GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/TASS/GETTY IMAGES

The idea that FaceApp is somehow exceptionally dangerous threatens to obscure the real point: All apps deserve this level of scrutiny.

Source: Think FaceApp Is Scary? Wait Till You Hear About Facebook

FaceApp is a viral lark that takes a convincing guess at what you’ll look like when you’re old. FaceApp is also the product of a Russian company that sends photos from your device to its servers, retains rights to use them in perpetuity, and performs artificial intelligence black magic on them. And so the FaceApp backlash has kicked into gear, with anxious stories and tweets warning you off of its charms. Which, fine! Just make sure you save some of that ire for bigger targets.

“Your face will most likely end up training some AI facial-recognition algorithm”

Source: Viral App FaceApp Now Owns Access To More Than 150 Million People’s Faces And Names

And we thought we learned a lesson from Cambridge Analytica.

More than 100 million people have downloaded the app from Google Play. And FaceApp is now the top-ranked app on the iOS App Store in 121 countries, according to App Annie.

While according to FaceApp’s terms of service people still own their own “user content” (read: face), the company owns a never-ending and irrevocable royalty-free license to do anything they want with it … in front of whoever they wish:

You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you. When you post or otherwise share User Content on or through our Services, you understand that your User Content and any associated information (such as your [username], location or profile photo) will be visible to the public.

That may not be dangerous and your likeness may stay on Amazon servers in America, as Forbes has determined, but they still own a license to do whatever they want with it. That doesn’t mean the app’s Russian parent company, Wireless Labs, will offer your face to the FSB, but it does have consequences, as PhoneArena’s Peter Kostadinov says:

You might end up on a billboard somewhere in Moscow, but your face will most likely end up training some AI facial-recognition algorithm.

Whether that matters to you or not is your decision.

But what we have learned in the past few years about viral Facebook apps is that the data they collect is not always used for the purposes that we might assume. And, that the data collected is not always stored securely, safely, privately.

Once something is uploaded to the cloud, you’ve lost control whether or not you’ve given away legal license to your content. That’s one reason why privacy-sensitive Apple is doing most of its AI work on-device.

And it’s a good reason to be wary when any app wants access and a license to your digital content and/or identity.

As former Rackspace manager Rob La Gesse mentioned today:

To make FaceApp actually work, you have to give it permissions to access your photos – ALL of them. But it also gains access to Siri and Search …. Oh, and it has access to refreshing in the background – so even when you are not using it, it is using you.

The app doesn’t have to be doing anything nefarious today to make you cautious about giving it that much access to your most personal computing device.

Follow John Koetsier on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out his website or some of his other work here.

John Koetsier

Labeling Theory: The labels we apply – or the others apply to us – determine our identity, our behaviour and also our reality.

Source: ▷ Labeling Theory: How do the labels we use change our reality?

“Be curious, not judgmental”, wrote Walt Whitman. Life is neither good nor bad. Where some see a problem, others may find an opportunity. Every time we label the events, we turn them into good or bad. Every time we judge what happens to us, we start a battle against the reality in which we will almost always have the chance to lose.

Labels, that rudimentary mechanism of reaction with which we limit reality

Labels can become so useful that we find it difficult to escape them. In some situations they make life easier for us since they become cardinal points, a rapid system of orientation that activates the response mechanisms we have learned without having to think too much. They are like a simplified trigger that connects a complex reality with a simple answer.

Our deep passion for labels comes, in large part, from our need to feel safe and control our environment. A label is a quick response that makes us feel that we have the control, even if it is only an illusionary perception.

If we labeled a person as “toxic”, we don’t need anything more, we will try to stay away from him. If we labeled a situation as “undesirable” we will do everything possible to escape it.

The problem is that the world is not so simple. Every time we apply a label we are reducing the wealth of what we’re labeling. When we classify the events as “good” or “bad”, we stop perceiving the complete image. As Søren Kierkegaard said: “When you label me, you deny me”, because every time we label someone we deny his wealth and complexity.

