That’s because not only might someone be watching you, but readily available facial recognition software might be able to figure out who you are pretty quickly.
In yet another installment in our fixation on privacy and what changing notions of privacy may mean for research (both conducting and reviewing it), we draw you attention to this New York Times article about cameras and facial recognition in New York City. One statistic caught our attention — researchers at Georgetown claim the average American adult has a greater than 50 percent chance of already being included in a law enforcement facial recognition database. And also that “in the United States, the use of facial recognition is almost wholly unregulated.” The New York Times article used cameras set up in a New York park that streams the images it captures online.
On the one hand, one could argue that this technology opens up all kinds of possibilities — solving crimes, finding and interviewing people for research projects, even doing research involving the observation of public behaviors from the comfort of your home or office. But it also raises questions about personal privacy, and provides more context for the privacy-related decisions IRBs and researchers have to make.