One of the questions featuring the below image which started this set of events:
Hey @MTA, who are you sharing the recordings with? pic.twitter.com/OwoccLxBmB
— Alice Fung (@aliceafung) April 18, 2019
Note the screen prominently features the ‘Wisenet’ logo. With tracking markers on faces.
Wisenet and south Korean parent company Hanwha Techwin (Itself owned by Samsung) are well known as suppliers of surveillance cameras and specializing in facial recognition.
Answer from MTA:
“There is absolutely no facial recognition component to these cameras, no facial recognition software, or anything else that could be used to automatically identify people in any way, and we have no plans to add facial recognition software to these cameras in the future,”
Nobody is necessarily expecting the cameras to have facial recognition software running on them.
But where does the video feed end up? Who has access to it? What safeguards are in place to ensure the video/data stream coming out of the camera do not end up on systems which do or can run facial recognition software?
Personally I believe that it would be incredible easy for images of faces to be timestamped, tagged and forwarded to a third party for tracking purposes.
There are already over ~5000 cameras across the NY Subway and have been for years. All of these can be analysed for facial recognition purposes. These screens are just a tiny fraction which the public can see.
In fact I strongly believe that there has been for a while a sustained push to introduce face recognition technology & surveillance of the public in New York
Welcome to the Data Age.