The Labeling Theory: How do the labels we use shape our reality?

Psychologists began to study labels in the 1930s, when linguist Benjamin Whorf proposed the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. He believed that the words we use to describe what we see are not mere labels, but end up determining what we see.

Decades later, cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky demonstrated it with an experiment. She asked people of English or Russian mother tongue to distinguish between two very similar but subtly different shades of blue. In English, there is only one word for the blue color, but the Russians automatically divide the spectrum of blue into lighter blues (goluboy) and darker blues (siniy). Interestingly, those who spoke Russian distinguished the difference between the two tones faster, while those who spoke English needed much more.

Labels not only shape our perception of the color, but also change the way we perceive more complex situations. A classic study conducted at Princeton University showed the enormous scope of labels.

These psychologists showed a group of people a video of a girl playing in a low-income neighborhood and to another group showed the same girl, playing in the same way, but in a high-middle class neighborhood. In the video were also asked some questions to the girl, to some she answered well, with others she made mistakes.

Darley and Gross discovered that people used the socioeconomic status label as an index of academic ability. When the girl was labeled as “middle class”, people believed that her cognitive performance was better. This reveals to us that a simple label, apparently innocuous and objective, activates a series of prejudices or preconceived ideas that end up determining our image of people or reality.

The problem goes much further, the implications of labeling are immense, as demonstrated by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. These educational psychologists found that if teachers believe that a child has less intellectual capacity – even if it’s not true – they will treat him as such and that child will end up getting worse grades, not because he lacks the necessary skills but simply because he received less attention during the lessons. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: when we believe that something is real, we can make it real with our attitudes and behaviors.

Nobody is immune to the influence of labels. The labeling theory indicates that our identity and behaviors are determined or influenced by the terms that we or others use to describe us.

The labels say more about who’s labeling, than who is labeled

Toni Morrison, the American writer, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote: “The definitions belong to the definers, not the defined”. Each label we place, with the objective of limiting the others, actually restricts our world. Each label is the expression of our inability to deal with complexity and uncertainty, with the unexpected and the ambivalent.

In fact, we usually resort to labels when reality is so complex that it overwhelms us psychologically, or when we don’t have the cognitive tools to assess in a fair measure what is happening.

From this perspective, each label is like a tunnel that closes our vision to a more vast, wide and complex reality. And if we don’t have a global perspective of what is happening, we cannot respond adaptively. In that moment we stop responding to reality to begin to respond to the biased image of reality that we have built in our mind.

Flexible labels reduce our stress

Using fixed terms to describe people or ourselves is not only limiting, but also stressful. On the contrary, thinking about identity more flexibly will decrease our level of stress, as indicated by psychologists at the University of Texas.

The study, carried out with students, revealed that those who believed that the personality could change, both their own and that of the classmates they labeled, were less stressed in situations of social exclusion and, at the end of the year, they become less ill than people who used to apply fixed labels.

Having a more flexible view of the world allows us to adapt more easily to changes, so we will stress much less. Furthermore, understanding that everything can change – ourselves or people – will prevent us from falling into the arms of fatalism, so that we can develop a more optimistic vision of life.

How to escape from labels?

We need to remember that “good” and “bad” are two sides of the same coin. If we don’t understand it, we will remain trapped in dichotomous thinking, victims of the labels we apply ourselves.

We also need to understand that if someone does something wrong from our point of view, it doesn’t mean that he is a bad person, but simply a person who did something that doesn’t correspond to our value system.

Remember that “Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine”,  as Alan Turing said. Because sometimes, we just have to open up to experiences, without pre-established ideas, and let them surprise us.

Sources:

Yeager, D.S. et. Al. (2014) The far-reaching effects of believing people can change: implicit theories of personality shape stress, health, and achievement during adolescence. J Pers Soc Psychol; 106(6): 867-884.

Boroditsky, L. et. Al. (2007) Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA; 104(19): 7780-7785.

Darley, J.M. & Gross, P.H. (1983) A hypothesis-confirming bias in labeling effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; 44(1): 20-33.

