Facial recognition technology isn’t new. But Police Officers wearing facial-recognition glasses to identify the occupants of vehicles is!
Cops in Beijing started trailing the facial recognition glasses last week and, let’s face it, it’s not as if they needed to seek the approval of the public before going ahead with the trial.
And, personally, I don’t see why they should need to seek ‘approval’ before using the technology.
You either want to live in a society free of crime, or you don’t. And, if like most sensible people you do want to live in a crime-free society, then this is the sort of technology that will help to enable that to happen.
According to Reuters, the smart glasses were first tested in Beijing at a road checkpoint last week and were successful in nabbing a few dodgy people who were on the run from the Cops.
Powered by Artificial Intelligence, the glasses compares faces and registrations of cars to a database in REAL TIME and displays a red warning box to the wearer when a hit is made against the information contained in the database.
The AI-powered glasses are made by a company called LLVision, the same company behind similar police sunglasses rolled out at a Henan (China) railway station last month.
The technology was quickly praised by authorities for helping identify several individuals who had previously committed crimes, from human trafficking to traffic infringements.
Surveillance and facial recognition technology is on the rise in China.
There are currently 170 million surveillance cameras, and the government hopes to more than triple that number by 2020.
That would be nearly one camera for every two citizens, which the Ministry of Public Security hopes can eventually be used to identify any citizen within three seconds.
China’s large sample population and lax privacy laws have allowed police and private companies to pioneer such technologies with few limitations.
COMMENT
I am all for this sort of technology being used by the Police. I know that not everyone will agree with me and that’s fair enough.
But I would rather live in a society where my children can go out and enjoy themselves, knowing that the security services are doing everything they can to keep them safe, than for them to go out and I/we end up being constantly worried about what might happened to them.
We all know what happened last year across the UK. ANYTHING that helps to keep us safe should be embraced. And if that means that my face is scanned by facial recognition software when I go out in my clapped out Nissan Micra, then so be it.
Maybe we should split the county in two, and have the people who are against this sort of technology living in one half of the country, and people who are for it in the other.
I know which half would be a safer community to live in….
Written by one of the many admins of Emergency Services Humour on Facebook, who is also a regular contributor to our popular fortnightly satirical eMagazine that is emailed straight to the inbox of our ‘VIP’ subscribers.
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