Title:
Facial Recognition Systems Bring Privacy Concerns
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
Today we take another look at facial recognition
systems. These can tag friends in Facebook photos or
help police identify suspects in the recent riots in
Britain. Kurt Roemer is chief security strategist
for Citrix Systems in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He
says technology makes it easier than ever for
governments to identify and target people. "And it
is very much a fine line between effective law
enforcement and privacy."Kristene Unsworth
researches information policy at Drexel College in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She says she is
concerned that governments and police are
increasingly using facial recognition software
without clearly defined policies. "There is so much
secrecy around this information that we don't really
know how these kind of images or other sorts of
personal data points are being used, how long the
information is being retained." Questions like these
are part of a larger debate about privacy and free
speech. After the riots, British Prime Minister
David Cameron raised the possibility of interfering
with social networks. He said the question was
whether it would be right to stop people from
communicating "when we know they are plotting
violence, disorder and criminality."China's official
news agency Xinhua says the British government
"recognized that a balance needs to be struck
between freedom and the monitoring of social media
tools." Xinhua added, "We may wonder why western
leaders, on the one hand, tend to indiscriminately
accuse other nations of monitoring, but on the other
take for granted their steps to monitor and control
the Internet."Europe has some of the world's
strongest policies on privacy rights. But Kurt
Roemer says, like other western governments, they
have not clearly defined their policies on new
technologies. "China calling that out really shows
that we have some issues to address here from a
policy perspective, in addition to technology." One
debate involves an action in San Francisco on August
eleventh by the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. BART
disabled wireless service in some of its underground
stations for three hours. It says protesters were
planning to use mobile devices to organize
activities to disrupt train service. BART has faced
protests over what activists say is police abuse by
transit officers. BART says it acted to protect
public safety. The American Civil Liberties Union of
Northern California says the decision was in effect
an effort by a government agency "to silence its
critics." For VOA Special English, I'm Carolyn
Presutti.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