Rosenthal, R., y Jacobson, L. (1980) Pygmalion en la escuela. Expectativas del maestro y desarrollo intelectual del alumno. Madrid: Ed. Marova.

“The effectiveness of virtual reality exposure therapy is important because social anxiety disorder is vastly undertreated,” says Dr. Page Anderson.

Source: Virtually Better: How Virtual Reality Is Helping Treat Social Anxiety » Brain World

Kellie Williamson

We humans are deeply social creatures. We live our lives in the company of others: we work together, eat together, play together, and sleep together. Yet, for some of us, interacting with other people can really be “hell.” The prospect of talking with a stranger, ordering food in a restaurant, or speaking up in a work meeting, can, for some people, be an incredibly daunting and fear-provoking experience. This is very much the case for sufferers of “social anxiety disorder.”

Social anxiety is the intense fear of being negatively evaluated or judged in social situations. While it is not uncommon to feel nervous in certain social settings (think first date or giving a presentation), sufferers of social anxiety disorder experience this fear to such an extreme and excessive degree that they tend to avoid opportunities to socialize. Sufferers may find themselves avoiding job interviews, missing out on opportunities for promotion, and, in some severe cases, avoid public spaces altogether. As many as 15 million Americans suffer from social anxiety disorder, yet, only one-third of sufferers receive treatment. Seeking treatment can be difficult as doing so requires sufferers to interact with strangers — the kind of interpersonal experience that many sufferers are prone to avoiding.

Social anxiety is typically treated using a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy. Under the guidance of a psychologist, patients are initially supported in facing their fears by imagining the fear-provoking setting, and later, by encountering the setting in real life, while accompanied by their therapist. One of the challenges of this kind of therapy is that exposing patients to fears in the real world involves unpredictability and uncertainty, where things can go awry, risking reinforcing a patient’s fear. In light of this, some psychologists are now embracing virtual reality technologies, which are offering a new form of exposure therapy to patients, an approach with very promising results.

At the Virtual Reality Medical Center in La Jolla, California, executive director and clinical health psychologist Dr. Brenda Wiederhold specializes in treating social anxiety disorder with the use of virtual reality exposure therapy. For over 20 years, Wiederhold has used various forms of virtual reality technology to help patients cope with the public-speaking demands of a new job, adjust to major life transitions (like going away to college), and enter new and challenging social environments. For Wiederhold, virtual reality creates a benign setting in which the feared social scenario can be controlled, and the patient’s responses can be carefully monitored, in a safe environment.

As with traditional cognitive behavioral therapy, Wiederhold’s treatment begins by teaching patients to recognize their bodily signals of anxiety, and then helps them to reframe the automatic thoughts they experience when encountering their feared situation. Once a patient has made progress with these skills, they can begin practicing in virtual social environments. Under Wiederhold’s careful supervision, patients wear virtual reality headsets and enter a virtual representation of the scenario they fear the most — be it talking in a boardroom meeting, presenting to an auditorium full of people, ordering a meal at a restaurant, or stopping a stranger on the street to ask for the time.

These virtual settings are populated with avatars that act and respond dynamically, almost like real people. As patients become more familiar with their virtual setting, Wiederhold is then able to adjust and ramp up the stressors in the controlled environment, giving patients an opportunity to practice their most feared worst case scenarios — for instance, by imitating restless, bored, or disruptive co-workers, or uninterested audience members, the patient is given a chance to build up a sense of control in these otherwise erratic settings. As such, patients are able to experience being in their feared situation, and coping through it, in the presence and safety of a therapist. Thanks to this controlled exposure, patients are then better equipped to face their fears in the real world.

Wiederhold has an extremely high success rate, with 92 percent of her patients showing considerable improvement in their social anxiety, leaving therapy displaying less avoidant behavior. Yet, according to Wiederhold, virtual reality exposure therapy does not work for everyone. “There is a small subset of people for whom virtual reality therapy does not work because they cannot become immersed in the setting,” says Wiederhold. “To be effective, patients have to suspend disbelief, let go of control, and give themselves permission to enter into the world.”

