This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 2nd, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Facial recognition technology's benefits are pretty clear, but the drawbacks have truly just begun to be discovered

at least in this country. Cato's Matthew Feeney details the latest wrinkle in a technology

that for the most part is not ready for prime time.

Before we get into the nitty gritty here,

what is the upside of facial recognition technology

with specific respect to the private sector.

There are many applications in the private sector.

I think many people would welcome if there were safeguards in place.

For example, cinema cues, lines to get into airplanes, grocery stores, these kind of security

and payment measures where you could have your face link to a bank account for an identity and you could walk around the mall and have your debit card automatically debited sounds convenient and an improvement on the status quo.

However, I think a lot of people have understandable concerns about some of facial

recognitions, other applications, especially when it comes to law enforcement.

Yeah, so the upside again, being able to just walk into a place and use your face, your

immutable characteristic, relatively mutable characteristic your face as the ID and just breeze through whatever

you need from a store or whatever association you need to establish sounds great.

Now with respect to how that technology has already been abused, what do we know?

Anyone worried about this technology should take a look, I think, first at China, which is the country with a government that is one of the most

aggressive pursuers of this kind of technology.

They've demonstrated how effective facial recognition can be as a mass surveillance tool and that is certainly a concern here in the United States.

There have been widespread discussions across the country about whether the technology should be banned or not. spread discussions

...