convenient?