Perhaps surprisingly, immersion in the virtual world does not depend too heavily on the virtual world being an exact replica of the real world. As Wiederhold explains: “The very first virtual reality settings I used were crudely animated, and I did not think they would work. However, even crude animation is helpful for my clients.” For Wiederhold, it is about featuring the right cues. With social anxiety disorder, patients are very aware of other people’s eyes, gestures, and emotions, so it’s a matter of making the eyes very visible, with good and clear hand gestures. When presented with the right cues, patients’ brains then fill in the rest of the fear-provoking details, and the situation feels remarkably real. By facing their fears in a virtual world, patients are then one step closer to facing their fears in the real world.

The clinical successes of virtual reality exposure therapy have been underscored by growing empirical evidence. In a study, Dr. Page Anderson, associate professor from the department of psychology at Georgia State University, and colleagues conducted a randomized controlled trial of virtual reality exposure therapy in treating social anxiety disorder. There were 97 participants in the study. Each participant suffered from social anxiety disorder and a fear of public speaking. Anderson found that participants randomly allocated to virtual reality exposure therapy experienced improvement in their symptoms, and were less avoidant in public speaking contexts. Even after a one-year follow-up, participants’ improvements had been sustained.

According to Anderson: “The effectiveness of virtual reality exposure therapy is important because social anxiety disorder is vastly undertreated, especially among young adults, and is associated with being less likely to go to college, gaining employment, and remaining in employment.” Virtual reality technology not only offers therapists more control of the social setting, but also allows patients to benefit from safe, repeated exposure to feared situations. “In the real world, if you put yourself out there, and face your fear, you try to get through it as quickly as possible and it is not therapeutic. In a virtual reality environment, patients can repeat the experience until they feel they have mastery over it.”

In explaining how this virtual reality exposure therapy works, Anderson highlights recent psychological and neurological theories of how fear works: “Fear memories do not just fade away. Instead you have to develop competing memories, by giving yourself new experiences of whatever you fear. By doing this, the brain pathways that tell you to avoid something become less strong relative to the pathways that tell you to approach something. It is a matter of learning to inhibit your avoidance response.” The brain regions involved in fear responses are the limbic system, specifically the amygdala and hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex.

“The prefrontal cortex is where your decision-making is happening. With exposure therapy, the idea is, you improve the ability of your prefrontal cortex to inhibit or override the powerful fear response of the more primal and instinctive limbic system,” says Anderson. Virtual reality exposure therapy gives patients the opportunity to form new, less fearful memories of their feared situations, which overtime can lead patients to override their avoidance tendencies.

Having found strong evidence in support of the efficacy of virtual reality exposure therapy, Anderson’s next venture is to develop and test self-administered, online treatment for social anxiety disorder that allows patients to be treated from home. In the future, it may well be possible for sufferers of social anxiety disorder to more easily overcome their initial aversion to seeking treatment in person, and to begin the daunting process of facing their fears alone.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2017 issue of Brain World Magazine.

New studies reveal that the excess of information can make us develop information addiction.  How the excess of information can turn you infoholic?

Source: ▷ Information Addiction: When information becomes a “drug”

JENNIFER DELGADO

Can’t stop checking your Smartphone, even if you are not waiting for any important message? Do you enter the online newspapers several times to check the news? Are you curious to know more about your neighbor or co-worker, even though you have no intention of relating to them? Do you “check” what others share in their social networks just out of curiosity? Maybe you are an infoholic!

It’s your brain’s fault! Researchers at the University of Berkeley discovered that information acts on the reward system of the brain in the same way as food or drugs.

Sometimes, we just want to know

We are curious. It’s not a secret. Curiosity encourages us to explore and discover. But perhaps we are much more curious and tattlers than we would be willing to admit. And maybe that curiosity can make us get saturated with useless information. Or that we get stuck in a search loop in which we never go into action, stunned by the number of options, the number of factors to consider and the new information that appears every day and contradicts the previous one, generating chaos and eliminating the space for the necessary reflection.

