Real-time facial recognition, GDPR, and the royal wedding
It’s official! The British Royal family has a new member in the face of Meghan Markle.
However, I am not here to discuss cheesy photos, wedding dresses, or USA — UK political relations. What I would like to focus your attention on is an innovative way that was used to broadcast the event.
The UK based media Sky News put a lot of effort to raise the bar on live streaming. They broadcasted the wedding using UHD quality, which is four times better than the HD we are used to. This is not the interesting part, however. In a bold move, Sky News used real-time facial recognition software for the official guests at the wedding. To recognize celebrities and royals, the software was trained using pictures of each person on the guest list. This allowed for real-time automated name tags to appear on the live stream. Furthermore, both the web and mobile apps automatically displayed a short bio of each guest when they arrived at the venue.
From a technology point of view, this is great. It saves so much time and hassle in manually adding name tags and bios of guests on each shot. It just makes everything way more efficient. From a marketing point of view, this is even more amazing as millions of people tuned in for the royal reception and experienced the benefits of using machine learning.
However, this also raises some questions.
There has been a wide debate about the ethics of using facial recognition in surveillance. Of course, this is not a case of mass surveillance, as you can hardly think of a more public event than this. This is why the usage of the software at the wedding can be considered an interesting social experiment. A test on consumer sentiment and acceptance of such technology in everyday life. I doubt anyone will be against digitized, automated name tags of celebrities. However, where is the line between this, and using machine learning for mass surveillance and recognition? Is there even a line? What about the common people who enter the picture just because they are standing close to David Beckham and George Clooney? Are they being analyzed and recognized?
On another note, Sky News took the right time to do such a move. Only a few days after the wedding, the new GDPR will make it quite more difficult to use this kind of software. After 25th of May facial recognition will require explicit consent by the people on camera. And since the UK is still part of the EU, the regulations apply there too. Even at royal weddings. I would be very surprised of all the guests were asked for their consent for the usage of the software.
So what do you think? Is this too creepy? Or is it a big step towards automating and digitizing media? Can artificial intelligence run our media in the future and to what extent?
I would like to read your thoughts in the comments. For now, cheers to the royal couple and cheers to technology!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on May 20, 2018.
