Date: 2025-01-14 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00017550
Technology
Prvacy, surveillance and more
Facing up to tech abuses ... Bloomberg staff on Russian capabilities
Peter Burgess
to me
Bloomberg
Hullo, it’s Alex here, scribbling from Moscow. Do you remember FaceApp? The photo-ageing app caused a brief uproar in July when a close examination of its Ts&Cs revealed that, whenever they uploaded a snap, users were inadvertently giving the Russian firm all sorts of rights to use them in perpetuity.
While the St. Petersburg-based company says it isn’t directly involved in facial technology itself, Founder and CEO Yaroslav Goncharov had some interesting lessons for the advent of facial recognition when he participated in a panel at the Bloomberg Sooner Than You Think technology conference in Moscow on Tuesday.
Russia is in the process of building a biometric database -- ostensibly to improve banking security, but which is administered by the state and therefore poses all sorts of worrying questions about privacy. People are understandably concerned that such data, which includes their voice signature and face, could readily be misused by state actors. The database isn't (yet) mandatory, and fewer than 50,000 people have signed up.
Sitting next to Goncharov was Alexander Khanin, the CEO of VisionLabs, a facial recognition company whose tech is well-suited to the Russian database’s applications. Indeed, Sberbank, the lender whose branches are responsible for gathering much of the data, owns 25% of his company. When I asked him how he dealt with concerns about abuse of his offering, his response was the kind of canned answer you often get from tech executives: that they always abide by the laws and regulations of the countries they operate in. Yawn.
That’s why Goncharov’s input was particularly instructive. FaceApp had done just that. It hadn’t broken any laws. But it had also seemed to seek permission to use people’s images for the widest possible set of applications. He regretted that FaceApp from day one hadn’t simply outlined how it would only use images for a discrete set of purposes: namely, those for which people had downloaded his app to begin with -- to see how they might look when they’re old. It was this apparent overreach -- Goncharov ascribed it to naïveté -- that prompted the popular blowback.
It’s a lesson that companies pushing into facial recognition technology would do well to heed. Yes, laws right now might allow all sorts of applications. Regulation is always slow to catch up with innovation. Or worse, in Russia the government seems to be pushing the adoption of a technology with little consideration for the concerns of private citizens.
As much as lawmakers must play a role in reining in the worst instincts of private business, companies themselves must also think deeply about how their innovations could be abused.
People will otherwise understandably remain deeply distrustful of a technology that is inherently creepy.
In the age of the cloud, finding the right IT staff is no small task. While those roles have generally been defined for large companies, it can be tricky for SMBs to figure out internal staffing needs. Just how much IT staff is required to get the job done, and what parts should be kept in-house?
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Nabbed by the camera. Hong Kong police already have access to AI-empowered tech that can recognize faces but there's no visibility on its use to identify protestors.
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