These researchers scanned people’s brains while they were immersed in a game of betting. Each participant received a series of lottery tickets and had to decide how much he was willing to pay to get more information about the odds he had of winning. In some cases, the information was valuable, as when there was a lot of money at stake, but in other cases that information did not contribute anything, as when there was little money at stake.

There was a trend: participants tended to overestimate the importance and value of information. And the greater the risk or the likelihood of winning, the more curiosity about that information increased, although in reality this had no influence on their decisions. I mean, they just wanted to know, for the sake of knowing.

Researchers believe that this behavior indicates that we not only look for information that is beneficial or valuable for some reason, but we like to obtain information in a general sense, whether we use it or not. It’s like wanting to know if we will receive a job offer, even if we don’t intend to accept it.

“Anticipation helps us determine how good or bad something can be. Anticipating a more pleasurable reward will make the information look more valuable than it really is”, the researchers said.

The brain scans revealed that the information activated the areas of the brain related to the reward, those that cause a release of dopamine and that are also activated in cases of addiction.

They concluded that “For the brain, information is its own reward, regardless of whether it is useful or not … In the same way that our brain likes the empty calories of junk food, information makes us feel good, even if it’s not useful.”

More information is not always better

We tend to think that the more information, the better. But it’s not always that way. Sometimes accumulating a lot of information can be detrimental to analysis, reflection and critical thinking. Consuming information as a drug implies that there is no processing of it, so it is useless.

In a world that bombards us with information constantly, we must keep it in mind or we risk losing ourselves in a sea of ​​news and content specifically created to “dope” us, not to grow or encourage us to reflect. We can really become infoholics.

In fact, a previous study conducted at the University of California revealed that social networks activate the amygdala and the striatum, brain structures involved in emotions and the anticipation of rewards, which are the same that are activated in addictions.

The desire to obtain more and more information, without doing anything profitable with it, generates the same impulsive behavior that is seen in addictions, silencing the inhibitory system that allows us to regain control.

Of course, that does not mean we should stop informing ourselves. It means that we must be critical with the information we consume and, above all, that we need to pass it through a sieve. Is it really worth losing so much time of our life consuming information that we will forget the next day?

Sources:

Kobayashi, K. &i Hsu, M. (2019) Common neural code for reward and information value. PNAS; 116 (26); 13061-13066.

Turel, O. et. Al. (2014) Examination of neural systems sub-serving facebook «addiction». Psychol Rep; 115(3): 675-695.

Source: Wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock

Why do kids struggle to look up from devices? The answer is persuasive design.

Source: How the Tech Industry Uses Psychology to Hook Children

Silicon Valley is engineering your phone, apps and social media to get you hooked, says a former Google product manager.

The technology is helping to combat crimes police no longer deal with, but its use raises concerns about civil liberties

Source: Facial recognition… coming to a supermarket near you

Tom Chivers

Paul Wilks runs a Budgens supermarket in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Like most retail owners, he’d had problems with shoplifting – largely carried out by a relatively small number of repeat offenders. Then a year or so ago, exasperated, he installed something called Facewatch. It’s a facial-recognition system that watches people coming into the store; it has a database of “subjects of interest” (SOIs), and if it recognises one, it sends a discreet alert to the store manager. “If someone triggers the alert,” says Paul, “they’re approached by a member of management, and asked to leave, and most of the time they duly do.”

Facial recognition, in one form or another, is in the news most weeks at the moment. Recently, a novelty phone app, FaceApp, which takes your photo and ages it to show what you’ll look like in a few decades, caused a public freakout when people realised it was a Russian company and decided it was using their faces for surveillance. (It appears to have been doing nothing especially objectionable.) More seriously, the city authority in San Francisco have banned the use of facial-recognition technologies by the police and other government agencies; and the House of Commons science and technology committee has called for British police to stop using it as well, until regulation is in place, though the then home secretary (now chancellor) Sajid Javid, said he was in favour of trials continuing.

