Archinect - News

Face-scanning to make Olympic debut at 2020 Tokyo games

2019-09-18T13:15:00-04:00

Intel is collaborating with NEC to provide "a large-scale face recognition system for the Olympics," said Ricardo Echevarria, general manager of Intel's Olympics program. The system is designed to let Olympics organizers "ensure smoothly secure verification for the over 300,000 people at the games who are accredited," he said. People using it will register with photos from government-issued IDs, he added.

Facial recognition will be used by the organizers to keep track of athletes, staff, volunteers, and other individuals involved with the event. The general public will not be involved in the effort.

The 2020 Olympic games in Tokyo will mark the first time that the event makes wide-spread use of facial recognition software.

The proliferation of facial recognition causes concern in London

2019-08-16T17:00:00-04:00

It emerged...that the property developer Argent was using the cameras “in the interests of public safety” in King’s Cross, mostly north of the railway station across an area including the Google headquarters and the Central Saint Martins art school, but the precise uses of the technology remained unclear.

Residents in the King's Cross district in London have mixed feelings concerning the use of facial recognition CCTV in the area. “For law enforcement purposes, there is some justification, but personally I don’t think a private developer has the right to have that in a public place,” one resident told The Guardian, expressing his dissatisfaction with the technology's use by a "private entity."

Others didn't seem to care as much."I don't mind being recognized...Actually, I feel safer if it's used for security reasons...," another resident expressed to The Guardian, sharing her favor with it being used to keep out criminals. In the end, it doesn't seem clear what the technology is being used for, however.

Facial recognition technology would be banned from public housing per new bill

2019-07-31T16:35:00-04:00

The legislation, dubbed the “No Biometric Barriers to Housing Act,” was introduced by Congresswoman Yvette Clark whose district borders the Atlantic Plaza Towers in Brownsville where tenants made headlines this spring with their fight to keep a facial recognition system out of their apartment complex.

Back in May, residents of the Atlantic Plaza Towers in Brooklyn opposed the installation of facial recognition technology proposed by their landlord. Now a bill has been introduced that would prohibit "facial, voice, fingerprint, and DNA identification technologies" within federally funded public housing.

Goodbye to public anonymity? This new Russian face-recognition app may spell its end

2016-05-18T17:06:00-04:00

If the founders of a new face recognition app get their way, anonymity in public could soon be a thing of the past. FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability. It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts.

"In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks."

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