Ethical Dilemmas And Facial Recognition Technology

Today’s society operates on multiple platforms and each of those platforms reveals information about our identity, our habits and our values. Those qualities of our being are valuable to entities like corporations and the government and they aspire to acquire such information to improve their own functionality. All of those things can be extracted from the technology around us that we interact with directly or indirectly every day. As the aforementioned entities implement technologies such as facial recognition and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), our private lives are unknowingly becoming more public than we would have ever imagined. These new technologies bring about a lot of concern when it comes to putting every detail of an individual’s

RFID and facial recognition technologies without ethical boundaries do not effectively “prevent others from harming us, wronging us by making use of knowledge about us, or [provide us] fair treatment and equality of opportunity” (van den Hoven 290). An example of how these technologies cause harm is they can connect people “without their awareness or permission, to intimate details available online, like their home addresses, dating preferences, employment histories and religious beliefs” (Singer 5) which could hinder them from being treated equally. If an individual frequently texts and drives in the privacy of their own car, a computer inside a car could prevent that individual from getting a job with a transportation agency by reporting this activity to the employer although the individual wouldn’t behave that way on the job. If more people knew about this, then there might be a fear of doing something that will cause them to be discriminated against and this leads to people constantly questioning their own actions constantly which could alter the way that society operates. In Never Forgetting a Face, Singer declares that there are two sides of the argument when it comes to emerging technologies “those who think the technology needs rules and regulation to prevent violations of civil liberties and those who fear

So far, these technologies have started to reach a commercial scene and subconsciously sell products to consumers, which is not what it was initially assigned for. In How Companies Learn Your Secrets, Target is used as an example of data mining to get pregnant women to shop at their stores. Additionally, it has given the government unwarranted information about citizens uninvolved in the initial investigation. These uses are unconstitutional and unethical. In order for these technologies to be used in an ethical playing field, we must implement comprehensive privacy laws as described in Ethics and Emerging Technologies because “the laws protecting Americans against non-governmental privacy invasions are pitifully weak” (Stanley and Steinhardt 281). However, the rate at which these technologies are being implemented is too fast for new laws to be created and the new technologies to assimilate into society. We already have laws that could address these issues such as the 4th amendment because “new technologies are endowing the government with the 21st century equivalent of Superman’s x-ray vision” (Stanley and Steinhardt 283). For example, in 2001 Danny Kyllo was charged with growing marijuana after the United States Department of Interior took a thermal image of his home and noticed unusual amounts of heat. This lead them to the conclusion that he might be growing