There is a growing demand for the technology in shops, with dozens of companies selling retail facial-recognition software – perhaps because, in recent years, it has become pointless to report shoplifting to the police. Budgets for policing in England have been cut in real terms by about 20% since 2010, and a change in the law in 2014, whereby shoplifting of goods below a value of £200 was made a summary offence (ie less serious, not to be tried by a jury), meant police directed time and resources away from shoplifting. The number of people being arrested and charged has fallen dramatically, with less than 10% of shoplifting now reported. The British Retail Consortium trade group estimates that £700m is lost annually to theft. Retailers are looking for other methods. The rapid improvement in AI technologies, and the dramatic fall in cost, mean that it is now viable as one of those other methods.

“The systems are getting better year on year,” says Josh Davis, a psychologist at the University of Greenwich who works on facial recognition in humans and AIs. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology assesses the state of facial recognition every year, he says, and the ability of the best algorithms to match a new image to a face in a database improved 20-fold between 2014 and 2018. And analogously with Moore’s law, about computer processing power doubling every year – the cost falls annually as well.

In ideal environments such as airport check-ins, where the face is straight on and well lit and the camera is high-quality, AI face recognition is now better than human, and has been since at least 2014. In the wild – with the camera looking down, often poorly lit and lower-definition – it’s far less effective, says Prof Maja Pantic, an AI researcher at Imperial College London. “It’s far from the 99.9% you get with mugshots,” she says. “But it is good, and moving relatively fast forward.”

Each algorithm is different, but fundamentally, they work the same way. They are given large numbers of images of people and are told which ones are the same people; they then analyse those images to pick out the features that identify them. Those features are not things like “size of ear” or “length of nose”, says Pantic, but something like textures: the algorithm assesses faces by gradients of light and dark, which allow it to detect points on the face and build a 3D image. “If you grow a beard or gain a lot of weight,” she says, “very often a passport control machine cannot recognise you, because a large part of the texture is different.”

But while the algorithms are understood at this quite high level, the specific things that they use to identify people are not and cannot be known in detail. It’s a black box: the training data goes into the algorithm, sloshes around a bit, and produces very effective systems, but the exact way it works is not clear to the developer. “We don’t have theoretical proofs of anything,” says Pantic. The problem is that there is so much data: you could go into the system and disentangle what it was doing if it had looked at a few tens of photos, perhaps, or a few hundred, but when it has looked at millions, each containing large amounts of data itself, it becomes impossible. “The transparency is not there,” she says.

Still, neither she nor Davis is unduly worried about the rise of facial recognition. “I don’t really see what the big issue is,” Pantic says. Police prosecutions at the moment often rely on eyewitnesses, “who say ‘sure, that’s him, that’s her’, but it’s not”: at least facial recognition, she says, can be more accurate. She is concerned about other invasions of privacy, of intrusions by the government into our phones, but, she says, facial recognition represents a “fairly limited cost of privacy” given the gains it can provide, and given how much privacy we’ve already given up by having our phones on us all the time. “The GPS knows exactly where you are, what you’re eating, when you go to the office, whether you stayed out,” she says. “The faces are the cherry on top of the pie, and we talk about the cherry and forget about the pie.”

As with all algorithmic assessment, there is reasonable concern about bias. No algorithm is better than its dataset, and – simply put – there are more pictures of white people on the internet than there are of black people. “We have less data on dark-skinned people,” says Pantic. “Large databases of Caucasian people, not so large on Chinese and Indian, desperately bad on people of African descent.” Davis says there is an additional problem, that darker skin reflects less light, providing less information for the algorithms to work with. For these two reasons algorithms are more likely to correctly identify white people than black people. “That’s problematic for stop and search,” says Davis. Silkie Carlo, the director of the not-for-profit civil liberties organisation Big Brother Watch, describes one situation where an 14-year-old black schoolboy was “swooped by four officers, put up against a wall, fingerprinted, phone taken, before police realised the face recognition had got the wrong guy”.

