Session 01: The Body as Border: Facial Recognition and Granular Surveillance
SESSION 01: MOBILITIES PRIVACY AND ACCOUNTABILITY
This presentation delivered by Prof Mark Andrejevic and Dr Christopher O'Neill was recorded at the 2024 ADM+S Symposium.
The Body as Border: Facial Recognition and Granular Surveillance
Prof Mark Andrejevic (Monash University) & Dr Christopher O’Neill (Deakin University)
Facial recognition technology allows for expanded practices of “em-bordering” — that is, the creation of increasingly fine-grained and ubiquitous checkpoints. Examples of this process abounded during the COVID-19 pandemic, when airports, building complexes and mass transit created new biometric checkpoints in a range of jurisdictions. Recent technological developments indicate the predictable result will be increasingly individualized forms of sorting, targeting, and control. We consider three dimensions of the automated elimination of anonymity: the prospect of fully customized information environments, the elimination of relative degrees of “slack” in systems of management and control, and the proliferation of pattern-of-life analysis that has become a staple of online surveillance. These developments all rely on the promise of facial recognition technology as, fundamentally an informational one. In this respect, facial recognition becomes a continuation and extension of the data-driven online economy and therefore the goal of large tech companies to collect and organize the world’s information in the name of efficiency, convenience, control, and profit. Facial recognition, viewed in this context, becomes a form of object tagging and tracking: metadata that enables people to trail clouds of information as they go through the activities of their daily lives.