As someone known for striking up earnest and meaningful conversations with people we’ve mistaken for someone else, we loved the idea of Facial Recognition Technology.
You too can learn to love FRT! For instance, assuming you don’t mind forking out $200 for a cat bowl, FRT will make sure it’s your cat eating out of it, and not the freeloader next door.
And thanks to FRT, conservationists can now identify individual giant pandas in. . . well, in China. Land of 170 million surveillance cameras where even human faces can be instantaneously matched to a behemoth database.
An efficient way of catching criminals, they say, except that “criminal” can mean someone who uses more than 2 feet of toilet paper in a public bathroom. The problem was solved by installing FRT:
(NYC avoids the problem entirely by having no public bathrooms, let alone toilet paper).
Thanks to FRT, residents of China not only have to show their faces to get on the subway, use an ATM or buy from a 7-11, they have to SMILE while doing it.
It can’t happen here, right? We have RIGHTS! Well, here’s how the NYPD uses FRT:
Say the police have a surveillance photo, but it’s too distorted to identify. Mouth open? No problem. Simply do a Google search for a photo of a closed mouth and paste it in:
Another NYPD technique is “creating a virtual probe,” meaning to combine two photos and look for a “match” to the resulting face.
Have you seen these people?
What me worry?
Appellate Squawk 