That said, the Facewatch facial-recognition system is, at least on white men under the highly controlled conditions of their office, unnervingly good. Nick Fisher, Facewatch’s CEO, showed me a demo version; he walked through a door and a wall-mounted camera in front of him took a photo of his face; immediately, an alert came up on his phone (he’s in the system as an SOI, so he can demonstrate it). I did the same thing, and it recognised me as a face, but no alert was sent and, he said, the face data was immediately deleted, because I was not an SOI.

Facewatch are keen to say that they’re not a technology company themselves – they’re a data management company. They provide management of the watch lists in what they say is compliance with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). If someone is seen shoplifting on camera or by a staff member, their image can be stored as an SOI; if they are then seen in that shop again, the shop manager will get an alert. GDPR allows these watch lists to be shared in a “proportionate” way; so if you’re caught on camera like this once, it can be shared with other local Facewatch users. In London, says Fisher, that would be an eight-mile radius. If you’re seen stealing repeatedly in many different cities, it could proportionately be shared nationwide; if you’re never seen stealing again, your face is taken off the database after two years.

Carlo is not reassured: she says that it involves placing a lot of trust in retail companies and their security staff to use this technology fairly. “We’re not talking about police but security staff who aren’t held to the same professional standards. They get stuff wrong all the time. What if they have an altercation [with a customer] or a grievance?” The SOI database system, she says, subverts our justice system. “How do you know if you’re on the watch list? You’re not guilty of anything, in the legal sense. If there’s proof that you’ve committed a crime, you need to go through the criminal justice system; otherwise we’re in a system of private policing. We’re entering the sphere of pre-crime.”

Fisher and Facewatch, though, argue that it is not so unlike the age-old practice of shops and bars having pictures up in the staff room of regular troublemakers. The difference, they say, is that it is not relying on untrained humans to spot those troublemakers, but a much more accurate system.

The problem is that, at the moment, there is very little regulation – other than GDPR – governing what you can and can’t do with a facial-recognition system. Facewatch say, loudly and often, that they want regulation, so they know what they are legally allowed to do. On the other hand, Carlo and Big Brother Watch, along with other civil liberties groups, want an urgent moratorium and a detailed democratic debate about the extent to which we are happy with technologies like these in our lives. “Our politicians don’t seem to be aware that we’re living through a seismic technological revolution,” she says. “Jumping straight to legislation and ‘safeguards’ is to short-circuit what needs to be a much bigger exercise.”

Either way, it needs to happen fast. In Buckinghamshire, Paul Wilks is already using the technology in his Budgens, and is finding it makes life easier. When he started, his shop would have things stolen every day or two, but since he introduced the system, it’s become less common. “There’s definitely been a reduction in unknown losses, and a reduction in disruptive incidents,” he says. As well as a financial gain, his staff feel safer, especially late at night, “which is good for team morale”. If enough retailers start using facial-recognition technology before the government takes notice, then we may find that the democratic discussion has been short-circuited already.

Hot spots: facial-recognition technology around the world:

China
China has embraced facial recognition, using it to implement a national surveillance system and bolstering its authoritarian regime. The technology is already pervasive in Chinese society, with facial recognition used for airport check-ins, cash withdrawals and to monitor the attention of school students. In the Xinjiang region, facial recognition is increasingly used to aid the oppression of the Uighur Muslims, with the state collecting their biometric data, including face scans.

United Kingdom
In the UK, police are conducting trials of the technology in public areas in south Wales, Leicestershire and London. However, there are currently no laws or government policies in place to regulate its use. Police use of facial recognition is currently being challenged in the courts.

United States
One in two American citizens is on a law-enforcement facial-recognition database. Concerns over lack of regulation and privacy led to the city of San Francisco banning the use of facial recognition by the police in May this year, with Somerville, Massachusetts, following its lead. Dani Ellenby

 

• The AI Does Not Hate You by Tom Chivers is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15