(Video) A Face in the crowd: Say goodbye to anonymity

60 Minutes: Even if your picture isn't on the Internet, computerized facial recognition makes it virtually impossible to keep your "faceprint" private.

Over the last 10 years, the ability of computers to identify faces has gotten 100 times better, a million times faster, and exponentially cheaper.

Yet facial recognition technology is still a work in progress. While investigators in the Boston marathon bombing had multiple images of both suspects, the technology did not come up with a match. They were not identified by their faces, but by their fingerprints! Authorities won't say what went wrong. One possibility is that government data banks - through which the photos would've been searched - are not big enough.

As we discovered, the FBI is working on expanding its database. Businesses are tapping facial recognition to sell us stuff and computer scientists are upgrading the technology.
Watch the video: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50147158n

60 Minutes on face recognition: the good, the bad and the lies

The FBI is also storing faceprints and fingerprints of people who apply for civil licenses, those who visit the US or move here from other countries, and everyone who undergoes a federal background check for employment purposes. None of those people fall under the “photographed at time of arrest” category, contrary to the FBI’s claims on 60 Minutes.
According to 60 Minutes and the FBI, the bureau is hamstrung by tight regulations that limit what it can and cannot do with face recognition and our images. Seemingly implying that corporations have a freer hand to track us than does the government, Stahl asks why the FBI can’t just download photos from Facebook and other commercial sources. The official suggests that he couldn’t do that because if he did, he’d have lawyers “lined up outside” his office. 
But as EFF’s Jennifer Lynch has highlighted, a 2008 Privacy Impact Assessment of the Next Generation Identification database explains that the FBI plans to collect drivers license images shared through the national Interstate Photo System, photos or screen shots of people in public places taken by police or private security, and, directly contrary to the FBI’s statements on CBS, photos available online via social networking sites like Facebook. The FBI is also working with states to manage federal government access to drivers’ license databases through programs like the creepily-named “Project Facemask,” essentially putting anyone with a state identification card into the biometrics mix.
As you can see, the FBI’s biometric plans are hardly limited to mugshots, contrary to the bureau’s claims on national television.
The CBS program strongly implies that the government’s hands are tied, that it needs more information, and that its biometrics tracking program is only aimed at “bad guys.” But as the FBI's own documents show, the facts say different.
Shall we simply roll over and accept that our children and grandchildren will be subjected to pervasive face tracking for the rest of their lives?
The 60 Minutes program makes it seem as if we must resign ourselves to constant invasions of privacy, to the total loss of anonymity in public. Our credit cards and cell phones already track us, the narrative goes, and face recognition is just yet another -- admittedly more invasive -- means to erode what’s left of our privacy. 
This is needlessly -- and dangerously -- pessimistic thinking. 
We don’t have to roll over and accept that in order to use technology to great benefit we must be ubiquitously tracked by government and big business. Europe has shown us that it’s possible to protect personal privacy while putting to great use the technological advancements that, if left unregulated, could plunge us head-on into a Minority Report nightmare. 
A businessman Stahl interviews feeds us a line oft repeated by business and government leaders who stand to gain from invading our privacy. His company merely provides us with “deals” based on the surveillance that is already occurring, he says. We may as well get a free diet Coke in exchange for stores tracking us, the argument goes. We are already being tracked everywhere we go, so why fight it?
That’s a dangerous, authoritarian and fundamentally defeatist assessment of our ability to change our circumstances. 
We live in a democratic, free society, where we can affect public policy and shape our own destinies. Instead of giving up and throwing in the towel, we can and must legislate to protect our privacy from the government and from corporations. Where legislation doesn’t work or isn’t likely to succeed in the corporate realm, we can boycott companies that intrude into our personal lives in ways we don’t like.
Contrary to the doomsday predictions, we don’t have to accept that our government and major corporations will inevitably violate our privacy and dignity, that we have already lost, that it’s too late. We can and we must fight to preserve and expand what privacy and anonymity we have left.
We don’t need the FBI or big business tracking us everywhere we go, for no good reason. And we mustn’t submit to it, either.http://privacysos.org/node/1065