Facial detection has a lot of uses, and facial re-id (fusing tracks based on face vectors within a session) have lots of uses. Facial recognition, or what shoul

Facial detection has a lot of uses, and facial re-id (fusing tracks based on face vectors within a session) have lots of uses. Facial recognition, or what should really be called facial identification, where media is converted to a numeric fingerprint to look up in a database, really does not have a lot of use-cases that give me the warm-fuzzies. IMHO, The only reasonable use for this kind of biometric fingerprinting is creating biometric models for validating key public figures against deep fake videos. This approach uses motion biometrics, so it's not even face-ID, but it is a form of "compare vector against existing database" so I count it. This is also super specialized and only applies to figures with hours of video to train on. Also my opinion, any system which does identification of the general population is going to inevitably be abused. Face detection, eye tracking, emotional and sentiment analysis, etc, has many uses in the videoconferencing space. The vector data only exists in the scope of a session. The part that makes it nasty and authoritarian is any time you build a database/index coupling identities (even pseudonymous) with features, whether it be face, gait, voice, from CNNs, HoG, or even just browser fingerprints, this is the dangerous bit, and where laws should focus their effort. Re-id in public (where you vectorize and fuse tracks starting with first glimpse) is a grey area and probably should be very scope-limited, e.g. active warrant, specifically signed by a judge to authorize use looking for only that person. Even then, kinda icky. Disclaimer: I work in the video emotional recognition field